Learning When and How to Assess Students

The value of learning factual information about literature rather than evaluating student’s ability to critically think has been intertwined itself in many of our Educator’s minds. Although evidence has been mounting on new techniques of teaching, students are being trained to focus more on learning facts about characters and setting instead of being able to ask questions to understand deeper meaning. The article suggests that students would rather fill out objective tests like multiple choice instead of wanting to tackle essays. There are many tactics teachers can use to counter this behavior including free writes and journals. Most importantly the writings must be relevant to their lives. For myself, I always struggled with literature and wanting to read and write because my teachers always gave up certain prompts to write about. I hated this. I want to study and write about what I find interesting to my live and how I can make those connections to what is happening in the world. Teacher’s need to give our students more options to not feel like school is so much of a chore.  

One thing I thought was interesting to consider was the reliability of different assessment strategies across timeframes. Does time and certain parts of the year promote some types of assessment over others? As a teacher, I think it is important to consider what our students are doing in other classes and even their activities outside of school. We might not think about it, but adolescents lie extremely busy lives and pressuring them to study a number of different subjects for upcoming tests can cause a diminish of desire to want to learn. Take into consideration Friday nights big football game or a weekend long volleyball tournament. These are big moments for kids and allow them to unwind after long days. Use these opportunities to push a test to a different day, especially when other teachers are testing their student’s as well.