Assessing Learning

Chapter 13 Wools-Assessing Learning Article
Assessing Learning: The Missing Piece in Instruction?
I found this article to be very interesting, on either side of the lesson plan examples. The beginning was informative and I found myself agreeing with a lot that was said. For example, in our district we follow the same kind of questions that are presented here; What have they been learning, how well have they been learning, and how can we verify they are learning? I’m sure that every district has some kind of format that follows this setup. What I always like to see, and it’s something I think most teachers forget about, is the performance task for students. As a teacher this is difficult for me because it requires you to just kind of walk away and let the student show their abilities. However, I think the results speak louder than any assessment given. Quite often when I do these things I’m surprised at what my kids are truly capable of. Another thing I think that is vital in a school community is some kind of assessment that allows you to see evidence in the improvement of instruction. We use a program called Acuity, which is similar to the MAP test, and do it 3 times a year. It allows the teacher and a group of collaborators to sit down and see what needs to be worked on. This year, after taking this class, I plan on asking my librarian for assistance in any information seeking GLE’s that we have problems on.
Since I didn’t care too much for the lesson plans I will only hit on them briefly. Ideally they were great and creative, theoretically they didn’t strive to assess a GLE (which is what leads instruction) or critical thinking. When we have our observations our principals are looking to see what level of DOK students are hitting, and I just don’t see the higher numbers here that I would like to. However, they can definitely be ‘tweaked’ to accomplish that.
The end of the article provided a couple of really great resources for assessments that I plan on checking out. We do a lot of creative hands on things in my classroom, (especially during centers/guided reading time) that I’m constantly thinking of a way to grade them without the 12/12 score. The University of Wisconsin-Stout looks very promising. I personally use one that I would highly recommend to any educator at that is, www.rubistar.com.

Chapter 13:
I love the line, “If you were arrested for contributing to the education of a student, would there be enough evidence to convict you?” Talk about thought provoking! I like how this makes you think outside of the box, and really this question can be asking to ANYONE in the building. After reading this chapter I was surprised that some, if not most, libraries are judged on the amount of materials they have or check out versus the quality of those items. However, there was a line under the heading ‘Qualitative Measures’ that made me realize why this is so. It’s so much easier for people to look at numbers and think, ok they’re set they’ve got plenty of planet books for the 2nd grade science lesson. However, it’s much more difficult to siphon through those books and determine what year it was published and if the information is correct and up to date. Imagine, how confusing would it be to a student to talk about Pluto not being a planet any longer, that we have only 8 in our solar system, then they go to the library to find a book completely disagreeing with their teacher. Granted there are steps that could be taken to avoid this, or even a lesson on copy right dates, but how much of that is really going to sink in to a second grader? Instead, the library should take special care to weed out all of those nonfiction pieces that are no longer applicable, instead of worrying about how many books they have in their library. I was surprised to see in this chapter that they don’t expect the entire library to be analyzed each year. After reading about all of the responsibilities and expectations (especially the yearend report), I would have thought that it was expected each and every year. However, this does make sense to me. Why not take the time to really concentrate on a few areas a year instead of frantically scavenging the entire library for out of date books? This would be a lot more methodical and allow the librarian more time to really concentrate on the validity of the text.