Today's class was quite informative, Of course we continued on our journey of unlearning and relearning. Activities are yesterday's old news and learning experiences and performance tasks are the new buzz. I can hear students cheering all over the United States where there is no longer a worksheet that has to be given to assess them or unclear guidelines for them to achieve.
In my search to deepen my understanding for developing performance tasks for my unit I found a pdf from learner.org. This document provided three steps to develop an authentic assessment.
Step 1
List the skills and knowledge you wish to have students learn as a result of completing a task.
As tasks are designed, one should begin by identifying the types of knowledge and skills students
are expected to learn and practice. These should be of high value, worth teaching to, and worth learning.
In order to be authentic, they should be similar to those which are faced by adults in their daily lives
and work.
Step 2
Design a performance task which requires the students to demonstrate these skills and knowledge. The
performance tasks should motivate students. They also should be challenging, yet achievable. That is,
they must be designed so that students are able to complete them successfully. In addition, one should
seek to design tasks with sufficient depth and breadth so that valid generalizations about overall student
competence can be made.
Step 3
Develop explicit performance criteria which measure the extent to which students have mastered
the skills and knowledge.
It is recommended that there be a scoring system for each performance task
I do not know how many times I created my lesson before my performance tasks. I was taught just last semester that the summative assessment must be completed before my lesson or unit is created. As was explained in class when your assessment parallels with the lesson/unit we create a VALID assessment. If we create valid assessments we are helping our students connect with the information that is being taught and this also allows our students to reflect on their learning. I feel that creating an assessment that aligns with the lesson follows standard four of the NCPTS, Teachers Facilitate Learning for Their Students.
Resource:
http://www.learner.org/workshops/socialstudies/pdf/session7/7.PerformanceAssessment.pdf
GREAT POST!
ReplyDelete"Activities are yesterday's old news.." Y-E-S!!! I am so glad you are already making the connections of other innovative ideas instead of worksheets. Digital age students are capable and deserve so much more than worksheets! Your understanding of the importance of validity in assessments is great! Being intentional about having valid assessment will be awesome in your future classroom. The connection to the NCTCS is also great! Facilitating learning (well...a part of facilitating learning...) means you, as the teacher build in intentional formative and summative assessments to truly gauge the abilities of your students.
Again, great job here!
-JP
Taylor,
ReplyDeleteI loved your statement about activities being old news. Since many of the students we are going to teach today have known about I-pads their entire life it is crucial that we provide them more than worksheets. I really liked the resource you found on making authentic assessments. Thanks for sharing with the class! Great post!