What is assessment?
Usually it is believed that assessment is just giving students grades for the different assigments they are required to do. However, the real meaning of assessment goes beyond grading, it is really about taking into account the whole students´ process to measure their performance in certain tasks or skills, with the aim of give them feedback in order to make sure that students overcome their weaknesses to improve in future assignments.
I personally consider that the main difference between assessment and evaluation, is that assessment intends to be a helpful tool to promote improvement. Asssessment is a comprehensive decision-making process that takes into account students´ backgrounds and conditions, while evaluation is more judgemental, it doesn´t focus that much in the process but in the product, and it doesn´t provides students with useful feedback.
Brown (2000) stated that assessment should not be confused with testting, since testing refers to the process of gathering information about a student with the purpose of measure a person´s ability in a certain domain, regarding specific competences.
The author also claimed that there are different kinds of assessment. For example, formative assessment, that is, the feedback given by the teacher to students, they make their own process of internalization of that feedback, and summative assessment, that is more like evaluation, students receive a numerical score but teacher do not give feedback at all. There are also formal and informal assessment. In the first one, students know that they are being assessed and teacher spends time preparing assessment tool, on the second one, students do not necessarily know that teacher is assessing, it could be in a chat collecting student´s ideas about a reading.
Finally, I think that getting closer to effective assessment knowledge will be very useful in career as a teacher as it is going to help me to have a better criteria in how to give my students accurate feedback and grades according to their processes, backgrounds and preformances. Some teachers are not aware of the diferrences between evaluating ans assessing and that could one the reasons why some students feel anxious towards exams.
Totally agree with you, also it is important to say that the purpose of assessment is to help teachers to give birth to over and above genuine, intrinsically motivating assessment course of action that are appropriate for the surrounding text and designed to offer constructive feedback students. Students need the opportunity to listen, think, take risks, arrange goals and the most important process the feedback from the teacher and then recycle through the skills that they are trying to master. Always taking into account that test imply the test-take's ability or competence, previous knowledge, interpretation of the scores with a certain area prepare previously.
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