"The Project From The Black Lagoon!"

It was a dark and wary night. I was I had completed all the assignments I had for the week until.....

I know that is not a typical start to a Blog, but I wanted to give myself a little break mentally from the rigors of this week's assignments. We were to create an assessment, quite literally from scratch. At first, I thought this would be a piece of cake, as I have helped with making simple spelling test for students before. However, quality assessment creation he's a very painstaking process. But if you want something done correctly, you will take the time to do it. With the help of the article, "Is This A Trick Question," I was able to fully understand the thoughtfulness that must go into the multiple forms of assessment.

 With creating an assessment from an original thought, you must first figure the standards that are to be assessed. Next, comes how to teach the standards and the source from which to teach it. Next, comes the aspect of creating the assessment and any other tools necessary for the assessment, including a rubric, alignment chart, and data collection source. Lastly, and this is of extreme importance, the assessment must have a way to prove its validity and reliability as an instrument of education.

It did not take me long to realize, that this entire process ties into a few of our standards we look to meet as teacher candidates. Standard 1.e states that we are to demonstrate high ethical standards. With our assessments, it is best practice to create them with integrity and within the laws that govern education in the state of North Carolina. By following through with validity and reliability on the assessment tools and data, there is a great chance you wll be in alignment with these ethical standards. Looking at Standard 3, the creation of the assessment, the content, and material used to teach students must all fall in alignment to what the educator knows. The educator also needs to know how to teach the content that's appropriate, make changes as necessary for the students, and find ways to connect content to other aspects as well. Though this project connects to many of the NCTCS, another important one to point out is Standard 4.h. Through creating this assessment, I could see first-hand the numerous indicators we can put in place to assess student understanding. The assessment and its parts are said indicators and are influential and making sure we get students in the direction they need to go.

Since a few of my friends from East Iredell are suppose to visit my page this week, I wanted to share with them my post from seminar this week. It goes with our project and confirms our processes.

As we discussed in class this week, assessments have to be valid and reliable. The validity of a product by definition means to have a sound basis in a fact or logic. Being consistently good in quality or performance with great trust is also the definition of reliability. This is true when these two words are used to describe assessment. For any test to be valid, it must measure the objectives that were taught up to the actual assessment. As stated in class a valid assessment will measure what was taught and be consistent, reliable, to this information. The data from the assessment should be reliable because it only tested The content that was provided. It is up to the teacher to make sure that these two aspects are met within every form of testing that they give. This may sound funny but I wouldn’t grade and apple on the taste of an orange. They are both fruits, but the contents of both are different and I’m not being fair if I’m not grading the apple based off of the contents and definition of an apple.

With validity and reliability of the assessment ensured, then the assessment should be proof that the teacher is “meeting the needs of learners” and “design with the learners, content, and goals in mind,” which is a key focus in our conceptual framework.

All right, until next time……

Always Learning, Always Growing;

William B. A. Alspaugh