#AEE412 Sunday Reflections 7: Assessing Student Learning

This week we read about assessments! I appreciate that each week our reading gives us a small taste of what we can look forward to learning in the upcoming class sessions (starting with "money Monday" as Dr. Foster likes to call it). On my road to a teacher I find that I am constantly learning things that I never knew! One thing is for certain, I know that we have to grade our students in a fair and accurate way. With the past few years as a college student it is easy to snap straight to "test" as the only way to assess learning. I appreciate that my education courses have jolted me out of that mentality and reminded me that there are many other ways to assess.

Think back to when you were a student! Did you consistently like being drilled with exams? Ask me that question and I would say, absolutely not! I can think back to one of my favorite classes which was high school biology where we often completed dissections, presentations, and other lab activities. The variety of assessments that we had in that class certainly was a more collective way to test the knowledge and skills that we gained.

As all Agricultural Educators know, our classes are never "black and white." Students are learning hands-on at higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and should therefore be assessed at those levels. This certainly does not mean that every assessment needs to be a test or a project but they need to see if the learning objectives are being met! In order to do this we must provide formative and summative assessments. Formative assessments are incorporated throughout the unit and a summative assessment is taken at the end of a unit.

I am reminded about our opportunity to complete a SLO or Student Learning Outcome in the Spring during student teaching. I look forward to this opportunity to assess students while assessing my performance. The link below includes a reference that I found regarding SLOs! It helps me to better follow the steps in figuring out what my SLO should be. Check it out.


https://www.nvcc.edu/assessment/_docs/PS4.methodsforassessingSLOs1009.pdf

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References:

Newcomb, L.H., McCracken, J.D., Warmbrod, J.R., & Whittington, M.S. (1993). Methods of teaching agriculture. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Cornell University Center for Teaching Excellence. (2015). Assessing student learning. Retrieved from http://www.cte.cornell.edu/teaching-ideas/assessing-student-learning/index.html

Jung, L.A. & Guskey, T.R. (2010). Grading exceptional learners. Educational Leadership, 67(5). Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb10/vol67/num05/Grading-Exceptional-Learners.aspx

Roberts, J. E. (n.d.). Methods for Assessing Student Learning Outcomes. Retrieved October 6, 2017, from https://www.nvcc.edu/assessment/_docs/PS4.methodsforassessingSLOs1009.pdf

Stoughton, A.L. & Myers, B.E. (2008) Creating and working with rubrics Retrieved from https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/WC/WC06900.pdf

Warner, W.J. & Myers, B.E. (2010). Evaluating learning in laboratory settings. Retrieved from  https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/WC/WC06000.pd