Flint 9/Collins 3

These chapters on assessment was incredibly helpful and informative for the work that we do with our students and for the kid watching project that we are completing. When I was in elementary school, I was fortunate enough to not struggle with standardized tests, and I never understood why my teachers disliked them so much. I’m doing well on them, what is the problem? However, now as a teacher and as an adult, I can see the huge down side to these tests. Teachers begin “teaching to the test” and the students loose out on various educational experiences as a result of it. I remember one day in class, we spent the entire class period just practicing filling in the bubbles for the end of grade test. I thought it was fun to fill in different patterns on the sheet but now I see that I lost out on some very valuable educational time.

There are several alternative assessments that are mentioned in the book that I think would be much more informative then a standardized test would be since you can see how the students are thinking about a certain piece of work or concept. Observation alone is a great tool that I think a lot of teachers over look. There are a lot of students in a classroom and there are generally a lot of things that are going on in the room and different things that the teacher wants to be doing but by taking the time to just watch students as they interact in groups with the material or seeing who is talking themselves through the material is fascinating and very beneficial. One problem that I see with miscue analysis and retrospective miscue analysis is that some students might simply answer the question the way that they think the teacher wants them to answer the question. If the teacher asks them why they skipped over a word, they might respond that they just didn’t see the word and they might not have seen the word, or they might have skipped it because they did not know how to pronounce it and they did not want the teacher to see that they could not read the word. Teachers will run into this in several different assessments but they should be able to tell which instance it is with the individual child. I really like these alternate assessments, but it would take a very meticulous and willing teacher to complete these and be able to accurately gage a student’s progress in order to ever replace standardized tests with something of this nature.