Chapter eight talks about the assessment in partnership pedagogy. The author starts with thinking about what assessement is for. He states "That is, tests allow us to ranl individuals, schools, and even countries by who is ahead and who is behind." Here is the question he asked in this chapter "Does any of this really help individual students?" In his judgement, it does not. From page 140 to 143, he provides different useful assessments that can help us to exam the partnership pedagogy. Such as Ipsative Assessment, Peer Assessment, Real-world Assessment, and Self-Assessment. Each assessment has been well discussed in this chapter. Also, later in this chapter, the author talks about assessing not just students' progress, but teachers, administors, parents, schools and even nations and the world's progress. Of course, to assess different groups' progress, the author provides guidelines for us to see how we can actually assess those progresses.
I think assessment is always a way for teachers to assess students' progress in every subject. Or we can say that, every subject need to be assessed so that we can see if our students are learned or not. I think this chapter is interesting because it is not talking about how to assess a subject, instead it talks about how to assess partnership pedagogy. It is a little bit different than I think about assessment. I have been doing reading assessment for one of my classes, and all I do is just follow what the book says, but I think this pedagogy assessment gives me another view about assessment.
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ReplyDeleteI have a love hate relationship with exams. I love that they evaluate my progress, but I fear that they stand to harm my grade. Exams also are not always fair representations of material covered.
ReplyDeleteHowever, as an instructor, it seems impossible to give an exam and have it taken seriously if there is not some massive perdcentage of the student's grade riding on top of it.
This chapter gives many other options, from the Ipsative evaluation to the real-world eval and even methods for evaluating your own teaching. Do you think it gives any hints on how to effectively incorporate or replace exams as mile markers for guaging student's understanding of the class materials?
I think as a teacher, we can not skip the traditional evaluation somehow because we need it to determine if our students can go to the next level or not. I know it sounds really bad, but there is nothing we can do about it. But I think this chapter does me another fresh idea that how to evaluate students' work.
DeleteI have mixed feelings on exams as well; on one hand it can allow me to see the students progress, but on the other hand I do not agree with exams as a measurement for comparing students. I think that exams are useful but should not be the only means of assessment. Students should be granted the right to not only answer questions on the exam, but given reasoning for why they answered the way they have. For me, my biggest priority it having students think critically about the content. If they can demonstrate that they have given the material thought and understanding, that is worthy of credit. I do think this can be done on an include exam. I personally think this is the way exams should be given across the board. Thus the reason why I have a real problem with standardized exams. We shouldn't be concerned about how well a student can score on an exam, but instead should consider how and why they answered the way they did. I guess somewhere along the line we lost the appreciation for critical thinking and explanation.
ReplyDeleteI think critical thinking reminds me there were a lot of time when I had a traditional exam to evaluate my learning through our semester, I had no feeling to challenge the right answer, but a lot of my classmates did. Even though there was no way they could get extra credit for it, but I think it makes me to think about how to make evaluation more effective.
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