Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

·If the ability to work hard in an organized and disciplined fashion is one of the things we

want students to learn, effort should count in an evaluation of students’ work.

·If we want students to learn how to work collectively, take responsibility for group activi-

ties, respect the value and contributions of other people, and play leadership roles, per-

formance on group activities should be factored into an evaluation of a student’s work.

·Students with limited academic skills should be able to demonstrate their knowledge and

understanding of a subject in ways that are appropriate to their skills. Imagine you are a

chef being tested on your ability to cook a new dish, but the recipe is written in a lan-

guage you cannot read. Would this be a fair assessment of your ability or knowledge?

·We are assessing knowledge and understanding of a subject and academic and social

skills, not a student’s qualities as a human being.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION—STANDARDIZED TESTING

Questions to Consider:

1. Where do you stand on the national debate over standardized assessments? Why?


2. What are your views on the following questions asked earlier in this section?
   What do fact-based, multiple-choice examinations actually tell us about student un-
   derstanding?
   Is there a correlation between more rigorous testing and the expansion of content
   knowledge and critical understanding or a commitment to active citizenship?
   Will pressure on teachers to have their students score higher on standardized tests
   force them to emphasize drilling basic skills and the memorization of facts at the ex-
   pense of more interesting and valuable types of classroom instruction?
   Does “prepping” students for tests enhance their learning or simply invalidate the
   tests as meaningful measurements?

SECTION B: HOW CAN TEACHERS DESIGN FAIR ASSESSMENTS?

As a high school teacher, I used multiple forms of assessment in my classes, including stan-
dard short-answer and essay tests geared to the academic level of my students. Most stu-
dents found my tests challenging, but not tricky. There is no simple rule for the frequency of
tests, the number of questions on a test, the type of questions, the vocabulary level used in
questions, the time allocated for a test, or the weight assigned to different kinds of ques-
tions. A lot of test design is based on a teacher’s judgments about her or his class and the
points and skills they are stressing in a particular unit. I tended to give short tests on a more
frequent basis to classes in which students had greater academic difficulty. I found that this
gave more structure to their studying and allowed me to target specific academic skills. Oth-
erwise, I gave full-period exams at the end of a unit as part of the process of pulling together
what we had been learning.
In subjects such as music, art, language arts, and second-language acquisition, tests pri-
marily include performance-based assessments. In social studies, math, and science, teach-
ers need to be more imaginative when designing tests so that they focus on problem-solving
skills, laboratory experiments, or primary source document analysis.

ASSESSMENT 207