Assessment

InTASC Standard #6, Assessment, involves a teacher’s use of several different methods of assessment to allow students to demonstrate their mastery of the content. A teacher must use assessments to monitor learner progress and allow students to see their own growth. Teachers also use assessments to guide their own decisions with regards to lesson planning.

A teacher with a thorough understanding of the Assessment InTASC Standard is able to use assessments to both provide feedback to students and to inform his/her/their own lessons and decisions. Both formative and summative assessments provide valuable information to the teacher about student progress and content mastery. Formative assessments allow teachers to adapt lesson plans and content focus to the particular, current needs of individual students or classes while summative assessments give the teacher an idea of how well the unit’s concepts were understood and applied by the students at the end of the unit.

Pre-Unit Assessment

I demonstrate my understanding of the Assessment Standard by using the data gathered from a pre-test to inform my lesson planning for an evolution and natural selection unit. The information gathered guided my decisions to focus on natural selection and certain vocabulary terms during the evolution unit, as students struggled most with this content. As the unit progressed, formative assessments in the form of classroom activities and questions demonstrated a further need for focus on the mechanics of natural selection and how natural selection leads to evolution, leading to my implementation of a mutations and speciation-focused activity to drive those concepts home.

Classification Project

I use different assessment methods in class and as summative assessments so that students are given ample opportunities to demonstrate their personal strengths as they show content mastery. For example, as the summative assessments for the classification unit, students are given both a multiple choice test and a project involving the creative effort of making their own unicellular organism and classifying it using the domain and kingdom traits learned throughout the unit. In this way, the students are able to demonstrate their understanding of the domain and kingdom levels of taxonomy and the traits found in those taxa through short answer questions and the creation of a brand-new organism rather than having the students limited to multiple-choice tests.

Rubrics

I use rubrics for grading, as these match my learning objectives and eliminate bias in my assessments. The summative assessment in my Matter unit is based on the learning objectives of the unit and the lessons leading up the assessment were created to meet the needs of the assessment. The presentations at the end of the unit use a rubric in order to eliminate bias and to provide the students with clear expectations for their presentations.