TPE 3: Interpretation and Use of Assessments

In order to assess the student fairly and effectively, there must be various opportunities for the student to experience success and demonstrate their grasp of the content. The teacher must draw upon their students funds of knowledge to have the student not only invest themselves in the content, but also to develop their thinking as well as academic abilities. For my U.S. History course, I use the Family History Oral Project to connect the material with their lives and that of their families. It is important to draw their family and community into the content matter in order to authentically meet the students intellectual needs. By monitoring the progress of this project, I am able to see that the student are well-read in the content in order to understand the signifance of the questions they are asking their family elder or mentor. The project also make the content matter come alive and connect to the student's lives outside the classroom. By providing flexibility in the project, the students are able to use their various skill sets to meet the expectations, all while taking various roads that arrive at a singular goal of learning the content. It also provides as opportunity for English Language Learners to connect their lived expereinces with the content in their primary language, if they are interviewing a family member or community member that speaks their home-language. It will also be conducive to the ELL student's English Language Aquisition, by positioning the student as an interpretor, tapping into their funds of linguistic knowledge. Also, in this particular assignment, the student's families are necessary partners in helping the student achieve the curriculum. The families are called upon to become apart of the classroom learning in a meaningful way. The families are made aware of the gravity of the project by understanding the grading, which is given to the students on the first day on their course organizer which serves as a syllabus. The parents are obligated to  sign the course organizer and returned back the following day, which the students will keep in the first tab of their binder.

To prepare the students for the structure of standarized tests, I will give students a multiple choice quiz that will be comprehensive of the material that was taught in the course. This type of assessment is meant to expose the students to the structure of standarized tests that they will encounter in the SAT and ACT, and in other professions, such as teaching. This type of assessment will also demonstrate the students handle on the vocabulary taught in the course. It will provide feedback for the teacher as to what vocabulary must be revisited in order for the students to develop their academic English abilities, as well as assess what barriers English Language Learners will encounter on sucha test, and how the teacher can support them in the language acquisition, and the syntactical format on a standardized test.

By exposing the students to both styles of assessments, it better prepares the students for demonstrating their understanding of the content in various formats. While they vary in levels of depth, they both provide the teacher with extremely crucial feedback of what they are learning, not learning, and what they need support in.