Fieldwork: Varying Assessments with Experiences
A. Conduct an interview with a current teacher or a current school administrator. Discuss the subject’s experiences with assessment. You may find it useful to record the interview.
A few questions to consider in your interview:
o How do they use assessment in their classroom, school, or district?
o What kinds of assessments do they use? How do they go about creating them?
o How does assessment inform instruction and other aspects of school programming?
o What do they find useful and not useful about teacher-created and standardized assessment?
o How does the current culture of accountability affect them personally? Why?
B. Conduct an interview with any student, preferably K–12, but a vocational, college, or graduate student would be fine as well. Discuss the subject’s experiences with assessment. You may find it useful to record the interview.
A few questions to consider in your interview (if interviewing a younger student, be sure to use developmentally appropriate language):
• When you think about assessment, what comes to mind?
• What kinds of assessments do you like? Dislike? Why?
• What makes assessments fair or unfair?
• Why is assessment necessary?
Submit a 4–6-page (double spaced) paper in which you use the course readings to analyze both of your interviewees’ experiences with assessment. Give a short explanation of each person’s experiences to frame your discussion.
What did you learn from each person?
Did it make you think about anything in particular that we have discussed in class thus far?
How do the interviewees’ experiences reflect what you know about good assessment, the purposes of assessment, and so on, as indicated in the readings, lecture notes, and through class discussion?
Be sure to support your analyses with ideas from the readings, including both the text and other articles assigned in class. Use proper APA format for your citations.
Fieldwork Paper I Guidelines
• Length: 4–6 pages, double spaced.
• proper APA form for citations
Fieldwork
Name
Institution
Course Code and Title
Instructor
Date
Introduction
The paper includes an interview conducted with a fourth grade teacher, Ms. Nicole, and her student, Adam. The sole purpose of the interview is to discuss their varying assessments’ experiences. Therefore, a brief recap of the interview has been included, as well as a broad analysis of their varying experiences with assessments.
Ms. Nicole
Ms. Nicole reported that she uses assessment as a tool for assessing and monitoring progress and comprehension of the classroom concepts in her students. She highly rates assessments to know whether her students are understanding the curriculum according to standards. Through administering assessments, she can know and highlight the specific areas where her students may be struggling. In addition, she can measure how they master the skills and the knowledge she purposes to pass. She explains that she uses this strategy to make a decision on her instructional strategy, where she works around these strategies to incorporate all the diverse needs of her students.
Ms. Nicole further highlights that she uses several types of assessments to give her a vivid view of her students' abilities. These types of assessments include quizzes, discussions in class, and observation. When coming up with the assessments, she ensures that they are aligned with the learning objectives and meet the specific grade level standards. She adds that by doing this, the needs of her students are assessed on only what they are expected to learn. Ms. Nicole adds that she values collaboration with other teachers to come up with assessments that incorporate validity, reliability, fairness, usability, and alignment.
Ms. Nicole says that assessment informs instruction by modeling her instructional strategies. For instance, she recalls that by effectively analyzing the assessment results, she is able to take note of specific areas where specific students need extra support or specific areas where they are excelling and breaking the glass ceiling. Knowing this helps her to modify her instructional strategies to meet the specific needs of every student individually. Additionally, she records that data garnered from assessment informs aspects of school programming by offering impeccable insights into the curriculum's effectiveness and resource allocation. Therefore, the school's administrators can make well-informed choices based on the outcomes of the assessment.
Further, Ms. Nicole records that teacher-created assessments are flexible and can be modified to meet the diverse needs of her students. The teacher-created assessments allow her to assess specific skills that may not be sufficiently addressed in standardized tests. However, she admits that it is time-consuming to develop teacher-created tests. On the other hand, she records that standardized assessments are advantageous in that they measure the performance of students by comparing them across schools and districts. However, standardized assessments fail to capture specific abilities in these students and other important data on classroom experiences.
Ms. Nicole records that the current culture of accountability affects her personally as a teacher. She explains that this culture is driven by standardized testing. Here, she explains that measuring accountability gives crucial data but also creates unnecessary pressure to teach to pass the test. She says that this limits flexibility and creativity and makes it challenging to meet the various needs of her students. Ms. Nicole explains that the current culture of accountability makes her feel as if her prowess as a teacher is judged solely based on her scores on standardized tests.
Adam
Adam records that when he thinks about assessments, all he thinks is how his teacher wants to check whether he has learned what he is expected to have learned. He adds that his teacher uses assessments to check whether he is improving in class.
Adam states that he likes interesting assessments that steer his creativity to demonstrate what he has learned in various ways. For instance, he states that he likes doing assessments that allow him to share and demonstrate exactly what he has understood. For example, he enjoys classroom discussions. On the other hand, he states that he dislikes assessments that are long, with questions that seem to revolve around the same topic. He says such assessments make him nervous, especially when the questions are tough and confusing. He says that with such assessments, he is not comprehensively able to demonstrate what he has learned.
Adam records that assessments are fair when everyone receives the same conditions to complete them, such as the same set of instructions and the same amount of time. Additionally, he states that assessments are fair when they are about the concepts taught in class and not new, unheard-of concepts. On that same note, Adam reports that assessments are unfair when there is favoritism, where some students receive extra help to complete them while others receive none. He goes ahead to explain that sometimes teachers fail to explain some concepts well before the assessment, which makes it unfair.
Adam admits that assessments are necessary for several reasons. First, he states that they help him and his teacher know how he is progressing. They ascertain that he gr...