Week 13

Week 13: What’s the Big Idea? Matching Assessment to Instruction

During this week you will discuss how teachers can best assess students’ science understanding and their abilities to employ scienceprocess skills. A central objective of the week is for you, prospective teachers, to understand that assessment—this process of learningabout students’ understanding and performance—must match instruction. 

If we want to know what students know and are able to do, we have to give them opportunities to show us using techniques that match the type of instruction in which they have been engaged. Hence assessment and instruction are intertwined. A good assessment is a good instructional task.

Assessment is very important for a teacher to know. Assessments that teachers should know and use in their teaching is diagnostic, formative, and summative. Diagnostic is important for students to use at the beginning before starting a lesson or a unit to see what the students know on a topic or concept. A good diagnostic assessment is to use KWL charts. Formative is important for teachers to use to make sure that the students are keeping on track. This should be done half way through a unit. It should take place in the form of a quiz or a journal entry to see how much the students know.Formative assessment should be a short quiz or a journal entry that has students answer questions based on what the students have learned so far. Summative is important for both the student and teacher. A good summative assessment is a unit test or project. It may be good to switch off for each other unit to do a unit test one unit and a project for another unit. A project and an unit test will show what the students have learned throughout the unit and if the students comprehended the information.  Teachers and students both learn from the  different assessments listed above. Teachers learn what went well in the unit, what to improve on for next time, and how the students learned from this style of teaching and the teaching methods used like a powerpoint or Smart Board or lecture vs. hands-on. Students see what they have learned and how well the students have learned by being assessed through doing projects or tests by getting a grade.