Deeper Thinking about Domain One

This week's blog is a little different from past weeks. I was asked for this blog to research an article, video, and blog that had to do with the student assessment component of Domain One. The article that I found is "How Should We Measure Student Learning?: The Many Forms of Assessment" by the Edutopia staff (http://www.edutopia.org/comprehensive-assessment-introduction). It stated that we need multiple forms of assessments to gauge student learning. I also liked their idea of using skills like collaboration and team building when it comes to assessments. This is more like the real-world or business situations that students would face after high school.

The second item I found was an interesting video titled, "Making a Case for Comprehensive Assessment" also located on Edutopia's website (http://www.edutopia.org/urban-academy). This video is about a high school that doesn't use standard state tests as their way of assessing student knowledge. Instead they use a lot of project based tools to show what students have learned. Also in a social studies class, students read real-world law cases and argue one side or the other after researching both sides. Though Urban Academy has recently been pressured to give state regents tests, they are fighting to keep the standards that have been working for their students so far.

The final item I found was a blog by Bill Tucker titled, "Improving Assessment: Getting From Here to There" (http://www.quickanded.com/2009/09/improving-assessment-getting-from-here-to-there.html) about the need for our educational system to try something new. He wrote about how our current testing system is failing us, but that it would be incredibly hard for major changes to happen quickly. He noted that if any change were going to happen, it would have to be in small increments with lots of research going into the correct changes as well as a major investment being made into a new system. I liked the analogy that he gave at the end of the blog that referenced the time and energy it took to get to the moon. NASA put in a huge investment of time and money with many failures and triumphs before they actually met their goals.

All three of these resources talk to the idea that we need a new system of assessment that includes different types of methods. I am definitely open to trying new forms of assessment with my students that would give more students the opportunity to succeed. I really like the idea of trying more project based assessments that would ask students to apply what they have learned in a more hands on way then a multiple choice or free response test. It is a little frustrating though with the push that my district is having for more assessments. We are moving from semester exams to quarter exams as well as making the all common across grade and subject. Though I can see some benefit for having quarter exams (less material for students to remember for one assessment), they are taking away instructional time that can be used for some of these alternate assessment types. We are more pressured to get a certain amount of material in before students have to take their exams.