With all of the anti-testing going on in the educational world, I am often very hard on my self regarding how I assess my students. My typical unit includes some lecture (broken into small chunks), small quizzes, a lab or two, and a test at the end of the unit. I have struggled to move away from the culminating test. I think that this is partially due to my own schooling, which was incredibly structured and traditional. I also think it is due to a false idea of performance tasks that I had and the amount of extra work that goes into planning a true performance assessment task.
I am going to describe a unit that I recently completed with my eighth grade Physical Science class, to demonstrate the types of assessments that I use in a typical unit. The unit started with a small intro to electricity, relating it to their previous unit on magnetism. During the first class, the boys were given laboratory supplies and tasked with making a light bulb light. Students were able to complete this task, and concluded that they had to make a circular, connected path for the electricity to flow. The following class period, the students took notes (using the SmartBoard and lecture) about the features of circuits. Another day, the students were given a battery, piece of wire, lightbulb, and miscellaneous items such as crayons, toothpicks, paperclips, etc. The students had to determine which objects completed the circuit, and which objects stopped the flow of electricity. For homework, students had to describe conductors and insulators. Small quizzes were administered about these topics. The unit took a turn when students began calculating different factors of a circuit such as voltage, resistance, and current. At this point, students did a lot of independent work solving equations. At the end of the unit, students took a written test.
Although I pride myself in the small laboratory/hands on lessons that I do in my class, it is a challenge to make these activities open ended and explorational. In addition, I find that my tests are often heavy with recalling information, and light on "constructed response" (Darling-Hammond, 2010). However, I do believe that my free response questions (although few) are often thought provoking and demand students to recall and apply information. Below are three example questions from the test that my students took on electricity.
--A travel toaster uses three 2Volt batteries and has a power rating of 1.8Watts. What is the current of the circuit?
-- Draw a series circuit with two resistors and one switch. If the switch is closed, will all of the resistors function?
--Compare and contrast series and parallel circuits.
The examples that I provided are very similar to those given by Darling-Hammond from the New York State Regents Exam. On that assessment, students were asked to draw and label a circuit and analyze the circuit under certain circumstances. I believe that my constructed response questions would be in the "analyzing" or "applications" area of Bloom's Taxonomy. The questions require students to recall information, and either relate it to other information or translate it into a different situation. I struggle to find ways to develop higher order thinking assessments with my young students.
The small explorations described in my electricity unit are examples of performance tasks that I use with students. In addition, I have had students design and implement their own labs to help during this unit. I have always had the false idea that a performance task needs to be an incredibly large project that occurs at the end of the unit. This is in fact, untrue. All of the small hands on work that I do with my students is a form of assessment. Perhaps with time I can find more merit in these tasks and minimize the weight of written tests. Until then, I need to work on rewriting my tests so that they require students to synthesize their own ideas, using what they learned throughout a unit.
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