Improving Assessment

Improved Essays
In order to use assessments to improve instruction, one must go through intensive, strategic planning to determine what will be assessed, why it is being assessed, and how it will be assessed. By beginning this process, it immediately creates a familiarity with standards that otherwise would not be as concrete. The ability to pick apart standards to determine outcomes assists in the creation of specific evidence to show that a student has reached mastery of the learning goal. When a teacher understands the content that is being taught, the instruction within the classroom ultimately improves as more explicit to the learning goal at hand. Creating assessments to utilize within a classroom or grade level gives the educator themself a base …show more content…
Oftentimes within these assessments, example questions or released items are available for teacher review and use. To improve instruction, while in the instruction planning of the objective, one must be aware of standards assessed and the variety of misconceptions. This allows educators to teach beyond the skill or standard assessed and to focus also on misconceptions that may exist from incorrect answers. The educator catches those misconceptions before they become aspects of teaching requiring further interventions. Once data is collected, it becomes a difficult process to decipher what to do with the information and how to utilize the information effectively within a classroom. The first means of data collection is to be aware of how that data is reflected in the standards that are being assessed. Allowing educators the ability to determine not only if the students answered correctly or incorrectly, but to analyze data to determine if there was common misconceptions among the class or individual misconceptions. This information can be used to create a road map of instruction for the time ahead. Misconceptions are not solely left to the test administrator as providing immediate and constant feedback to those misconceptions is of extreme importance. Feedback is not just providing student scores after

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