Chapter 8

Chapter 8 focuses on assessment in schools, especially in the light of increased technology and a change to a partnering style of pedagogy over standard teacher instruction.  Schools have been and always will be about testing, especially standardized testing that compares students from schools across the nation and the world.  There are varying levels of assessment that can be done for students including formative providing feedback, ipsative trying to better previous attempts, peer where other students assess their peers work, real-world where students share there work with a global audience, self-assessment where you look at your own work and make decisions on what can be done better, assessment where students can use the technology tools that they use in their daily lives like cell phones or ipads, and summative assessment which is the standard testing of knowledge.  Outside of assessing students, teachers should assess themselves to see how effectively they are reaching students and how their students are reacting to the partnering that is being done.  Administration should also be assessed for how effectively they are supporting a 21st century learning environment and the growth rates in their districts and how effectively it is being implemented. Finally teachers should be assessing parents of their students and how they are reacting to partnering.  Parents are usually worried about what their students are learning and the way they are learning compared to how they were taught.  Keeping parents in the loop of the classroom will ensure that they know what their kids are doing and help to curtail any possible issues.

One thing that I really agreed with in this chapter was the portion where he discussed the role of standardized testing in comparing American students to students in other countries.  I have always thought that it was ridiculous that government is so concerned with numbers from a one day high-stakes test.  How a child or group of schools compares to another group of schools on simple summative questions will never give  a true relationship of how the students compare in real life.  While one country may have great testing rates, they may also have the largest drop out rate of college because students decide that living off the government or working in a blue collar job is more productive.  The actual outcomes of the countries are the true comparison points that should be looked at.  Which countries are more innovative and create more new things, what countries have the highest employment per capita and the most productive use of resources.  These are items that can be assessed and given a true weight of worth, students testing only gives a false sense of truth. One reason I truly hope that CCSS turn out to work for education is that it will change our perception of summative assessment to a more real-world and application style of assessment that will truly tell teachers, parents, administrators and the world how effective our education is.  If CCSS is truly designed effectively then hopefully this type of testing will come to the forefront and we will steer away from high stakes uneffective testing.