Assessment

"Think of a lesson plan from your licensure area.  Knowing that assessment is an integral part of teaching, explain at least four informal and formal assessments that you will use in your lesson plan to provide you with feedback and involve the students in assessing their own learning."

When I think about lesson plans and assessment I can tell you that I get really intimidated.  I dread having to deal with the anxiety that comes with both of these in the classroom sense.  Although I realize that unless I have both I will not have a successful classroom!

First, throughout any lesson plan I construct I will always incorporate observations (informal assessment).  This is one of the biggest aspects that I think would help me the most in truly learning my children and their skill level/ability to further help them.  

Along with observations, I will use anecdotal and running records.  These are two different ways to record what a child does during a set amount of time in regards to an activity or in the classroom that will shed light on thinking and functioning. 

The last avenue of informal assessment I would use in my lesson plan would be a portfolio.  As we learned in class today, having a portfolio brings so many positives to showcasing a student's knowledge. This would also incorporate students into their own assessment because I would include many aspects of reflection throughout the portfolio.

Formal assessments are a tad bit trickier for me.  I am not so exciting for having to "test" the children in my classroom because they are so young.  However, I know there needs to be something that will identify struggling students early, so they can get proper help and support within the classroom.  

The first form of formal assessment would probably be quizzes.  In the kindergarten classroom I am in this semester, after the children finish a unit in math, they always end it with a quiz.  It's not overwhelming, maybe 10 questions at best.  I think this is an easy and great way to identify if students are understanding concepts, and provide a non-biased systematic way of doing so.

Along with quizzes, I would use multiple choice tests and long & short answer tests.  These, as I mentioned earlier, are a systematic way of assessing children in the classroom.  Usually there are tests that accompany the unit or lesson within a teacher's book or online to help measure student's learning, so again this would take away bias and promote validity and reliability. 

The last avenue of formal assessment would be through oral tests.  I think this would be important to determine any language or fluency problems while asking the student to think on their feet.  Where some of these would be sporadic and without warning, there would be others like speeches where the students know ahead of time.

As I was looking around google scholar for a good article about assessment, I wasn't really impressed with their selection.  So - I took to pinterest which of course had a million things, but I came across this book.  I have NOT read this book, but the abstract explaining what it was seemed like a book I would most likely buy in regards to assessment in the classroom!

See you all soon!

-S