Chapter 14/Free Response- Brittany Edmonds

In chapter 14, the first idea that caught my attention was the introduction into assessment. Of course, it explained what assessments were, but it also presented valuable information about the subject of who is to blame when assessments do have the results expected. I thought that was a very good point to put into the chapter that I haven’t seen in other books. It says, “…educational assessments are merely tools that can help…When people use these tools for the wrong purpose or when they interpret assessment results in ways the results were never meant to be interpreted, it is the people—not the assessment instruments—that are to blame” (Ormrod 504). This proves an excellent point, and provides future educators to see exactly how these assessments are suppose to be used and not manipulated. Ormrod explains that you can’t do it all as a teacher, but what you can do is make sure you are seeing all aspects of the assessment and how it was used.  One issue that I struggled with is the norm-referenced assessments. I know that this type of assessment can become helpful in particular ways, but it can also be detrimental in other ways. Sometimes educators place too much attention on how well their students are doing compared to those in a higher academic area. This begins to place too much pressure on students and educators to compete with those that may have a completely different classroom environment. This is one of the ways that the assessments can become manipulated. Another interesting and helpful point that Ormrod made was about evaluating the quality of instruction. She states, “When most students perform poorly after an instructional unit…we must consider not only what our students might have done differently but also what we, as teachers, might have done differently…In any event, consistently low assessment results should tell us that some modification of instruction is in order” (508). I completely agree with his statement because so many teachers assume that it is the student’s lack of attention or faults that have kept him/her from learning from your instruction, which is not always the case. I think that every educator should look back after EVERY assessment to see the quality and revision that can take place in that specific module, unit, or lesson plan. Looking as these briefly mention topics, as a teacher, I see that I have the professional responsibility to not only look at my students’ performance, but I need to evaluate my own. So many instances have gone on throughout my own academic career where I was blamed for a teacher’s manipulation of an assessment or dense, unreliable instruction. Reading this chapter has not only opened my eyes to all ways examine that I am serving the appropriate needs for students to improve more, but also, I never realized how many different assessment there were. I always thought that when you speak of assessments, you are referring to a hand-written or computerized test. After reading, I can see that teachers are assessing students daily and in informal ways that are beneficial to the student.