Assessment TIPR

Prompt: How does the teacher assess student learning? Identify specific instances of informal and formal, formative and summative assessment and explain the types of assessments (e.g., self-assessment, portfolio, project, performance, etc.) that are used. How valid, reliable, biased, and practical are these assessments?

This teacher, like any good teacher, is constantly assessing her students throughout her classes. However, she uses far fewer formal assessments than any teacher I have ever seen. Her most common assessment, of course, consists of monitoring her students throughout each class period to determine their level of understanding, engagement, self-efficacy, proficiency with ASL, etc. This assessment is formative, and is very informal for the most part; it is not always associated with a grade, but it is a good assessment. It is reliable because it occurs over the course of the term; it is valid because she is assessing them precisely based on what she has taught and has asked them to do; it is fair because all students are expected to expend effort in their learning and maintenance of Deaf space; and it is practical, because it is intricately linked with good teaching practices, and does not at all interrupt the flow of any lesson; it does not cost any extra effort, time, or money/resources.

Her formal assessments occur three times per term in what she calls "Proficiency Progress Assessments." These can be in many forms (those listed in her disclosure document are an interview, group chat with prompt, assignment, and presentation), but this term there were two group chats with prompts and one interview. For the group chats, she places the students in groups heterogeneously based on past proficiency levels and gives them a prompt. One prompt for which I observed was asking what they were doing for Homecoming week. Like many schools, each day of Homecoming week had a theme for how students should dress, and the students had spent the previous two days discussing and practicing in small groups describing clothing and physical features of people, so this assessment was very valid. The reliability of this assessment is mixed; it is a "single snapshot" and so is affected by students' and the teacher's mood, but the description and grading mechanism are made very clear in her disclosure document: The proficiency assessment simply has to be completed and have effort shown. This is open to interpretation somewhat, but she and I both saw very few students who were not engaged enough in the process to receive full points. I believe the assessment is also very fair, as it asks something with which all students are familiar, no outside resources are required, and there is no vocabulary with which students could be confused. The only potential issue is that in grading any form of expression in ASL there is potential for bias to creep in, because there is no way to separate the work from the student's identity (i.e. the student will always be visible when you can see their work in ASL). Finally, this assessment, as well, is very practical, as it requires little extra effort, and no extra time or resources.