Chapter
Three: Developing Lessons with Technologies
Focus Question 4: How
can teachers evaluate and assess their students?
Standardized testing is both a common and mandatory way to
assess a student’s knowledge of the material that had been reviewed. Critics
speculate standardized testing only measures a limited amount of knowledge
while forcing teachers to teach the test style curriculum. Performance
evaluation is another effective form of assessment based on how students can
complete a specified task.
Tech Tool 3.2: Online
Educational Testing Policy
The Fair Test: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing
is an online source for teachers to use to keep informed about testing
policies. Fair Test maintains information about testing policies including
misuse of test scores, gender bias in standardized testing, disputes over
testing errors amongst others.
Chapter Summary Points
-I found it mind boggling but at the same time believable that it is estimated that over 100 million standardized tests
are given to K-12 students in the U.S. each year.
-Since the No Child Left Behind Act, schools either are
considered “highly performing” or “underperforming”, based on the students
average test scores. High performing schools that do not show year to year
improvement on test scores, which is considered very difficult, are deemed
needing improvement. State education officials decided that is a very high bar
for most schools to achieve and wanted different performance evaluation
criteria determining school success.
-There is a debate on how electronic grading systems do not
assess a student best. If a child gets a question wrong and the teacher graded
it and could see the student’s misconception, they can address that with
further instruction. Using a test assessment to record answers takes away the
teacher’s ability to make sure students fully understand material.
Resources
Transforming Learning
with New Technologies
Melanie Holtsman via Flickr
You picked up many of the main points in the chapter - for future blog posts, you want to go beyond that and personalize them by giving more depth and your opinion/observations, etc. And you will also need to link your Flickr resource and put the book and other resources in APA citation style.
ReplyDeleteYour thoughts about the number of standardized tests in the public schools these days is so correct - Our school's computer labs (since all of the tests are online these days) are booked about 75% of the time with one test or another. When we swing the pendulum, we really go to the extreme!!