Assessment

How does your co-operative teacher use assessment?
What are your experiences this semester with assessment in the field?

Questions:
-What assessments are used?
-How frequently are students assessed?
-How are the results used?

My field teacher uses a variety of formal and informal assessments to discover where her children are developmentally. In reading classes, she uses the tests provided in the curriculum, which I sometimes find to be a little bit difficult for the level at which the children are operating. For math, she provides manipulatives for each student to represent the problems they are doing and then walks around and discusses each child's answer with them as they finish.

She uses this information to plan for future lessons and to slow down in her teaching approach, if necessary. Since she has the lower groups level-wise for both her reading and math classes, she tries very hard to take cues from what they are learning in order to structure her lessons.

I think that the use of variety in her classroom helps each student succeed, since if a child doesn't do well with one sort of assessment, she has the opportunity to observe them in a different form of assessment, and she can tell that perhaps it isn't that the student doesn't know what he or she is doing, just that they didn't understand the method of the assessment.