Assessments Help Guide the Teacher on What to Teach

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Recommended: Importance of assessment in teaching and learning

1. Assessment is a process that aims at setting certain goals and standards that the teacher needs to meet during the teaching process and thereafter gather and analyze evidence from the feedback realized from the students to determine if the performance by the students matches the expected goals and standards. Evaluation is a process of collecting data and analyzing it in order to establish if there are any strengths and weaknesses in the strategies in the teaching process. I found the link between testing, assessing and teaching most relevant to me. This is because they all supplement and depend on each other. Good testing strategies assists the teacher assessing the usefulness of the strategies and consequently affects the approach the teacher has towards teaching. If the assessment shows the strategies are good, the teacher will keep the strategies and if they seem not to yield whatever goals he had, he will abandon them. I found the different types of assessments in this reading most enlightening. Often, people think that all assessments have the same goal but this perception is wrong as seen in this reading. Formal assessments use data to make conclusions from a test. For example, results from a test may make the teacher conclude that a student is reading below average in a certain area. Informal assessments concentrate on the content and are not data driven. The difference between the two types of assessment are important because they determine the purpose of assessment. Formative assessment is assessment that takes place as the unit of instruction goes on in order to monitor ongoing progress for example in the middle of a lesson. The teacher is able to realize immediately any weaknesses in the students. Summative assessmen...

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...ls provided by the author to produce and interpret valid data in order to make good decisions in the classroom.

5. New terms learnt are,

• Criterion referenced assessment: this is an assessment that compares a learner to other students. For example comparing the scores of a student with those of other students in the same class.

• Analytic scoring: it is a type of scoring that separates the scoring strategies into categories observed one at a time. For example, the teacher looks at grammar, clarity, and so on.

• Assessment literacy: this is the knowledge of principles that guide assessment. This includes methodologies and techniques.

• Cohort: this is a group that goes through observation over time and its progress measured.

• High stakes testing: this is a program of testing where the results are of important outcomes to the learners and the teachers.

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