As a teacher I must say that I am not totally satisfied with the way I assess my students because I

think there are a lot of scopes for improvement. I am a teacher of this English Medium School

which follows Cambridge Curriculum and I mainly teach primary sections.

While teaching, I always struggled with the question that, when the students are learning new

subject, which topic should come after which topic so that the learning becomes easier for them

and the assessments too. Assessment is the outcome of what they have learned so for me setting

the goal in the very beginning is important so the students can get to easily grasp the topics and

hence do good in their assessment.

For each subject matter, setting the goal would be different , for example if I am teaching grade 5

Science subject then my goal will be to divide the chapters according to similarity and go about

it step by step and assess the students.

In my class, what I do is, give them a sense of reality, make them realize and feel the importance

of the topic which becomes more interesting for them and then I go about assessing them with

some worksheets, fun activities, maybe some crafting drawing.

I have seen teachers forget about the core learning and how logical their worksheets are or

whether it has some inner values or flows but rather they make worksheets after worksheets and

forget about the quality and focus on the quantity.

These practices were sometimes done by me and I would like to come out of that loop and rather

I would like to set the subject matters serially as to which topic should come after which so that

it makes more sense, and focus on what are the most important things a student should learn

which will be handy in his real life experiments or experiences and try to assess him on those
important ones rather than just make lame assessments from the unimportant lines of the chapters

like fill in the blanks with no important word.

Also it can be seen that assessments have sometimes negative effects when it is high stake

assessments. Students tend to just learn or memorize under some pressure and results have very

bad consequences when some syudents fail. So from my point of view, I would only focus on

creating an emotional connection in between the student’s real life with the curriculum and teach

him in an interesting manner so that I don’t even have to consider the point of high stake

assessment because the motive should be clear to all students, and it is learning is for life, for

their own quest and not some boring drill.

Now considering types of assessments, I think formative assessment is fine and needs to become

standardized grading system. Like one practice I observed in my previous school was they used

to make 60 objective question where the total mark was 30 and all the students starting from

grade 1 to grade had to finish it within 30 minutes. I don’t thin that’s a good policy as students of

grade 1 cannot complete a question with the same speed of a grade 10 student.

As this practice is already seen in my school , I tried to relay my complaint and make them

understand the issue but they were no open to changes and that’s where I face problems and

challenges.

So these types of practices needs to be changed. Another practice can be seen is tech based

assignments and exams which I do not prefer much because that leads the children to cheating

and not answering is simply acceptable but practicing malpractice at such a young age can have

immense destructive effects on a child. He may get used to cheating in every stance of life.
Therefor, if I really want to make tech based assessments , I will be very cautious and make such

system where they don’t get to cheat.

Reference:

1. Scot, T., Callahan, C. M., & Urquhart, J. (2009). Paint-by-Number teachers and cookie-

cutter students: The unintended effects of high-stakes testing on the education of gifted

students.

2. Beard, R. M. and Hartley, J., Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, London,

Harper & Row, 1984

3. Gibbs, G., Simpson, C. & Macdonald, R, Improving student learning through changing

assessment - a conceptual and practical framework.

European Association for Research into Learning and Instruction Conference, Padova,

Italy, 200