ASSESSMENT - LEARNING LOGS
Learning Log I
Log 1 by
Carlos Veliz.
My
ideas about being assessed is that it depends a lot of the time on luck because
in many cases as a student I remember having studied science all year long and
after thinking spending two weeks revising every day for the final end of the
year exam and getting the score I found out that I had gotten a "D" which
was just passing I really felt that I deserved more and that I had done well
but I did remember that the final exam was 50% based on two topics which I
considered not fair and on which I seemed to misunderstand what was being
asked, this exam should have been more explicative and also more balanced
and not based on luck or bad luck when it came to certain highly graded
questions.
As a
teacher I have to take quizzes made by the institution where I work and I have
found that not all the best students get the best grades this can happen as
sometimes questions based on reading that do not have anything to do with what
we studied in class could be worth up to twelve points over a total of forty,
with 2 points for each question correctly answered of six questions, and if you
combine that with a writing exercise taken directly from the book students that
remember the corrections the teacher did on it would be favored, I think this
writing activities should be more spontaneous and not memorized that would make
them fairer.
I
think that formative assessment is important but it can also be wasted, there
are good and bad ways to do formative assessment. For example: If a teacher see
a student make in the moment and knows that it`s more likely that the other
students will also have the same mistake then the teacher should stop and
stress the correction on the board for everyone to learn. I remember a lazy
teacher I had in school who would only correct the student who he was attending
in that moment and I felt dis-encouraged because I could barely hear as it
wasn`t for the rest of the class but I knew I had the same mistakes and if the
teacher were to explain that to each one of us he`d take all day, that should
have been highlighted on the board.
I
think that if a student is talking aloud in class and the teacher wants to
correct and if the teacher just repeats the corrections a loud while student is
talking then the student will be interrupted and break his flow, I remember
this happening to me and I just stopped talking, I didn`t want to seem an
idiot, so in that case the teacher should take notes of what they`re say and
wait until everyone has finished and randomly correct on the board but letting
peers have the chance to spot the corrections which is less threatening that
the teacher doing it and they`ll probably remember it better too.
I
reckon that what is really learned in class is what the student is able to
create after the class, not what they remember. I remember understanding
everything in certain classes during the class but by the time the next class
came I had forgotten it because I never got the chance to be creative with it,
for examples when I studied History for example instead of just reciting a lot
of dates and names referring to politics it would have been more interesting to
explain why we think we would vote for the Democrats or Republicans or how
beliefs and daily life was so much different in Ancient Rome than it is today.
Or if we study the future tense in Language Arts it should be something like to
compare my future grandchildren`s life to mine by combining Simple Present with
Simple Future.
Reaching
personal objectives should be the same as reaching the teacher objectives by
being able to apply what I learned in class for whenever I need it in real life
and even though the focus might be on an exam in the near future the main
objective is to ace the graduation exam, college entrance exam, job interview
in English, travel purposes or whatever comes after that exam that`s why
creativity is so important because students are personalizing, making learning
real, their own, long lasting and meaningful. All objectives should be measurable
and not have objectives that are just fun, fun can be good but the main
objective should be focused on what we wish our students would be able to do
with this information. I remember doing a song with possessive pronouns
in class which was fun but I found that in the moment in which they had to
create their own examples in real life they were so focused on the patron that
they had learned in class and they couldn`t get away from that, in other words
they could only remember what they heard in the song.
Learning Log II
Log 2 by
Carlos Veliz.
I did two
observations one was of Carlos Coral in level six that was studying " Plans
for the future " which didn`t have any grammar in that hour of class. The
other class I observed was of Nigel Brown in level eleven. These classes were
very different from each other apart from being in two different levels the
teacher`s approach was very different. I saw two different kinds of washback
due to the two different approaches by the teachers and also different levels.
