Assessment
As a teacher, one finds oneself facing a heterogeneous set ofstudents, all at different stages of educational development and learning,and one particular question comes to mind: HOW DO WE ASSESS' Of course,the simplest answer to this is the usual assessment method that has beenused for so many years: you give tests, you give assignments, you gradethem and tell the student that he is doing a good job or that he needs toimprove his work. This is a passive approach towards assessment: you donot really care about the actual effect of assessment, but you see it as anecessary process you must follow, as a method of separating smarterstudents from those with poorer learning capabilities. However, there seems to be more to assessing than this and Chappuis'sand Stiggins's article comes to prove it. What if we see the assessingprocess as an active process, where the parties involved, both teachers andstudents, can actually learn from this and where the process can become anuseful tool rather than a must-do task' What if we no longer seeassessment as "an index of school success" (thus, the consequence), but as"the cause of that success". Starting from this premise, they examine the
In this sense, I am not sure that thenew concept introduced in this article will help motivate a student betterthan the old fashioned type of assessment. The second premise we need to investigate is whether this is actuallya viable method of assessing and evaluate whether we are not putting toomuch accent on assessment itself, ignoring the actual learning process. If we exclude acertain category of students that are not interested in raising theirgrades (a category I have mentioned above and that we will exclude from ourdiscussion), the remaining students may be regarded as a set of studentsthat will take competition as a positive thing. The idea behind thismethodology is to use different assessment instruments for the differentmembers of the class. Perhaps one of the most important differences from the typicalassessment process we are accustomed with resides in the fact that thereproposed assessment becomes more closely involved with the teaching andlearning process, rather than a process that comes after it. However, in general, this differentiating element is seldomused. The method proposed in the article tends to minimize thecompetitive aspect of assessment, which is not negligible. Thispremise can only have idealistic responses and consequences, thus lesslikely to succeed. However, another method of alternativeevaluation that aims at maximizing student learning is differentiatedassessment. They both are alternative assessment methods, where theinvolvement of the student in the assessment process is particularly high. In their opinion, the greatest advantage that would derive from this wouldbe the higher motivation that a student gets and the fact that, beinginvolved in the process, he is more likely to actually benefit from it.
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Acceptance Essays
