Jenny Neville Teaching Portfolio

Professional Practice: Standard Five

Assess, provide feedback and report on students learning 

Teaching Standard 5.1:

Assess Students Learning: Demonstrate understanding of assessment strategies, including informal and formal, diagnostic, formative and summative approaches to assess students learning:

Assessment is the process that monitors students’ learning progress (Brady & Kennedy, 2012). As teaching is primarily focused on one’s learning and achieving specified outcomes, then assessment is key to knowing how well one is actually learning and effectively one is teaching. Assessing students throughout the learning process is essential to truly understand how a student is progressing. No longer is a major assessment at the end of a unit warranted nor is it truly reflective of the student’s ability and level of understanding. From a teachers point of view such assessments do little to indicate if major concepts are being grasped and where there are problems within the learning process.

To be fair, relevant and informative assessment type needs to be varied. This enables all learners to authentically demonstrate their skill and know how. Throughout my prac I used forms of diagnostic, informal and formal assessment as well as summative. Using a combination of these assessments meant, beginning with diagnostic assessment I could initially see where student’s knowledge was lacking, identifying areas that required greater attention and stronger scaffolding. Student progress could then be assessed through informal and formal formative tasks such as observations and played an important role in indicating if a tighter grasp on core ideas was occurring.

An example of using different assessment strategies to inform my teaching and assess students learning was the use of a diagnostic test in maths (see attached). Knowing that there was a varying skill level in the class I designed a maths test to identify areas in need of attention and greater clarification. The test was fairly comprehensive, composing mostly of previously covered concepts, as informed be their class teacher and my own observations and areas still to be covered as part of the Australian curriculum. I entered results into a student checklist and used a system of ticks to how well student had answered questions.The results of the test clearly indicated the need for nearly every student to revise the basics such as identifying prime numbers, closely followed by factors and multiples. Areas highlighted as priorities informed the sequence in which the maths program was delivered.

Source: http://ajsoccerusa.wordpress.com/

Performing ongoing assessments allowed me to ‘check in’ and see how all students including struggling and excelling  were progressing; shedding light as to how to tailor future lessons. An example of this was a pop quiz at the beginning of the second algebra lesson in a planned sequence of three, to see how well the student could apply the concepts from the previous lesson which would indicate if they required revisiting.

I found the use of rubric a useful and user friendly summative way to assess student’s progress. For the history project mentioned in Standard 4, rubrics allowed individuals to be assessed on both their own work and group effort. It gave the opportunity to personalise each student’s efforts, offering straightforward feedback about the presence or absence of an array of skills in the task. I like to be able to offer students feedback directly related to their work, and found providing room for comment on the bottom of rubrics a good way to add that touch to their work. It is quite time consuming though, considering, assessing, commenting on every students work. Being conscious of my time (or lack of), it is necessary to use it wisely and therefore important to make the assessment process more efficient yet still representative of students’ progress. This could be achieved by assessing fewer skills at once, having more informal assessments or a better constructed rubric, amongst other approaches. So with this in mind, I will attempt to develop representative, and efficient assessments and marking guides in the future. I found the resource, Assessment and Reporting’ (Brady & Kennedy, 2012) to be incredibly useful and will endeavour to refer to it as I take the opportunity when employed as a teacher to not only use a variety of assessments but to also design and refine my own assessment tools. I can see the benefit in having well designed and formatted checklists, rubrics, tests, observation diary and so on and see how thorough assessment not aids students’ progress but classroom management in general.

Supporting Documents:

References:Brady, L. & Kennedy, K. (2012). Assessment and Reporting: Celebrating Student Achievement (4^th ed.). Frenchs Forrest, NSW: Pearson     Australia.

Soccor, A.J.(2012). http://ajsoccerusa.wordpress.com/.