In in case of Carlos Coral`s class(level six) the students seemed very relaxed
as the teacher`s approach was very relaxing and non-threatening, the teacher
didn`t confront students after making mistakes, the teacher was very subtle to
correct he noted mistakes in a notebook and at the end of the class he had the
students correct them, but nobody knew whose mistakes they were as they were
anonymous and students had the chance to correct what they could, which offered
peer correction which is very productive. This class was an intermediate level
where the students have a lot more background knowledge than in a low level
course so that was obviously influential. In the other class by Nigel Brown
which was level eleven and where the students were called upon one by one to
ask and answer questions. I found this environment quite intense and personally
would be stressed in that class as the student called upon was obliged to
series of questions on the spot in front of all the class on the positive side
as the corrections were on the spot one by one where the student was obliged to
continue saying after teacher`s oral corrections as many times were necessary I
could see that students genuinely learned the times besides all of the rest.
The formative
assessments were quite different I could see that the Carlos Coral`s students
level six were happier in the class environment and seemed to smile, share
laughs together and more anxiousness to learn than in Nigel Brown`s class of
level eleven. The only assessment witnessed in both classes was formative, I
didn`t see any summative assessment in either course.
Carlos Coral`s objectives
were clearly written on the board so I could see that he achieved them because
he wrote that students will be able to give personal opinions about community
problems and how to resolve them by reinforcing vocabulary and discussing
questions in groups so I could witness how this goal was achieved. Nigel Brown
didn`t have the objectives written on it, but I could see the book pages being
covered in class and from what I saw on the board the objective was ask and answer
questions in complete form. I think that the teacher of the level eleven should
make his class less threatening.
Learning Log III
Learning Log
- PART III by Carlos Veliz
How learners
feel about assessment or wash back.
Through my
own experience and based on observations recently done and the microteaching. I
observed that the students can feel optimistic or threatened by assessment that
depends on how the assessment is done. The formal assessment in Julio and my
case during the Microteaching was over twenty points, it was based on advanced
level reading with a little review on Past Perfect, and the formal assessment
contained reading comprehension, critical thinking and grammar review. We also
included the rubric which was twelve points over twenty based on reading and
eight points over twenty based on past perfect review. The students should feel
content with this type of assessment and we´d expect positive wash back as it
was based on a short reading extract with a prior vocabulary lesson so they
could understand the most challenging words before reading making it a fair
reading assessment. The reading extract was created by myself with pictures
illustrating the occurrences according to the topic. As the reading was based
on history I made it more informative and less detailed by limiting unnecessary
dates and making it interesting. The text also comes with a video on 3 minutes
which helps students to understand better. After my peers read the article for
four minutes they were asked to summarize it in their own words and all to the
participants could contribute information so I could see that there was good
comprehension and is a very authentic
assessment because
that´s what we´re expected to do in real life. In the case for summative
assessment or formal assessment there should be proper instructions, it should
also have reliability so we should include a rubric that will guarantee
reliability and fairness and not being biest.
There
are many ways to do formative assessment including group work where after the
group has finished the teacher can correct in general and it takes
a bit of pressure off the students as the mistakes aren´t focused on one
student but all the group. As I observed two different teachers in the
assessment course, each one with a completely different method of correction in
formative assessment I could see that one was more direct correction focused
directly on the student that was being corrected while in the other class the
formative assessment or correction in this case was more subtle as the teacher
wrote down the student´s mistakes in a notebook and at the end of each lesson
had peers correct general mistakes this seemed less threatening for students
and would make them feel more confident and motivate them to be more
experimental .During Julio and my Microteaching we used an interactive game
called Kahoot to evaluate informally, to take pressure off students they
teacher should put students into groups. From my personal experience student
love Kahoot games just before an exam as I use it to review so I design my game
based on the most relevant information they´ll need focused on the examination
topics.
What is
really learned in class depends on the input, to get positive productive output
there should be a productive input. All learning should be authentic and to
achieve this the learning process, the formative and formal assessments should
all be based on real life situations. The expectations of authenticity depends
on what we´re teaching. In the case of History in English well then the focus
is more on comparing and contracting historical events or being able to
summarize them. To teach grammar it´s important for students to be able to use
the grammar naturally and know when to use it and to combine tenses, so exams
based on grammar should be mixed, that means if they´re learning the past
perfect the evaluator should also include present perfect and simple past tense
to see if they are able to use it authentically. The students should be tested
formatively by conducting real life situations they need oral practice, this
should be done in the classroom with models, clear and visual aims so students
know what is expected of them in a nonthreatening environment.
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