Assessment Oh, Assessment

I think that it is important for us to understand first what assessment means.  Assessment is typically defined as evaluating the quality or ability of an event or a person’s knowledge.  I think that in many cases we are very focused on assessing a child’s academic knowledge.  We often forget that our students are more than test scores.  I think that if we are going to assess our students’ academic knowledge then we need to think also about their psychosocial and biosocial development as well.  I feel that many times our expectations for what we want our students to do academically are misguided.  Our nation is very focused on making sure that we aren’t falling behind other countries in the race for knowledge; however are we paying a price with the development of our students as a whole?  Our students need to be educated and our assessment needs to be used to improve their learning not just for the sake of assessing and receive funding. 

A recent article in Educational Leadership stated that assessment around the world does vary but many of the concerns are still the same.  In the U.S. the biggest complaint is that teachers are teaching to the test. Many feel that we aren’t holding our students to the right standards and thus we can meet their goals. “ In most other countries, however, including the Czech Republic, England, Canada, Japan, and Australia, teaching to the test means teaching the curriculum, because the same agency that develops the test also develops the curriculum. In fact, the test is often seen as a mechanism to promote the curriculum,” (Levinson, 2000, p. 60). If only there was a way to assess students for the benefit of instruction and not for the monetary punishment of failing schools. 

The idea of assessment is a very tricky one for me as an educator.  I think that assessing our students is a very important part of our job; however I also think that many times we are just testing for monetary gain and not for the true purpose of guiding our instruction.  If instead of making our testing high stakes maybe we should make them more like high learning and fund the time that it takes educators to evaluate an educational attack plan to aide struggling students. 

References:

http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el200002_levinson.pdf