Assessment Experience from My Childhood

Think of a personal assessment experience that you remember from being in school and write out a short description of that (150-250 words).

In point form include:

• What kind of assessment is involved (i.e. for/as/of)?

• How did this affect you/your class?

• What quality issues were involved (i.e. reliability, validity, fairness)?

Note: Be sure to include ideas from the readings. This can be completed in your journal/portfolio if you wish and a picture/scan can be uploaded here.

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What kind of assessment is involved?

It was Grade 8 Social Studies, Feudal System Unit.

I remember we had to read about the feudal system from the Pathways Textbook and take notes on it. Then, our teacher would call us one by one to homework check to make sure we have covered the contents he needed us to know before we move onto our project. Looking back at it now, I can see that my teacher was doing very subtle way of incorporating assessment for learning since he was seeing how much we knew of the subject before he gave direct teaching and instructions.

In this project, we had to make a miniature model of the feudal system: real 3D models of the castle, lords, farm lands, serfs, church, cardinal, etc in proportionate size. By doing so, our team members were more motivated to know further of the feudal system and to place ourselves in the middle ages through imagination. Here, our teacher had us demonstrate both assessment of learning and assessment as learning; students had to have some fundamental knowledge on the feudal system to actually complete the project accurately and students were engaged with continual learning even as they created a piece of assessment for the teacher.

How did this affect you and your class?

This assessment project is something I will always carry with me - it was enriched with content, challenged us to learn further, and most of all, it was fun. Students were practicing self-regulation by holding accountable to each other to stay on task and scaffolded on each other's ideas to further expand our knowledge and understanding of the curriculum content.

What quality issues were involved?

• Reliability: I did not notice any issues with reliability in this assessment project - all the students were provided with much class time to complete the project with lots of teacher guidance, scaffolds and peer co-regulation to help us perform the best that we can. If we were given another opportunity to do this project again, I do not think our team would have done anything different other than to improve on the feedback we received.

• Validity: there were seemingly no issues with validity - I believe that what we were assessed on was logically connected to the curriculum content and competency goals.

• Fairness: I believe the project was pretty fair, given that it was very low floor and high ceiling kind of project. Students can decide for themselves the ways they can contribute to the project and accommodate each other in their needs and strengths.

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Readings of this week:

Butler, D. L., Schnellert, L., & Perry, N. E. (2017). Developing Self-Regulating Learners. Don Mills, ON: Pearson. [Chapter 9]