Week 3 - Assessment

This week Camila Monteiro and I read and discussed about assessment. Formative and Summative assessment refer to how certain assessments are used. An example of formative assessment could be worksheet, homework, projects, this kind of assessment gives the teacher a chance to how well the student knows about a certain unit of a subject. An example of Summative assessment could be a final test or a final paper, where the teacher sees what students have learned from that unit. We agreed that formative assessment can be used as a summative assessment. An example of that would be a teacher using quizzes she has given during formative assessment to get a final grade. We talked about Standardized Achievement Test which is used to assess the current knowledge the student has and identifies the student's strengths and weaknesses. Standardized Aptitude Test is used to assess future potential or capacity. An example of this are tests usually given for admission or selection to enter a particular school. We also agreed that Standardized Aptitude Test would be more like Norm-referenced tests because they are comparing test scores and knowledge, and Standardized Achievement Tests would be more like Criterion-Referenced Tests because it looks at students strengths and weaknesses. In Alexandria's case Camila and I decided that we would still be concerned although there were some factors that could have somehow affected the low scores of the students. And the scores did improve a little from the past year. So as the principal we would just want to make sure each teacher were doing their job in order for the students to be learning and consequently get better scores. It is important to know how to assess correctly and make it valid and reliable so we can test our students fairly. We need to know what kind of assessment best show what our students know. Parents should know about standardized assessment and what it is testing. They should be aware of their children's scores and need to know the area they did poorly on so they can help them improve.