Running head: CHAPTER 11 1

Chapter 11: Philosophy of Assessing Learning

Professor Miller

Andrea Cobbley

11/17/19

Salt Lake Community College

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Chapter 11: Philosophy of Assessing Learning

Assessing student’s learning is very important when teaching children. It is a way

to make sure that your teaching is affective and see if you need to adjust anything or

cover something again. “Assessment is the process we use to gather information and

make decisions about students’ learning progress, and, unfortunately, we tend to think of

it as a process that comes after a lesson has been taught” (Kauchak & Eggen, p. 361).

Assessment seems like it can be thought of negatively, but I think there could definitely

be some more fun ways to assess students rather than tests.

It will definitely be important to keep everything connected and make sure the

assessment matches the lesson so I can make sure the students are learning what I am

teaching them. “Instructional alignment refers to the match between standards, our

learning objectives, learning activities, and assessments, and it is essential for effective

classroom learning” (Kauchak & Eggen, p. 362). If everything you teach does not

connect it will not be as effective as it should be. Your lesson needs to align with the

assessment you do after and all of it needs to align with the standards because that is what

is required for us to teach.

I think I will have several different ways that I assess students’ learning. An easy

one would be to ask questions during your lesson and prompt the students if they cannot

come up with the correct answer. With questioning, you can kind of assess as you go, but

this does not necessarily assess all of the students. I could always just use paper and

pencil tests and quizzes to assess the students. It could also be fun to separate the students

into groups and ask questions. They could all work together and we would keep score.

This would make an assessment a lot more fun for the students.
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“Informal assessment is the process of gathering information and making

decisions during the course of learning activities” (Kauchak & Eggen, p. 376). When I

am doing informal assessments, I think it would be good to do questions and prompting

like I mentioned earlier. This does not ensure that all of the students understand, but it

would be a great way to informally assess them. “Formal assessment is the process of

systematically gathering the same kind of information from all students – most

commonly a paper-and-pencil quiz or test” (Kauchak & Eggen, p. 376). This is a great

way to make sure that your whole class is on the same page and they are all getting it, but

you need to be careful not to do it too often. I think it will be crucial for me to have a

balance of informal and formal assessments. I would maybe save the formal for more

important topics and use informal for topics that are not as serious.

Assessing students learning is important because it tells us, as teachers, if we are

doing a good job or not. If we give students a formal assessment and see that several

different students missed the same question that might tell us that we did not do a good

enough job teaching that subject. If we find that we need to reteach something it is

important to find this out early one so we can reteach it before we take the bigger tests at

the end of the year. In my classroom, I would try to want to take the negativity away from

assessments and hopefully I will be able to do this successfully. I would want the kids to

have fun, but they will also need to realize that they need to take this seriously.

Assessment is a very important part of teaching and it is one of the biggest ways we can

make sure we are doing a good job and being effective teachers.
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References

Kauchak, D., & Eggen, P. (2008). Introduction to Teaching. Upper Saddle River, New

Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.