Professional Practice Standards
Standard Four
Assessment of and for student learning is concerned with how the teachers systematically gather, analyze and use all relevant data in order to measure student academic progress, guide the instructional delivery of their lesson plans in the classroom, as well as how to provide timely feedback to students and parents throughout the year. Teachers are constantly working to apply their data to their classrooms to ensure that the needs of the students are being met and the lessons are effective. A variety of assessments are implemented to monitor the student’s progress as well as provide the student and parents with meaningful feedback about the student’s performance in the classroom. Teachers are continuously setting new goals and challenging the students to improve in every aspect of their education, employing assessments give teachers the appropriate tools they need to give the students constructive criticism and promote their future success in achieving the goals you set for them and the goals that they set for themselves.
When developing assessments of and for learning it is important to consider both formative and summative methods. Formative assessments monitor student learning and assess their understanding of a topic. Many formative assessments are informal and are given throughout a lesson. Summative assessments evaluate the students learning at the end of a lesson or unit. Summative assessments are typically given more points and require some preparations/ review.
When designing a lesson, it is often a good idea to build the assessment first so that you know what information is needed and the objective of the lesson as a whole. Here is an example of a pre/post-Money Test that I created to determine what knowledge my students already possess about counting coins and money.