Reflection: Assessment in Teaching

The thought about assessment always fascinated and overwhelmed me at the same time from the first time I learned about it in the classroom. At the beginning of my study, I was fascinated by the fact that assessment could be used not only to know the students’ learning achievement but it could also be used to help their learning (formative assessment). I was addicted to formative assessment seeing the benefits students could earn from it. As time passed, I recognized many variables around assessment that affect its main goal to “assess” students’ learning. I think the good assessment is not only the assessment that will help the students learn when they are doing it, but the one that could tell the teacher what is happening in students’ learning, how the students think about a specific topic the class was learning, and measure students’ understanding in the topic. It feels like I, as a teacher, try to read the students’ minds through the assessment — maybe it is. However, there are a lot of factors that make an assessment result does not display the real condition of the students’ learning. It could be the language, the wordings, the chosen topic, the students’ condition, the form of assessment, etc. Therefore, designing a good quality assessment is very challenging and needs a lot of practice. The more challenging phase of the assessment is analyzing it, especially in the written assessment. The same answers might have through a different way of thinking, either they are the right or wrong answers. The right answer might go through misunderstanding in the process, the wrong answer might go through correct understanding in some processes and misunderstanding in some others, and it is important to acknowledge each students’ way of thinking in order to assess their learning and decide which students need help in their learning process in which area. That is what I am still trying to learn and practice along the time.

In my SEP, I made some reflections and evaluations regarding the assessment. The assessment in SEP is very challenging because I taught more than 150 students and it is very difficult to keep track of each students’ learning.

1. Instruction

At the beginning of my SEP, and the first assessment I made for the students, there are some students who did not understand the instruction I made even though I thought it was clear already. I think in each assessment, the instruction cannot only be delivered by written instruction, but the teacher needs to explain the instruction verbally while giving a chance for students to clarify the instruction. I never thought instruction would be so tricky. Teachers might also need to give examples and read the instruction several times before giving it to the students just to make sure there is no ambiguity in the instruction.

2. Points

Grading is actually still an internal conflict, is it necessary to give numbers to the students or it is better just to give descriptions of what they have mastered and have not in a topic? However, conventionally, I still need to grade. Then, in the grading, I did not specify the points for each problem in which each problem was actually having different weights. Therefore, I feel bad when I give equal points for each question, but the past is passed and I need to remember this so I would not make the same mistake. Then, on the next assessments, I specify the points for each question. After giving points for each assessment, another problem arises. In one question, there might be different answers in which could not be given the full points. I was afraid that the points that I gave were not fair and I was being subjective. Therefore, after that, I personally made my own standard of the given points. For example, if the student gave the right way of thinking, but he was not being careful with the calculation, then I would give him a full point with a note. If one problem has two concepts, then the student has one misunderstanding then he would get a half-point.

3. Never procrastinate

I know it might be trivial, but never ever procrastinate to mark the assessment you already gave to the students. Previously, since I had more than 150 students, I was being lazy to mark all of the students’ answers. I did it after one week of assessment in which we had moved to a different topic. Then, I fully regret procrastinating it. When I saw the answer, I noticed some misunderstandings in the students where it could be discussed right away after the assessment and it could be solved in a short period of time. However, since the assessment had been a week ago, then to talk about the misunderstanding I would need to discuss the prior topic first which would take more time than it should be. Therefore, now I note to myself to mark any assessment right away after I got the paper.