Module 7 - Assessment

REFLECTION - Module 7

           

Important Concepts:

 

1. Direct instruction on what is expected in the testing format by teachers enable young primary students to show genuine reading competence. From K-12: test prep, testing strategies, and released test item practice is the key, in my experience, to achieving higher test scores.   I believe that practicing the exact format helps children become very comfortable with the way the test is structured; the more comfortable they are with that, the better they will be able to focus on the meat of the text instead of the text structure.

2. I noticed also that on the other hand, too much focus and preparation on the test can be harmful to students in a few ways.  Test anxiety is a reality for a lot of students, so teachers must be careful not to show their nervousness, or the students who are prone to that may not score well. Also, excessive practice in specific testing formats can cause students to lock into one particular format and they will have trouble switching formats when taking another test.  Narrowing curriculum to only teach exactly what is on the test could mean that many important objectives may be left out of instruction.  Though test prep is very important, it should carefully and gracefully be weaved into the curriculum with the PASS objectives for that grade level. 

 

Implementation:

            Module 7 discusses high-stakes testing issues.  We, being on a school improvement plan, are pretty much encouraged to teach to the test....we use released items from the state department for our core classes, we teach it in the format of the test, constantly using benchmark exams that are formatted like the OCCT-- yet we also pull things out of our hats to make it interesting and fun for the kids. If not, we lose them. Various strategies, graphic organizers, and activities get the job done. Hopefully we'll be off the list soon!

 

Before/During/After Strategies:

            The Before/During/After Strategy that I used was Prior Knowledge. I wrote down all that I knew about assessments, testing strategies and preparation. I also incorporated KWL. I listed what I wanted to learn, then I read the text to see what all was really correct.  I've been doing this  a while, so I was on point on most of the concepts I wrote down. I then wrote down all the answers to the questions I had from the W column.

I love using this strategy in my classroom. I used it just the other day for a test prep article about storm chasing.  They were really interested, and scored much higher on the passage's questions at the end.