Title: 10. PEDAGOGICAL-ASSESSMENTACTIVITIES IN A MIDDLE SCHOOLLIFE SCIENCE CLASSROOM
Abstract: Alternati ve assessment improves the science education of students by aligning curriculum, instruction and assessment. The results of alternative assessments may be used to plan the curriculum and guide instruction, as well as to evaluate students. I use inquiry activities as my main vehicle for teaching because of the interest seventh graders have in doing Inquiry-based act ivities allow students to observe, interpret, and construct knowledge for themselves in a manner that cannot be accomplished with traditional textbook based teaching methods. Students must get their hands on science to get their minds on science. In this way, I use inquiry based activities as assessment tasks that align my assessment practice with my instructional approach. In this chapter I will share an example of a pedagogical-assessment activity, including student work examples or responses to the assessment task, the scoring guide I use to assess student performance, and my thinking about assessment in the seventh grade . I will also share a brief example of a pedagogical-assessment activity that serves as a summative assessment task and discuss the notion of standards based assessment. The ultimate goal of this chapter is to demonstrate how instructional activities may be used as assessment tasks: pedagogical-assessment activities. If classroom assessment is to become a more powerful tool in measuring student growth , it must move from the end-of-the-week, end-of-the-chapter, end of-the-unit procedure to ongoing formative assessments (Burke, 1992, p.49) . I evaluate student performance with assessment tasks that allow for open-ended responses, because I want my students to reflect on what they are observing and to communicate their findings in a variety of ways. One of the alternative assessment tasks I use, What is the Relationship between Abiotic and Biotic Factors? demonstrates the interaction of living and nonliving factors in a dynamic manner. This task is also an instructional activity because it enables students to learn about the interactions between abiotic and biotic factors . This approach embeds assessment in instruction creating pedagogical-assessment activities . These may be characterized according to attributes that Baron (1991) identified for enriched performance assessment tasks. These include:
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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