Jacqueline’s Blog

     Assessment is suppose to drive our instruction.  However, after reading this chapter, I’m not sure that educators in American History ever realized the correct way that assessments should be used.  It sounds like we as educators in the US have misunderstood how these assessments should be used.  I look back to when I was in the classroom and I think there were times when I misused those assessments as well. Now, after being trained in Reading Recovery, I understand that seeing a student in the process of thinking and the decisions they make can give educators a lot of information about what to teach next.  I think the way that Juliana Jones expresses her assessments provide a clear understanding of what all educators should be looking for.  She talks about using writing as an assessment tool.  She gains a lot of information about strategies, false starts, steps they took, and why.  I think that we have to teach our students how to accurately express their understanding.  This would give us so much information.  However, I think the idea of efficiency seems to take a front seat to correct implementation of assessment.  I think many teachers feel that they don’t have time to analyze or use the assessment information in this way.  In this chapter, they provide a table created by the National Forum on Assessment, which I think we should all revisit periodically to reflect and revise our own performance and understanding of assessments. The two areas that I need improvement are number 4: Professional collaboration and development support of assessment and number 6: Communication about assessment is regular and clear.  As I reflect about my time in school, we took classes that helped preservice teachers clarify the limits of assessments.  We learned about what good questions looked like as well as questions that contained biases and subjectivity.  I think if we were engaging in conversation about test questions and its limitations, we could gain some crucial information that could help students, teachers, and community leaders keep the results in perspective.  I also think that communication should improve in relation to test results.  I know when I was little, I don’t remember when we actually took the test.  However, I do remember having the classroom teacher have a conference with my mother and myself about those results.  She provided strategies and activities that I could do over the summer break that could help improve the test results in the future.  This helped me understand that I did well in certain areas and needed to work on a couple of areas.  This helped me keep the test results in perspective.  I know when I started teaching, we didn’t have time at the end of the year to do that.  I wish that there could be a couple of days in the summer that we could meet with parents and students who wanted more information about the test.  This might help us provide vital information to improve performance on next year’s tests.  I don’t know what I would have done if I had grown up during No Child Left Behind.  I get nervous about testing, by the stakes do seem to be higher today than 20 years ago.  Will the emphasis grow or will we be able to lower the emphasis to a normal level?  I look forward to a day without NCLB to find that out. 

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