Learning and Assessment - Essay Example

Although, the alternative assessment strategies using various technologies was better way to assess a student than the traditional one, yet using both types of assessments in triangulation was the most appropriate approach. Before discussing that which method was better, one must keep in mind what is assessment and what are its essentials In literal terms, the word assessment means to determine the real worth of something. In the educational setting, it refers to the evaluation done by the teacher to find the extent to which the student had been able to learn something.

A good assessment should be complex enough to involve the students in real thinking process, open enough to appreciate diverse opinions but at the same time, it should also be constraint enough to enable a fair scoring system. Initially, the only method for the assessment, used by the teachers, was the traditional one. This means that a written test used to be taken, having questions and answers, preferably in the form of Multiple Choice Questions. This tradition was followed for centuries. Even today, this traditional methodology of assessment is being used in most of developing countries till matriculation level, atleast.

On one hand, this approach was easy to conduct and scoring could be done more objectively but this traditional approach led to several problems too. The first problem was the misrepresentation of learning. The goal of assessment is to check for the level to which the student had learnt. But a written test was just a sampling of those learning outcome, only on the basis of that 'sample', it would not be appropriate to grade the student. Another problem with written test is that, ideally the evaluation should be a continuous process.

However, the written test used to be the evaluation only at certain point of time. There is a possibility that the student would not have been feeling well at that time and thus could not attempt the paper well, in such cases; such assessment strategy fails to portray the true picture.THE ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES - Advantages and Drawbacks:On the contrary to the real purpose of assessment, a written test could provide the true picture only if the writing skills of the students permitted so, thus it became primarily the test of writing skill before being the test of original stuff.

Suppose there was the written test of science, it should test whether the student has grasped the particular concept or not (Shepardson 2001), but two students delivering the same content, but one had better abilities to express himself, he was likely to get more marks than the other.However, the alternative assessment strategies used various technologies to remove the loopholes of the traditional system. The alternative assessment strategies were based on the ideas that the assessment should be able to involve the student to involve in thinking process that is supposed to be invoked in him, because of the learning that he had gained.

Furthermore, it was not dependent totally on the writing skills of the students. Above all, it was capable of accepting the diverse ideas and responses. However, one major challenge