Pros and Cons to Different Assessments

PROS OF THE ASSESSMENTS 

SELECTED RESPONSE AND SHORT ANSWER

• Selected response options do a good job at assessing mastery of discrete elements of knowledge, such as important history facts, spelling words, foreign language vocabulary, and parts of plants.
• Efficient in that we can administer large numbers of questions per unit of testing time and so can cover a lot of material relatively quickly. 

EXTENDED WRITTEN RESPONSE

• They can get at deeper levels of knowledge.
• Extended written response is a good choice for assessing reasoning targets. 

PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

• This helps assess how well students are actually learning the material. 

PERSONAL COMMUNICATION 

• For some students, such as those with special needs, English language learners, or younger students, it is the best way to gather accurate information.

CONS OF THE ASSESSMENTS

SELECTED RESPONSE AND SHORT ANSWER 

• There are limits to this format when assessing reasoning.

EXTENDED WRITTEN RESPONSE

• Extended written response is useful for assessing blocks of knowledge rather than pieces of information detached from one another (causes of environmental disasters, the carbon cycle in the atmosphere, etc.) 
• Extended written response assessments are not as efficient as selected response assessments because responding to each takes longer.

PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

• We can’t know the reason for failure unless we follow up the performance assessment with one of the other assessment methods. 
•  It is inefficient to assess all content knowledge with a performance assessment. 
• It just isn’t practical (or safe) to conduct some performance assessments.

PERSONAL COMMUNCATION 

• Tends to be inefficient if a lot of knowledge is to be assessed for lots of students.
• The drawbacks with using personal communication to assess reasoning proficiency are, as always, the amount of time it takes and the record-keeping challenge it poses.

WHAT ROLES WILL ASSESSMENTS PLAY?

Assessments will play a big role in my English classroom. I will obviously have assessments in my classroom, but I do not want them to be the main driving factor in my classroom. Students freak out when they hear "assessment" so my plan is to try to make them not scary. For example, while there are cons to personal communication, I have always been one that likes to check in with others by simply asking how they're doing and what they need help with. I could add onto this by having my students write in a journal (or something similar) anything they are struggling with, doing well with, etc., so I can see how I can help them.