Free Response 2

Georganna Greene

Jonah Ruddy

Educational Psychology 401

June 5, 2014

Free Response 2

       "How students are assessed is just as important as whether they are," -something I jotted down during class yesterday that stood out to me as meaningful. I find this important because assessments are often so routine in a class structure that they can become carelessly composed, developed, and administrated. As teachers it is so important to emphasize the importance of assessments, not in the sense that they are all high-stakes tests. But students and teachers are both putting the effort forth in the class, and in my opinion, everyone deserves to know how successfully the class is progressing. If a test is poorly considered or put together, it will poorly reflect students' abilities and efforts.

        A great example was the case study we looked at Tuesday about the teacher who gave his students the option to complete a creative project instead of taking a test. Even though he intended on changing things up, in the students' interest, he was not prepared to effectively assess his students outside of a traditional test mode. He should have had a different rubric for each project, which would have both clarified expectations for the students and perhaps set the different project style options (artifact, building a test, play etc) on a more even playing field as far as difficulty in the details. It was important for him to give the assessment, but it was just as important for him to consider these elements of successful evaluation in the process.

     I had a college art history professor this past semester who taught a class on High Renaissance, Mannerist, and early Baroque art in Florence. She was a brilliant historian, scholar, and thinker, who had more information to share about art and art history than most encyclopedias would. Even though we knew she was brilliant and knowledgable, she was not an effective communicator. She would talk at us for two hours straight with some visuals on a power point, with no break or shift in the structure such as discussion or group-work etc. It was a truly difficult two hours each day, when it could have been a very engaging thought-provoking class for us. Consequently, her inability to engage us in the class made her two exams (1 midterm and 1 final ) extremely difficult to study for (out of an enormous pool of information, on which most of us weren't able to physically write our notes fast enough to keep up with her talking speed). She provided little in-class resources, but expected us to dig through libraries to learn whatever we missed in class due to this, and would hardly stop to see if the class was with her. This is a great example of someone who's lack of teaching skills made the class suffer during assessments, and supports the notion that "How students are assessed is just as important as whether they are."