Assessment in theAssessment in thehigh school setting:high school setting:

Ontario, CanadaOntario, Canada

Thoughts and Thoughts and summary summary bby: y: Bahar MemarianBahar MemarianApril 2016April 2016

Definition of Assessment

• Dictionary definition: The act of making a judgment about something, the act of assessing something

• Designed to measure specific elements of learning

• Identifies individual student weaknesses and strengths

Common forms of Assessment

• High-stakes assessments are typically standardized tests used for the purposes of accountability

• Pre-assessments are administered before students begin a lesson, unit, course, or academic program

In Ontario high schools

• The Growing Success document and the Ontario Ministry of Education provide guidelines for teaching

• Example: forms of assessment (explained in the next slides)

• Some guidelines may not be regularly followed in teaching due to their ambiguous nature (example: Assessment As, For learning)

• Summative in nature

• Assessing if students have achieved the curriculum outcomes

• To show how students are placed in relation to others in the form of grades

Growing Success Guidelines (Assessment Of Learning)

Growing Success Guidelines (Assessment For Learning)

• Provides insight on how to modify and differentiate teaching and learning activities

• Determining predictable patterns and pathways many students follow

• Understanding how, when, and whether students apply what they know

• Teachers could make use to streamline and target instruction and resources

• A process of developing and supporting metacognition for students

• Focuses on the role of the student as the critical connector between assessment and learning

• When students monitor their own learning and use the feedback from this monitoring to make adjustments, adaptations and even major changes in what they understand

• Guiding students to develop, practise, and become comfortable with critically analyzing their own work and with reflection

Growing Success Guidelines (Assessment As Learning)

Why students dislike conventional evaluation methods (i.e. exams only)?

• Time constraint• Peer pressure (hearing questions from peers like

how did you do on the test? What was the answer to that question? What did you get? Oh I found that an easy question, I finished an hour sooner,…)

• Only making use of the a few of the senses (slow hand writers, audio visual learners will be put at a disadvantage)

• Not interactive/feedback based (One way learning evaluation system, you either fail or win)

The pass or fail viewpoint

• For the not so smart kids, feeling lucky means forever getting stuck in the 50s

• Prior to start of the course– Placement assessments – Screening assessments

• Once the course starts– Creating evaluation rubrics based on the skill set

of the class population– Getting students involved in the evaluation

process

How could we make better assessments?

Concluding Points• To make good assessments:

– Effective evaluation of students knowledge level before placement in a course

– Creating or making use of fair and reliable achievement charts for knowledge and understanding, thinking and inquiry, communication, and application categories in every class deliverable

– More Assessment For and As learning included in student evaluations

References• Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation, and

Reporting in Ontario's Schools, Kindergarten to Grade 12

Thank You