Last week, the eighth grade had a quiz about seasons. Tomorrow, the seventh grade has a test on the first part of Populations and Ecosystems.
Why do we have tests and quizzes?
Is it to torture you?
Is it because we’re supposed too?
Is it just something we do?
The answers are; no, no and no.
Teachers need assessments for two big reasons:
- To assess whether you have learned the material,
- To assess whether we have taught the material in a way that you can understand.
If everyone does well on an assessment, then we can safely assume that we have taught and you have learned the material. In this case, everyone goes away happy.
If most students do well, then we have some work do to with the ones who did not do well. Was it a failure in teaching? Was it a failure on the student’s part to learn the material or prepare for the test? In this case, most students go away happy and the teacher needs to figure out what went wrong. Some students may have some extra work to do to catch up.
If very few students do well, then we might have a problem with the way the material was taught. Now, the teacher needs to dig in and figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Sometimes we reteach the material, sometimes we conclude that the problem is on the student end and take appropriate action based on this decision.
I have had cases where I concluded I needed to reteach the content in a different way - like the extra work many of our eighth graders did after the seasons quiz. I have also had cases where I concluded that the students were not doing their work and were not even trying to learn the material, like our first test of the year in the seventh grade.
One more thing, as much as you may dislike having to take a 30 minute test/quiz, your teacher has had to write that assessment, and then will have to grade 50+ copies of it.
Trust me, the torture is not taking the test, it’s grading it!
No comments:
Post a Comment