Week 1 Journal Entry

Reading Journal: Describe what you know about assessments in education. What types of assessment have you heard of and experienced (either as a student or as a teacher)? What might be features of "good" assessment in your content area?

In education, I am aware of formative and summative assessments. Based on my understanding, a formative assessment is an assessment that provides data and is essentially a checkpoint during a unit or set of units. This assessment informs instructional changes going forward and highlights concepts or skills that students in which students are currently not fully understanding. Summative assessments are assessments at the end of a unit or set of units. These assessments are meant to comphrenisvely look at student learning through a longer assessment. These assessments could be a final or unit test that as students to apply knowledge from through a set of units. These assessments make sure all students are learning material to a certain standard. A good assessment in my content area (science) is an assessment that both tests students content knowledge and their critical thinking and reasoning skills. Half of science is being able to problem solve and create models to find solutions and the other half is the content knowledge needed to address these problems. Good assessments should target both aspects of science instruction.  

How do these two readings define formative assessment? What are some distinguishing features of formative assessment?

The Lay of the land article byMoss and Brookhart defined formative assessments as a "process that helps students  understand  and  use their own learning  targets,  set their  own learning  goals, select  effective learning  strategies,  and  assess and  regulate  their  own learning progress. " Guskey and Jung explained that formative assessments could either a formal assessment or a skill demonstration, as long as the goal is to gather information on student learning to provide feedback on learning progress. 

For what purposes might you use formative assessment practices in your classroom/practicum?

I will use formative assessments are used to guide instruction and monitor its effects. Formative Assessment can provide information about the present state of the learners, clear view of the learning goal, and action to close the gap. Learning goals can be found and changed within the curriculum and the the present state of the learner is learned from the given assessment. Based on data from a formative assessment, a data-driven action plan can be created. Formative assessments can use used 

In what ways can formative assessment practices benefit student learning? Your instruction?

Most assessments can be seen as formative if they are used to inform instruction. I view my quizzes and Unit Tests as formative assessments. For example. I have a formative Assessment called an Open Response Quiz which targets students skills using three question. From this assessment, I can discover information about what concepts or skills each learner struggled with, change, upcoming learning goals and evaluating past learning goals, and create an action plan to address student gaps through Targeted Teaching and Intervention

Add anything new and valuable that you learned about assessments from the reading and video. How, if at all, did these three resources shift your thinking about the types and purposes of assessment in your content area?

The articles shifted my thinkng on formative assessments. I usually thought of fortmative assessments as formal assessments that I can collected data from. However, I can see that any assessment (including games or skill builders) can be formative as long as the goal is to collect data and improve instruction.