The Importance of Student Assessments

The Primary ingredient for the making of a great teacher is love. As teachers, we must see the good in every student.

It is vital for students to understand that the skills they learn in school should be transferred to the actual skills they will need to be healthy and independent. It is very do-able to integrate interesting real-life activities into the students' instructional day.

Real-life skills can be acquired through leadership opportunities such as a service worker in the library, office or lunch.

Continuous, authentic, and appropriate assessment measures provide evidence about each student's learning progress. Such information helps students, teachers, and family members select immediate learning goals and plan further education.

Assessment is the process of describing a student's progress toward an objective. Assessment, which does advance and guide learning, should include both the processes and the products of learning, taking into account student differences.

Students should have opportunities to set personal goals, chart their growth, and reflect on their progress in achieving the knowledge, skills, and behavioral objectives of education. Means of assessing student progress should also serve a learning function, helping students to clarify their understandings and providing information on which to base judgments.

Teachers should specify in advance the criteria for assessment, usually in the form of a rubric that defines levels of quality for assessing performance, demonstrations, projects, or similar work; and examples of quality work should be readily available.

In addition to the content knowledge and skills typically assessed through paper and pencil tests, methods of assessing students' growth must address that many other aspects of a student's development including critical thinking, independence, responsibility, and those other desired personal attributes and dispositions that have lifelong influence. This requires a variety of assessment strategies including journals, electronic portfolios, demonstrations, descriptive teacher feedback, teacher-designed tests, and audio or video evidences of learning.

Assessment should emphasize individual progress rather than comparison with other students and should not rely on extrinsic motivation. The goal is to help students discover and understand their own strengths, weaknesses, interests, and aptitudes.

Teachers should recognize students' efforts and support their developing work ethic, knowing that not all students can reach a uniform standard at the same time. Emphasis should be on what has been accomplished. Descriptive feedback that addresses not only the quality of the current work but how to improve or move to the next step in learning should be provided to each student.

Various written reports from teachers, telephone calls, and e-mail messages keep home and school working together. Major learning activities or units should culminate in some form of presentation or product that students share with their parents, other students, or the community to demonstrate what they have learned and accomplished.