Alternative Assessment Analysis - Essay Example

Alternative assessment Analysis It is important for to monitor achievements and assess the result to guide instruction. This can only be achieved through use of various forms of assessments. This paper mainly focuses on alternative assessments that can be used to measure and promote learning among students. According to Berry (2008), alternative assessment can be taken to be any form of assessment method that differs from the convectional paper-and-pencil tests. This type of test can be further classified as either formal or informal depending on the way in which they are undertaken.

Various forms of formal alternative assessments are the portfolios, projects, and journals. These kind of assessments have specific guidelines and formally specified performance indicators that are used to measure students learning. The major situation in which these kinds of assessments are appropriate is actually, when the learning attribute measured is specific and can be practically revealed. A good example is the assessment of a student’s ability to plan, manage, and implement a program related to their field of study.

In such a case a project or a portfolio can be very appropriate to assess the student’s skills.The most conspicuous form of an informal alternative assessment is observation. This kind of assessment is informal since it has no specific indicators that can show the level of performance of a student. It is also one kind of an assessment undertaken informally and sometimes the student might fail to realize that he is being assessed. This kind of assessment is very appropriate when it comes to assessing competency of some aspects of learning that the student might try to hide.

A good example is the assessment of pronunciation and communication ability of a student.There was a time our teacher used observation form of assessment in assessing our ability to communicate back in elementary school. Most of us were not aware that it was an assessment until the teacher told us so after we had completed the task that was assigned to us. The assignment was simple since each of the students was to use five minutes to explain to the teacher his most exciting moments of the class.

Later, after the teacher informed us that it was an assessment he showed us the rubric that he was using to mark the assessment. He later told each of us his score in the assessment, where he had gone wrong, and what he needs to improve. He also told us various types of instructions that he has decided to introduce in order to counter the communication problem that he realized had affected majority of us.ELD students are students who are developing English language (Borges, 2007). All this students have English as either their second language or as their third language.

United States because of receiving immigrants from various parts of the world it has several of such students. An alternative assessment that would be appropriate for assessing this kind of students would be reading-observation assessment. In this assessment, the teacher or the instructor should give the students some simple English words to read and observe them as they read. This kind of assessment can be used for both entry-level students and the continuing students. The possible outcomes of these kind of an assessment is that the instructor would be able to know the language background of the student as well as the communication and reading proficiency that the student has been able to achieve.

According to Lasik (2004), an alternative assessment can take different general formats depending on whether it is formal or informal. Such formats as well as the content of the assessments can support language proficiency goals through enhancing the ability of the instructor to measure various language deficiencies among the students. The deficiencies identified by the results obtained by such tests can be effectively addressed by introduction of new instruction techniques as well as the modification of the existing ones.

In this kind of assessment, we might encounter special education and gifted children. For special education and gifted students, I would give them special attention in terms of both assessment and implementation of assessment results.ReferencesBerry, R. (2008). Assessment for Learning. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.Borge, M. (2007). Regulating Social Interactions: Developing a Functional Theory of Collaboration. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest LLC.Wasik, B. H. (2004). Handbook of Family Literacy.

Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.