Length of assessments?
How much time should be spent assessing students? I am currently teaching 5 week term and am giving daily quizzes. I would like to give a weekly assessment that is more representative of a major exam. My concern, is that too much time would pass by the time a problem would be identified. What are your thoughts?
My assessments are normally 30 to 40 minutes. As a math instructor, I tell my students not to spend more than 1 minute per problem. I encourage them if they are strongly distracted by a particular problem to come back to it later after finishing the other problems. Over 12 weeks, probably a test or quiz every other week.
I think we do assessments pretty much all day. I always check to see if the are comprehending and retaining.
I taught ESL for a while and its possible to to make the students responsible for every data item put out in ESL class as its largely vocab and then concepts. Vocab is very objective, the concepts you need to have patience with.
Yes, we evaluate as we go along informaly and then formal methods ie quizzes do help and have a place.
Hi Angela. Your post interested me. Do you go over the daily quizzes? I wonder if problems would be caught during that discussion. I give daily grammar checks that take about 15 minutes of class time at the beginning of class. I feel that I find problems that need a more detailed mini-lesson during these checks. If I see a wide spread problem, I teach the mini-lesson and then give a short (10 question) mini-quiz on that concept.
