Essay On An Analysis Of The Article “Heathier Testing Made Easy”

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Introduction

The educational system continuously evolves and improves to provide quality education to both its learners and educators. Academic institutions have been exploring ways on how to gauge and assess the learning of a students and its effectivity whether his learning is enough to live accordingly outside the four corner of the organization.
The article entitled “Healthier Testing Made Easy” emphasizes the absence of real-time and actual mechanism to evaluate whether the learning of a student goes beyond rote memorization and getting high scores in an examination based on their teacher’s discussion. This article also discusses the mechanical and repetitive teaching style of most teachers through teaching, taking exams and jumping on to the next lesson. It also highlighted that such traditional form of student teaching and evaluation does not directly prove whether a student can apply what he learned in a real situation or simply transfer and use what he absorb efficiently. Moreover, the article cited that student’s education must not appear as burdensome through taking numerous examinations. Going through every ladder in one’s education, as mentioned in the article, should prepare the students in the context of an adult life through incorporation of assessment and feedback mechanism.

My Workplace, Culture, and Setting

I work in a state school surrounded by professional educators and administrators who motivated to improve the culture of the school environment for the benefit of the learning of the students. Our teachers and colleague openly discuss teaching learning experience, both traditional and progressive style, and how it affects each of our students. In our working environment, we encourage teachers to go beyond their usual traditional classroom set-up and teaching style, and innovate while teaching the defined curriculum. Some of us are responsive and some remains hesitant. The working condition, however, is pleasant and respects each teaching style. Although this culture appears healthy, there are cases where after two or three years of teaching, our teachers leave their occupation and look for greener pasture. Unfortunately, this is during the time where our teachers already acquire good enough experience to train, enrich and become more intuitive with their teaching style.

Political effects of the issue in your school

Introducing authentic assessment and feedback mechanism in an academic institution will require revisiting the instructional materials and curriculum. This approach will require buy-in for both school administrator and its respective teachers. From the perspective of the educators, although this opens an opportunity to broaden their professional skills, the assessment will add up to their usual responsibilities and requires additional skills. Some educators may see this as an added burden to their usual schedule, thus, may result to resistance. On the other hand, the school administrator need to revisit its standards and grading guidelines as the approach to provide grades through authentic assessment is different. The entire assessment activities will require time, extra labor and extra cost for everyone in the school, thus, this may pose as a challenge to the administration .

Emotional effects of the issue in your school

Standardized testing, as being challenged by the authentic approach, has both positive and negative effects to students and teachers. From the perspective of the teachers, they feel that they see take on more pride whenever student examinations reveal high scores, thus, suggests their effectiveness as an instructor. On the other hand, testing requires more pressure for them to include more practices and drills, thus, requiring significant time. From the perspective of the student, seeing that they have achieve high scores reveal that they feel more accomplished. Testing, however, frustrates students and struggles more whenever they see low grades .

Educational effects of the issue in your school

The introduction of authentic assessment in the educational level will impact both the educators and students. From the educator’s perspective, there is a need for enough and in-depth training to understand and employ various approaches in constructively providing feedback and assessment. For an educational institution used to adopt the conventional style of teaching, this approach has to become repetitive and requires guidance on how to approach various student’s situation. From the perspective of the student, the authentic assessment will demand each of them to perform and apply their learning in a real-life situation. Such approach will become an additional step for the students on top of their current learning activities .

My Personal Stand on the Issue

As an educator, I believe that there is different teaching approach that a teacher can employ in order for him or her to assess whether his or her students learn from the lesson. I believe that standardize testing is merely one way of gauging how a student fair in his academic performance. I, however, also disagree that this is the only way. Upon providing my students with the test results with their scores, I personally speak with them about what are the possible errors and my assessment as to where they should improve and focus. I feel that as educator, constructive feedback and assessment must regularly take place so that I can see whether my student understand and improves based on our agreed assessment.
I believe that for an educational environment accustomed to doing the conventional way of teaching, performing a periodical feedback and assessment will become challenging. Given the chance, I will prepare and propose a strategic program to our head administrator with the objective of implementing a constructive assessment and feedback mechanism of the performance of a student regularly. Aside from the usual standard testing that we implement to check on the learning absorption of a student, all educators must dedicate a specific time to speak and impart to the student what are the things they need to further improve. As a follow-up, educators must do a follow-up assessment, aside from the test, on how the students have applied the previously agreed assessment. As a pilot implementation, the school designates a specific department where educators will apply and apply the program. During the course of implementation, the educators will provide their inputs on how the students respond to this kind of approach. Similarly, this program encourages the teacher to incorporate their experience as an input to improve the said strategic program. Based on the result of the pilot implementation, this program will become part of the curriculum of the school to proactively improve the teacher and student learning process.

Works Cited

Gulikers, J., Bastiaens, J., & Kirschener, P. (2006). Authentic Assessment, Student and Teacher Perceptions. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 337-357.
McAlister, B. (2010). The Authenticity of Authentic Assessment: What the Research SaysOr Doesn't Say. Retrieved from Calpro Online.org: http://calpro-online.org/eric/docs/custer/custer4.pdf
National Association of Secondary School. (2007). Authentic Assessment. Principal's Research Review, vol.2, issue 4, 1-8.