Principle number one

What is authentic assessment?  When something is authentic what is it?  What is the opposite of authentic?  What kinds of assessment are NOT authentic? Why?

Down with the Traditional  The aim: to supplement traditional assessment practices with ‘alternative’ approaches that offer more meaningful and productive ways of assessing students. Which Traditional practices work for you in your classroom?

Assessment Reform  Greater authenticity  Too often we assess what is easiest to measure and neglect what is more difficult to assess yet important. Supporting learning  Often assessment interrupts or discourages learning Fairness of all Students Some students are penalized by current practices due to the methods and conditions under which assessment occurs.

Assessing your Assessment  Dr. Case’s Research Report marking sheet  Activity:  Turn to page 320 of Case’s article  Read the upper half of the page describing the background, activity and his first worksheet.  In pairs, mark the Research Report Assessment. That is, give him ‘your’ grade.

Principle #1  Focus on What Really Matters  Is the material we are using (consciously or not) to judge students’ work reflective of the most important educational objectives?  Assessments that are skewed towards a limited range of desired outcomes—outcomes related exclusively to factual knowledge—fail to assess and encourage student growth along other desired dimensions.

Principle #1 continues  Many standardized tests used to evaluate students, teachers, and schools focus on those curriculum outcomes that are easily measured by machine-scoreable questions. This leaves a considerable gap between the outcomes that schools are expected to promote and the outcomes used to measure school performance. (Case, 2009, p. 321)

Principle #1 continues  What skills (understandings, abilities) do you find difficult to assess? Reading comprehension Mathematics Science Writing Other

Principle #1 continues  Imbalance in Marking:  How much weight are you placing on the most important criteria?  Turn to your rubric and check it out:  What categories comprise the greatest percent of the overall mark?

Table of Specifications

Unit goalsQuizzesActivity Sheets Group ProjectIn-class observation Research report Critical thinking Info gathering Recall of factual info Understandin g key concepts Cooperation with others Total

Principle #1 Be prepared for a surprize when you discover the importance you actually attached to the various goals. The actual weighting of marks should be matched against the importance these goals deserve according to the curriculum and your own professional sense of what really matters, given the students you teach.

Principle #1 Summary It comes down to: What you ‘are’ assessing and what importance do you place on each skill, relative to the total grade of the assignment.  Closing ‘Quescussion’

Raising important Questions  An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong. Russell Baker Russell Baker

Aims of Education  An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. Anatole France Anatole France