Education. What is your philosophy of Assessment - Essay Example

Philosophy of Assessment One of the primary elements of education emerges in the form of assessment. While assessment elements differ among different instructional domains, it’s clear there are a number of assessments methods that pertain to all levels and forms of education. Still, it’s worth noting that teaching professionals must attend to the varieties of students, cultures, and grade levels when considering assessment strategies. As a high school chemistry and physics teacher, I have developed a number of assessment strategies that have formed my own philosophy to the assessment process.

This essay considers my personal philosophy of assessment. One of the primary considerations I recognize in terms of assessment is developing a means of judging student participation and effort throughout the semester and course. One of the primary challenges I had when originally considering assessment was the nature of developing assessment strategies that are student specific, or measure objective standards of comprehension. While ideally classrooms are constituted by students of the same level of achievement, in reality this is not always the case.

Early in my teaching career I recognized that I would have to make the difficult decision of requiring all students to achieve the same level of achievement. From this foundational level I then began to design assessment strategies that required students to achieve an objective standard of accomplishment. In these regards, I have been greatly influenced by constructivist theory of assessment, specifically a text Understanding by Design. This text contends that assessment should be designed from a top-down structure with the end goal in mind.

Working from this theory, each semester I considered the ultimate objective for the course and then worked back from that in developing assessment strategies that would work as standards bearers for the semester. After determining the end of course objective I would then break down the semester into manageable units. Within each of these units there would be a final exam and quizzes. The quizzes were implemented in large part as a means of motivating students to remain consistent with scholastic work throughout the semester.

In these regards, oftentimes I approached quiz grades with a more lenient approach than I did the units final test. The student quiz scores also functioned to aid me in identifying areas of student progress that are more in need of attention. Indeed, student quiz assessment was a learning process for the students as well, giving them an early idea of elements of the text that they must further study. With the final exam then students had to demonstrate their mastery of the material. Rather than functioning as a learning aid, the final exam existed solely for the purpose of measuring the student’s achievement in relation to the objective progress they made within the specific unit.

In conclusion, my personal philosophy of assessment starts with the end of course goal in site and works back from this in developing assessments. Within this structure, I include final tests and intermittent quizzes. The quizzes aid students and myself in determining areas that need further exploration. The final tests function to record an objective assessment of the student’s comprehension of the course material. References Wiggins, Grant. (2005) Understanding by Design. New York: Prentice Hall.