Standard Eight: The pre-service teacher understands and uses formal and
informal assessment strategies to evaluate and ensure continuous intellectual,
social, and physical development of the learner.
Performance Indicator 8.1: employs a variety of formal and informal
assessment techniques (e.g., observations, portfolios of student work,
teacher-made tests, performance tasks, projects, student selfassessments, authentic assessments, and standardized tests) to enhance
and monitor her or his knowledge of learning, to evaluate student progress
and performances, and to modify instructional approaches and learning
strategies.
Artifact: Landforms Assessment and Landform Review Games Checklist
Course: Student Teaching
Rationale: Standard 8.1 requires the pre-service teacher to employ a variety of
formal and informal assessment techniques to enhance and monitor his or her
knowledge of learning, to evaluate student progress and performances, and to
modify instructional approaches and learning strategies. These artifacts were
created for a landform unit in social studies. Prior to the formal assessment, the
students reviewed the concept by playing games I created on my website.
Informal assessment occurred as I monitored their progress with the games
using a checklist. By observation, I checked off the games each student
completed and noted any landforms I needed to re-teach. The checklist
structured my observation and helped me verify each student’s understanding.
At the end of the week, I administered the landform assessment I created. This
formal assessment required students to identify numbered landforms. Evaluating
the formal assessment allowed me to measure the students’ progress.
Reflection: During student teaching, I learned how important ongoing
assessment is in the education process. Frequent feedback is necessary to
determine what material students know and what material needs to be re-taught.
Furthermore, ongoing assessment does not always have to be formal. Informal
assessment techniques such as observation, anecdotal records, portfolios, and
checklists are effective ways to regularly gauge how well students are learning
and how well one is teaching. Using this information, one can determine what
the problem is, re-teach, and re-assess. To improve my informal assessment, I
might create a short quiz on my website. The individual quiz scores would be
saved to the site so I could view them and determine what concepts students did
not master. A short informal quiz could serve as a helpful diagnostic tool to guide
my instruction. To improve my formal assessment, I would include a section for
the students to define each landform. More test items would provide additional
points for the students as well as present a more reliable measure of what
students know. In my classroom, continuous assessment will be utilized to track
student progress, monitor the effectiveness of my teaching, and guide my
instruction. Moreover, I will continue to create both informal and formal
assessments to measure learning objectives.