What is Assessment

Hello Fellow Bloggers
Unfortunately, the word assessment has a long, dark, twisty road of evilness. The problem is that there are so many teachers that think the only way to assess a student is by giving them a test. When I think of the word assessment the first thing that comes to mind is the horribleness of Standardized Tests. The first time I took a Standardized Test was in kindergarten. We took the CATS and the teacher separated us at different little tables in the classroom that and we had to have two number two pencils. We got to write with one,and the other had to go on the the floor near are seats. Now that I am a college student and educated and all the jazz, when I think about teachers using Standardized testing as a way of assessment is worse than just using tests that they created or got from a text book. The reason for this is because a person does not grade the tests a machine does. The teacher may know different unique thing may know about and individual student that a machine cannot not simply because a machine is inanimate. Assessment does not need to have a negative affiliation towards it's name. If we give future and current teacher better resources and information on better ways to assess students work, assessment as we know it can become a thing of the past. There are so many ways that you can measure students progress instead of using a test. You can do a project, you can have them create a test, they can do worksheets where they need to find the correct word or answer in a word search or crossword puzzle, and if you want to use a test to measure assessment why not do an informal or nontraditional test. Instead of just having a spelling bee have a math bee or a History bee. You call also play Jeopardy or Subject baseball. You can have two different teams and their name is either based on the subject as a whole like for Math you can have the Sensational Subtractor's and the Amazing Adders or you can do it more bases on the actually information that will be given during the game like for History/Social Studies/Women Studies you can have the Elizabeth Kady Stanton's and the Susan B. Anthony's. It puts a creative twist on something new. Grading is going to be a little hard but you can do this a pretest or even as part of the test and let each student get a certain amount of turns and each turn is worth a certain amount of points. I know that I am stretching it a bit, but it does makes sense. The point is assessment does not have to be a scary thing where it feels like time is moving too slow or too fast or feels like everyone is done before you are or the worst feeling of all is when you feel like the teacher is stalking you I swear that I have had that dream before.
Bye, Anni