Selecting Appropriate Assessment Methods

            Chapter six is about selecting the appropriate assessment methods needed to achieve three goals.  These three goals include:  to determine whether his or her instruction is successfully conveying material to the class in general; to assess the knowledge level of each individual student; and to formulate a plan to enhance student learning.  Enhancing student achievement through assessment, then the main categories of assessment is reviewed, and descriptions of various assessment tools are provided.

            Bloom’s Taxonomy is long trusted as the analytical framework for knowledge acquisition.  It can be characterized as a scheme to classify educational goals, objectives, and most recently, standards.  The original version categories included knowledge, comprehension; application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.  The revised version categories are remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.  When educators understand the principles of the taxonomy enables them to classify what exactly is being assessed.  The other model used is the Dynamic Instructional Design (DID) model.  It follows a six-step process for designing instruction that includes formative and summative feedback questions at each step.

            The next section discussed is about connecting theory to practice.  Authentic assessment is first mentioned.  Authentic assessment usually means presenting students with tasks that are directly meaningful to their education instead of indirectly meaningful.  One of the most important practices to emerge from authentic assessment are rubrics which are scaled descriptors of performance through which teachers could describe students’ level of mastery.  Alternative assessment is discussed next which refers to any type of assessment that does not include the classic objective formats of multiple-choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, and matching, continuing all the way to standardized achievement tests.  They provide formative and summative data for teachers and students.

            There are many assessment options teachers are able to use.  These include quick-check assessment vehicles which are three-minute writes, muddiest point, know-want-learn, think-pair-share; checklists, role plays, rubrics, portfolios, and written evaluations which include learning logs, journals, and reflections.

            This chapter is very informative about assessments which will help me in the classroom.  I know that I will be able to use the many assessment options mentioned in this chapter.  I have already used some of them when I was interning and they really do work.

Williams, S. R., Wattam, D. K., & Evans, R. D. (2007). Selecting Appropriate Assessment Methods. In M.L. Bush (Ed.), Assessment for an Evolving Business Education Curriculum (pp. 74-87). Reston, VA: National Business Education Association