Assessment Made Easy for First-Year Teachers
Hi! Congratulations on becoming a credentialed teacher in the great state
of California. If you are reading this you have just endured one of the most
fantastically challenging years of your life. Good job, you made it! Now, if you
are like most newly-credentialed teachers you are going to be walking into your
own classroom in the very near future. This new situation will bring all sorts of
novel and exciting experiences, ranging from concerned parents to intestinal bugs,
and other obstacles that are not as closely related. All of these challenges will be
met by you, the new teacher: a uniquely inspired, idealistic, moral, and altruistic
breed of professional. In addition to writing lesson plans, decorating your
classroom with Grateful Dead teddy bears, integrating subject matter and
attending titillating staff meetings, you will be primarily responsible for assessing
all of your students in the subject(s) that you teach. This assessment can take
many forms. It is the purpose of this handbook to address some of the more
common concerns and must-know facts about assessment and its connection to
educating the young people of the next generation
Assessment is critical to teachers in a variety of ways. Primarily, teachers
need to understand the concept of assessment informing instruction. This idea iseasy to understand; it is intuitive that in order to teach an individual something
new, you need to know what knowledge they already possess. One thing that is
not always obvious: there are effective ways to conduct quick and efficient
assessments that will give you this information. Beyond this quick type of
assessment is the longer, more formal written assessment that is based on a
question and answer format. Writing these tests in a fair and balanced way can be
a challenge for someone who has never written test questions before. Issues of
validity, reliability, and fairness must all be addressed and dealt with
appropriately. After all, this type of assessment is what will most heavily
influence your students’ grades; it is vital that you are measuring what you think
you are measuring, and what you want to measure. Additionally, each spring your
students will be assessed on the state-mandated Standardized Testing and
Reporting (STAR) test. Although the prospect of high stakes testing can cause
anxiety in both the student and the teacher, with this handbook we hope to
mitigate any stress and the over-consumption of caffeinated beverages.