We started off the class with our Learning Circles talking about the first two chapters of our text (click here for discussion summary), the main thing we talked about was including students in the assessment process at the correct times to ensure maximum student success.

• As a student, I didn’t really care about being involved in the rubric making process maybe because I felt I would perform well either way. It was more common to receive a copy of the rubric before completing an assignment (which I have come to appreciate in university) but still not often. In terms of self/peer-assessment, it almost always came after the project so nobody cared about or reflected on their feedback.
• As a pre-intern, I don’t think I had enough time or need to practice assessment other than one exit slip.
• As a future teacher, I would like to at least provide the rubric to my students before they work on an assignment. I’m still trying to figure out the rubric format I like and how to equate it to a specific grade based on my feedback.

Another major event in this class was talking about what we know and do not know about assessment, both my partner and I determined that we really don’t know much about assessment other than that there are two kinds: formative and summative. We had so many questions like: how do you combine results from various assessments to get a specific grade? how do you avoid any biases when working with rubrics which are more subjective than numbers (ex.math test)? does someone who received constant assistance by the teacher (my pre-internship had many cases of this) and therefore got all of the answers correct deserve the same mark as someone who achieved the 100% on their own? how often do you need to do tangible assessments?

We also did a quiz on why we assess students and I found out that I feel assessment is equally for assessing students learning and as an assessment of their learning. My partner and I felt pretty similarly about this and got a score of 31 (AforL)/29 (AofL). I feel like university is trying to preach assessment of learning, but as someone who really only has experience as a student assessment of learning seems to still be of great importance. I don’t think it should be completely one-sided (all for assessment for learning) because as a teacher, you need the actual grades for report cards, not everyone will receive 100%. I feel like I don’t know what the right balance should be…

My symbol for this week is a question mark because I haven’t realized until now how much I do not know about assessment and how many questions I have.

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We also did a quiz on Shared Responsibility in Assessment, click here for my results!