Assessment Strategies for Students

Assessment Strategies for Students

Introduction

Learning and development are an ever evolving process. There is a need to update the learning processes to meet the challenges of today's society. We cannot confine the purpose of education to only enhancing the understanding of the world. Developing human experiences and the opportunity to utilize one's capabilities are the two main purposes that education serves well. On a broader perspective, learning process consists of curriculum development, teaching and assessment. If we examine the last decade, we'll learn that the classroom environment has been drastically transformed. The credit goes to the extensive researches in the field of pedagogy. It is due to recent researches, educationists are able to provide theory and practices of effective teaching methodologies. The researches in the field of education mostly focus on modifying instructional methods by utilizing the results of assessments. Assessments reflect the areas of concerns. That is why; it becomes necessary to analyze the outcomes of assessments before drawing instructions.

An assessment is an important way to measure a student's response to teaching. Assessing a student is important because of two primary reasons. Firstly, it gives a chance to a student to reproduce his or her knowledge. Secondly, it provides information to both teachers and students, about their progress. An instructor learns how good he is at teaching. A teacher also learns whether his teaching method is bringing fruitful results or not. Therefore, standards based schools emphasize much on implementing standard practices in every aspect of teaching and learning. Realizing the importance of assessments, educationists have developed varied assessment strategies. Quizzes, presentations, essays, formative assessments, hourly tests etc are some of the widely used assessment strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss three different assessment strategies and evaluate their performances in a classroom. Every assessment method has its benefits and limitations. We cannot declare an assessment method to be completely effective or ineffective. Some assessment methods work better in a certain environment.

Discussion

Portfolio Assessment

A student's portfolio is a systematic collection or representation of a student's work in a meaningful form. Portfolio assessment illustrates a student's accomplishments and activities in a specific course or all courses of a particular grade. The collection is developed against known objectives and evaluated according to a defined criterion. It includes evidences which reflect a student's talents against a quality standard. There are mixed opinions about which strategy works best in a classroom. Supporters of authentic assessment explain that tools like portfolio illustrate a broader array of skills, knowledge, problem shooting and critical thinking capabilities. They feel that a portfolio assessment does it better than other tests like Multiple Choice Questions (Silveira, 2013). An effective portfolio contains a number of elements. The content of a portfolio must fulfill its purpose. The artifacts may include assignments, projects, articles, tasks or other related material. Both instructor and student participate in maintaining the portfolio. Portfolio assessment is an indirect method of assessment (Meeusa et al, 2009). The traits of portfolio assessment are as follows;

The assessment strategy is effective ...