third blog

What´s your call on the following? Assessment in education must, first and foremost, serve the purpose of supporting learning.

I´m totally agree. Assessment must serve the purpose of supporting learning. The first thing that comes to people´s mind when they hear the word assessment is summative assessment. Teachers can not measure the students´ progress just through a test at the end of a chapter or a unit.

Teachers must keep in mind assessment as part of the lesson plan. In other words, assessment must be part of an effective lesson plan. Why? At the end of the class, teachers must assess how much the students have learned, how many of the objectives or goals have been accomplished.

 That information will help teachers to know if the topic or subject is easy or difficult to understand for the students. Teachers can also realize in what way or method or technique students learn more easily. Students can notice how much they have learned about the topic they are studying and work on it. So, students can identify their weaknesses and that will be important because students can develop the capacity for self-assessment. Then, teachers can help students to know how to improve and be better students.

Knowing our students ´weaknesses is very important because we as teachers can modify and change the way we teach in order to make our classes enjoyable, interesting, funny and easy to understand.

Another aspect that is important to study is that teachers must use different kind of evaluations in order to assess the four areas of learning:  listening, writing, speaking and reading.