Another busy week in Capstone I! How to develop authentic assessments? Authentic assessments are critical to my teaching style. Being a previous employer, I agree totally with Mr. Wiggins, author of Healthier Testing Made Easy: The Idea of Authentic Assessment, in that students need to know how to transfer what they are learning in the classroom to the real world of work. He does not agree with simply giving multiple choice tests to enable the students to perform better on SOL tests. The authors of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School explain it as follows:
A major goal of schooling is to prepare students for flexible adaptation to new problems and settings. ... Many classroom activities... focus on facts or details rather than larger themes of causes and consequences. ... Understanding how and when to put knowledge to use... is an important characteristic of expertise. Learning in multiple contexts most likely affects this aspect of transfer.
Black and Wiliam also emphasized the importance of quick and excellence feedback of assessments as the greatest “way of raising standards" of learning. All students want and deserve quick feedback on their work. This is one way we as teachers can assure our students that we care about their learning while at the same time helping them to achieve better on the national tests being given as well as in the real world.
As teachers, therefore, we need to engage our students, make learning relevant, and provide them with meaningful and prompt results of assessments. That is not anything new, but it never hurts to hear it stated once again. Have a great week and until next week Happy Learning!
Works Cited
Black, Paul, and Wiliam Dylan, "Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment," Phi Delta Kappan, 80 (2): 139(9)
Bransford, John, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, ed., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, (National Academies Press, 2000)
"Healthier Testing Made Easy: The Idea of Authentic Assessment | Edutopia." K-12 Education & Learning Innovations with Proven Strategies That Work | Edutopia. Web. 11 Oct. 2010. <http://www.edutopia.org/healthier-testing-made-easy>.
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