One of the things I enjoy about being back in graduate classes is that they really make you take a look at what you are doing, in this case in my classroom, and allows you to find places that you can grow. I think that we have a tendency to get in a groove and just keep doing the same thing. These classes wake up my brain and make me excited to try new things.
This unit on assessment did just that. It really made me realize how far I've come with assessments over my 17 year career, but it also showed me I can go even further! I am starting to dabble in Project Based Learning and that has really changed the way I look at assessment. I can remember in a training this summer they said "maybe at the end of the project they don't even receive a grade." Umm...what? No grade? Why would a student do the project if they weren't getting a grade? Then I didn't give a grade....they still did the work! And they still learned things! Mind blown!
One of the things that surprised me in some of the videos that we watched this week was that one of the speakers talked about how traditional testing is cost effective and still a viable option. I was surprised because I expected the videos to take the opposite opinion. However, the speaker went on to talk about how traditional tests make a student retrieve from memory and that when they do that they have a better chance of remembering that information long term. He went on to say that the biggest learning that happens with these traditional tests is when they get something wrong and they have then hyper correction effect. Only through this, and not by seeing the grade in the gradebook, do they actually benefit from getting something wrong and essentially benefit from taking the test. I thought this was an interesting perspective.
I'm excited to keep exploring assessment throughout the semester because I know that there are so many new trends in assessment that were prevalent when I went through my teacher training 18 years ago.
