[Music] thank you hello and welcome to your first exciting Adventure into the world of educational assessment Dr schwar here ready to take you through an introduction to educational assessment uh let's take a look at what we're going to cover today today we're going to look at why assessment matters the assessment cycle and we'll see an overview of different types of assessments uh Jump Right In why does assessment matter um well the idea is um with assessment we want to know what your students know and what they're able to do so if you create assessments if you create projects that do not match what it is that you want students to be able to know or to be able to do then you have an incomplete picture you have an erroneous picture of what students know and are able to do so assessment high quality purposeful assessment matters a whole lot there's an interesting story in the the book about a child that the author of the book did poorly in assessing or someone the author knew a teacher did poorly by just using you know the textbook given questions and and so here you have a mismatch between what was being taught in the classroom and how the teacher was assessing students so so what is it that we really knew about the students abilities um not much but the student was being graded I'm sure you have examples of this in your own life so think about it um when was the time that you had an assessment you were given a grade you did work and it didn't at all match what was going on in the classroom or what the teacher said you were supposed to be learning about either the assessments were too difficult or too easy whatever it might be I'm sure this has happened to you it's happened to me that's for sure so high quality purposeful assessment matters a lot so how do we assess well we kind of think of it expert teachers don't even think about it they just do it but for right now we are not expert teachers so we're going to think about the assessment cycle and so basically how we're going to learn to do this is we're going to start in the top right hand side where it says learning targets are clarified so we're going to start and you're going to hear the term backward design a lot in this class we're going to start with our standards we're going to start with mapping our standards um throughout the semester throughout the quarter throughout the year even and we're going to find out okay what do we need to teach in the first quarter then let's boil it down what do we need to teach in the first week the first unit the first lesson okay so you start with your standards and you find out what it is you need to be able to teach here for your units and your lessons and so forth and we develop learning targets based upon our standards We Gather our evidence in multiple ways you're going to hear me say this multiple times as well so you don't just want a One-Shot deal at what students know you're going to create multiple assessments throughout the unit these are your lessons and they're going to give you a picture a different uh different views of students and what they know and what they don't know so we're going to gather lots of different evidence you still may have just a One-Shot summative assignment but I'm I'm certain it'll also be accompanied by some sort of collaborative project or so or something of that nature and you'll have more experience with that as we go through the course after we gather a whole lot of evidence we need to be able to analyze that evidence make some inferences uh and and and make some interpretations for individual students and what we need to do uh to help uh increase their learning as we move towards the final piece of this instructional plans and modifications are carried out we need to definitely understand that these assessments and the interpretation of assessment and and all that data data drives our instruction so you're going to hear me say it on the next couple slides as well but assessment data Assessments in general Drive instruction it's not the other way around okay and I'll talk about that in just a second so um in total though what you want to gather from this graph is is student involvement at each and every piece of this so students are involved in clarifying the learning targets students are involved in gathering multiple forms of evidence students are involved in perhaps you give them a lot of choice in what they do as far as the assessment products that you want them to create students are involved in interpreting the data so they look at their scores they provide their own sort of self-regulated feedback right and then students are involved in in in in thinking about what sort of instruction what sort of lesson plans need to be carried out we'll talk more about this as we go so this is the first time you're going to see it but we'll be talking about it throughout the rest of the course different types of Assessments I'm going to go through several different types here this is an overview I really want you to commit the vocabulary for this chapter one the different types of Assessments please Commit This to to memory I'm going to be using this vocabulary so this is really really important whether you create flash cards or or play games with the vocab whatever it is you need to know this vocabulary okay so this is part of uh what we might term assessment literacy where we use a specific pieces of vocabulary and we're able to define those pieces so what is assessment in general so we've been saying this word assessment you probably already know the word assessment and have that has different connotations for you but understand that assessment is a process in which teachers and students gather information to make educational decisions assessment involves the organizing and interpreting of data from different sources of evidence to make those educational decisions assessment drives instruction it is not Pinterest this is not a teacher's blog from Pennsylvania it is not um you know Sally down the street who has a great activity that is not what drives instruction okay it helps definitely helps you can pull these pieces in but what you need to understand is that when we assess at the beginning of the year that that diagnostic type of assessment that is going to play a major