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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Testing 1,2,3..(hyperlinks and more!)

Testing has always been a big part of school life- perhaps the part many people remember the most.  Many of us remember the days of sweating through Regents and SAT tests more than the days of discussion in our HS classes!  
Testing ....or as I would prefer to think of it..ASSESSMENT IS and SHOULD be an important part of what we do in schools.  We really do need to assess the need to teach something before we teach it!  Otherwise, we might just be wasting everyone's precious time.  We need to assess WHILE we teach as FORMATIVE assessments really should guide what we reteach and when we more on....and finally we REALLY SHOULD assess the learning at the culmination of a unit of study.  Summative assessments really do inform US more than they inform our students!  How else can we know who needs our differentiated support and reteaching in order to succeed in content or skills? Assessment that is embedded and integral to our teaching is the work of effective teachers....
I guess I have spent a whole lot more time in the world of rubric assessment than in the formulation of multiple choice questions.....SO..after just spending the last 6 hours of a lovely snowy morning finishing the FORMATTING of a practice ELA test ...in a manner that is at least CLOSE to this....... http://readingandwritingproject.com/resources/ela-materials.html    Where I had to ADD lots of reworked questions.... I am remembering that GOOD assessment making takes TIME....and evaluating those assessments takes even more TIME.  I guess our team can hope for snow next Saturday morning too! 

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