Comments on: Thoughts on Assessment 1: A response

By: Hidden gems – The blogosphere revisited « Doing some thinking

Hidden gems – The blogosphere revisited « Doing some thinking — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 15:02:14 +0000

[...] Thoughts on assessment 1: a response – Greg Thompson writes about rethinking school and other educational matters on his blog. His [...]

By: John Ranta

John Ranta — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:42:12 +0000

I wonder if you are overlooking the factor of time. Assessments are more than a measure of mastery, or of gaps at any particular moment. They are a measure of what a student has mastered in a given amount of time up to that moment. As such they are also a measure of said student’s learning skills – work habits, attention, focus, memory, processing, etc. Mastery alone is not a meaningful measure of teaching or learning. What is meaningful is mastery within a specific time frame. Deadlines are critical – in the classroom and in the real world. JR

By: Thoughts on Assessment 3: Writing the obit on summative assessment « Constructing Meaning

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:36:23 +0000

[...] February 5, 2010 Thoughts on Assessment 3: Writing the obit on summative assessment Posted by Greg under Uncategorized Leave a Comment This is the third in a series of posts on assessment. I imagine that it won’t be the last, but I think this is the most important of the three thus far. The first post was inspired by a post by Henrick Oprea (Blog, Twitter) and developed as I read posts by Steven Anderson’s (Blog, Twitter) and Jan Webb (Blog, Twitter). If you are just checking in at this point, here are the links to the first to posts (Note: I had started this post prior to attending Educon 2.2 at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, January 29 – 31, and worked on it while I was there, thus there is an Educon influence): Thoughts on Assessment 1: A response [...]

By: Thoughts on Assessment: A Conversation « Constructing Meaning

Thoughts on Assessment: A Conversation « Constructing Meaning — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:22:48 +0000

[...] and his post, On Assessment – part 1. His post got me thinking and I responded by posting Thoughts on Assessment: A response. soon after, I picked up a link (via Twitter) to Steven Anderson’s (Blog, Twitter) post [...]

By: On Assessment – part 2 « Doing some thinking

On Assessment – part 2 « Doing some thinking — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:59:02 +0000

[...] } The first post of this series has led to a response by Gregory Thompson (whom I also ‘met’ through Twitter on #edchat). I’ve read it and enjoyed all the [...]

By: David Jakes

David Jakes — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 02:50:36 +0000

I’m not sure most teachers assess students. I think many give tests and quizzes to determine a grade. Doing that is not assessment in my mind, and people may disagree with that.

Assessment should be used throughout a learning process to course-correct. It should be used to redirect student learning efforts as well as provide direct feedback to the teacher relative to their effectiveness. Too often students see “assessment” or tests as something done to them. Students need to see and understand that assessment should be used to help students and their efforts become more effective, not just judge their effort as some final product.

I’m reminded of the mournful comments of my colleagues when students didn’t perform well on a test, and on a particular piece of content: “I don’t understand why they didn’t do well, we covered that in class.”

This, of course, drove me nuts. Did you just cover it, or did you teach it and did they learn it. And how do you know?

With a thorough and effective assessment plan, they would have never have had the need to ask that question…

Thanks for the post. Well done.