role in where you as the teacher drive that course okay so um your pre-test your formative assessments and then your summative assessments all of these assessments help inform the instruction that you're going to give let's talk about different types of Assessments as we go here um so what's the difference between assessment and evaluation that's those are the first two terms um the idea is that evaluation comes from the French word evaluate it is to put a value on something so think of evaluation as judging yes you as the teacher are a judge of the quality or worth of the results of the data you are the expert in the field of whatever it is you're going to be teaching and therefore you are able to judge the quality of items that students produce just learn it and and do it some people aren't comfortable with these sorts of things but but you need to be uh formative and summative assessments so I just briefly mentioned formative a moment ago summative we should know these are the formal measures uh informal measures at the end of a unit of learning um and so we know those as like module tests unit tests whatever those might be formative assessments are way more important you never get to a summative assessment without knowing that your students know what they need to know okay these are informal and formal evaluations your units might have uh five to six learning targets or standards associated with them your formative assessments these are the smaller units these are smaller lessons that only have one to two learning targets associated with them you monitor your progress you give a lot of feedback we'll talk about that and really either these are not graded formative assessments are not graded or they are weighted so that they have a very low grade okay so that they have a low value you'll notice this course and every course that I teach I weight my assignments okay I weight categories of assignments and that is purposeful because I want you to see that those formative measures um they they are worth a little bit less as far as the grade goes but they're still worth something right so they they do make a difference constructed in selected response easy stuff selected response true false multiple choice fill in matching so when we create tests we typically see selected response and and please remember that when you see have a selected response type of test all you're doing is recognizing the correct answer I try to tell students this all the time don't choose answers you you've never seen that word before why would you ever do that so recognize the correct answer uh constructed response are short answer extended response essay type questions and we'll get into the higher level thinking skills very very shortly here in this course so you'll learn what do K and blooms are performance versus authentic assessment this is an interesting one really they can be combined you can have authentic performance assessments okay but they're separated here so just understand a performance assessment is any assessment in which students apply knowledge or skills to problems um and then a fun authentic assessments are just real world um assessments Assessments in which you have students acting as if they're acting in the real world so they has real world authentic applicability uh other types of Assessments we have here Norm referenced then Criterion referenced if I can make this as simple as possible just remember that Norm referenced tests um you're comparing students to students so you want to know where students are in comparison to other students so think of an intelligence test we want to know whether some students are more bright or less bright uh so on and so forth just so we can we we have a better picture of where our students are as far as their intellectual aptitude right a Criterion reference test always references back to learning targets standards and so forth so this would be like an ACT test right so an act always goes back to learning targets or standards or an AP test for example and speaking of these types of tests you have achievement tests versus aptitude tests as I just mentioned an intelligence test for example would be an aptitude test the Whisk for young kids Woodcock Johnson later on for academic achievement in Middle School you might see an oasis test or in high school and asfab test these are to help students choose where they're going to go in life right start to look at their aptitudes and what they can actually accomplish as far as professional life and careers the SAT the Scholastic aptitude test measures how well you might do in college for example achievement tests the AP test and the ECT that I have already mentioned the ytop and nape tests that you might be more familiar with here in Wyoming finally these larger tests are need to have good reliability and validity validity is the ability of that test to measure what it's supposed to measure so if you have a test and it's supposed to be on uh parts of the anatomy of the human body and you have uh different functions of the human body well that test is not measuring what it's supposed to measure because it's only supposed to measure the parts of the human body so that would be an idea about validity reliability make sure that this test is consistent across evaluators in time I often teach multiple sections of a course and when I look at the grades and the the how the how the test acts from one section to the next section to the next section then I'm really looking at the reliability of my test finally quality assessment matters because we need to have valid and reliable measures of what students know and are able to do so go back to that idea about what is validity what is reliability we have to know what our students know and com and connect that with our standards and and learning targets assessment is a process that begins with our standards and moves to our learning targets and it goes through a process right where we interpret that data and then that data and assessment drives our instruction finally there are many different types of assessment get to know them commit these ideas to memory and you'll do well in this course keep going keep reading dive a little deeper into topics you want to know about and we'll see you next time