The Need for 21st Century Assessments

Throughout my academic career I have been exposed to a variety of teaching strategies. After taking courses such as EDUC 4P19 I can now infer and reflect on my previous experiences and understand the reasoning for different assignments and tasks that I deemed as irrelevant at the time. The reasoning for my naïve initial conclusion was due to my lack of knowledge of different types of assessment required in the curriculum. The assignments such as peer evaluations and editing each others work, which I figured were monotonous tasks for easy marks turned out to be crucial parts of understanding which strategies through the course worked best for me. The three types of assessment are essential part of a teachers’ evaluation of the student and help them grow as a lifetime learner.  These three types of assessment are known as assessment of Learning (AoL), Assessment for Learning (AfL), and Assessment as Learning (AaL).

The dominant type of assessment I have seen throughout my academic career is AoL. This type of assessment is used to gauge a students knowledge on a specific topic or subject of study. I sincerely believe that this is most suitable way overall to assess knowledge in many courses such as math. However, I believe math courses within the elementary and high school curriculum should use other assessment strategies more frequently such as AaL. This type of assessment focuses on metacognitive development and incorporates tasks such as reflections or peer evaluations. I believe this would be a more helpful way of developing knowledge for math students because they can recognize which strategies they found most useful during lessons. Another positive result of AaL is students are exposed to peers strategies of forming knowledge and can create a collaborative learning environment. However I do not believe that only AaL alone is a suitable way to gauge students’ final math marks.

Another type of assessment that could be utilized more in math classes is AfL. Assessment for learning involves the process of teacher providing feedback to students on their work as well as adjusting their lesson to meet the students needs to learn. An appropriate yearly task that should be implemented into elementary and secondary school math curriculums is a diagnostic assessment. The inclusion of a diagnostic assessment would allow for the teacher to gather an understanding of the range of knowledge levels and learning needs in the classroom. From this point on, the teacher can construct their lesson based on the students’ preexisting knowledge. This can be a much more problematic approach to classroom assessment for some teachers as it requires them to get to know their students and manipulate their lessons to suit the necessary learning needs.

In the twenty-first century it will require graduates to have much more then memorization skills to obtain a sustainable career. There must be different types of assessment used in classrooms to prepare students for different scenarios in the workplace. AoL is the traditional way for teaching to designate a concrete grade to each student. However there must be more ways implemented to guide students to form knowledge. AaL should be used more in courses such as math and science in order to provide students with a more student directed learning approach. Whereas AfL is an efficient way to show students how they are progressing as the course. AfL, such as describing detailed, meaningful feedback on an essay is an appropriate way for a teacher to privately convey a message to their students on how to grow in their field of study. The following short video is another example that demonstrates the need for twenty-first century assessment styles. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lBhMSaFNhY)If students are to truly grow as learners they must have a long-term exposure to the different learning strategies they find most useful. A much richer curriculum can be achieved by straying away from the traditional AoL and incorporating more meaningful assessments.