Creating Effective Assessments
Using formal assessment to measure student knowledge can come at several different points during your course plan. Assessments preformed before a course, while you are teaching the course and after you are finished teaching the course are all valid and helpful to a teacher, yet each serve different purposes. Understanding each assessment type is important to helping teachers fine tune their teaching skills.
It can be beneficial for a teacher to give a student an assessment before teaching a new course. This will help the teacher know what information the students already know about the subject to be studied, and help the teacher focus her lessons. This type of assessment is generally done through class discussion.
After I have taken this course, I can see that not only is it important for the students to learn the content, the instructors must also do their assessments of the student's learning all the way along and learning from them in order to be good at what they do. When I started my first full week of substitute teaching anatomy this week, I did ask the first night if any of the students had taken any biology or anatomy/science courses before. I partly wanted to know if there were any students who might want to be "helpers" in teaching the material and could help the other students. Anatomy can be a little daunting for students new to it. Mindy
When I started my first full week of substitute teaching in anatomy I asked how much exposure the students had previously in biology or anatomy to try to guage their knowledge level. I didn't do a formal written assessment, just a sense of their familiarity with anatomy from verbal responses. It helped me determine how much extra explanation to prepare with the powerpoint presentation. Mindy
Hi Kimberly- Thanks for your post to the forum. You have a firm grasp of assessment techniques! Best wishes for continued success in your teaching career. Susan
