My Assessment Philosophy
Indeed, assessment is essential part of an effective teaching and learning process. This is a way of measuring student learning, understanding, and application of content. It also can give a teacher howto improve the teaching strategies that will be best used in learning process.
During my field experience this semester, I noticed there is more than one way to measure a student’s abilities.My mentor teacher Miss VG, she asked the questions frequently to gauge students understanding during the class and as the students were able to answer those questions correctly, or at least they tried. She broke up the class up into groups. Shewalkedaround from the classroom and paused at the different groups for a few minutes to assess students learning and progress. She used daily Khan Academy website in her classroom which was aligned with state standard. This website has a feature where she generated practice problems for students to work on. All students’accounts were tied to Miss VG personal google account where she can monitor their progress. I managed to grasp some useful assessment strategies that I can use in the future. During my field work, I also got opportunity to teach mathematics to 7th grade students. During my instruction, I was continually assessing the students to figure out whether the students were learning the main idea. Moreover, I handed out worksheets which had 11 to 12 problems at the end of class to see that they had absorbed the material.
As a future math teacher, I believe that assessment is one of the most integral parts of mathematics. I also believe that assessment should be more frequent and ongoing. It will help me to identify what I taught well and what I need to work on. In following with those beliefs, I will fully align the Utah State mathematics learning standards in to my curriculum and instruction.During the class, I will utilize multiple techniques to assess my students’ level of understanding of math. I will design assessment tools both formative and summative which will allow me and my students to assess whether they have reached the course objectives and learning outcomes. I truly believe that I have to challenge my students in order to promote deep learning.
I will use these types of assessment to make sure that students are learning. The first is pre-assessments, to see where my students are at before starting a new unit of instructions; the second is frequent formative assessment, to see how well my students are learning the materiel while I am teaching it. During class, I will adopt formal and informal short questioning strategies to see if my students truly understand the material. It will also help me to keep students engaged in every math concept covered in class.I will daily use daily worksheets and pop quizzes as formative assessment. These can be classwork or given out homework. Additionally, I will carefully design daily class activities which will help them reach their goalsThird is summative assessment, which I will use at the end of a learning period to measure whether the students have fully learned the information, presented during instruction. This will include tests, exams, and final projects. My assessment policy will be not a one-shot, do or die experience for students. I will be fair to my students and will give them extra chances to demonstrate their success.