Assessment and Motivation

    As teachers, we often spend countless hours grading papers and writing comments in margins, only to have our students look at the grade and then toss the paper in the wastebasket. 

    While we must evaluate our students’ work, we also need to develop opportunities for our students to think about their work and use our corrective feedback to develop next steps for meeting the learning targets we have set.

How Assessment Affects Learning

    The difference between good students and weak students is that good students are able to absorb our feedback and use it to create a pathway toward understanding learning targets. Weak students, however, have trouble understanding feedback and need us to give them specific next steps in order for them to develop a growth mindset and see a path toward understanding. Unlike our good students, our weaker students often have given up trying to understand our comments written in the margins of their papers or don’t know how to find solutions to the test items they missed.   Because they don’t understand how to improve, they often dismiss school and school work as “stupid” or simply say, “I don’t care.”

    We can help our students’ by teaching them to be more analytic & motivated about their own learning, by giving them class time and a structure to examine their own work in relation to previously explained criteria, and by clarifying how they can improve their work. Let’s find out what motivation is?

    In the ever-changing world of education, many ed.establishments are becoming less focused on sorting students into winners and losers and more focused on helping all students succeed at meeting standards. This change in focus “compels us to embrace a new vision of assessment that can tap the wellspring of confidence, motivation, and learning potential that resides within every student" (Stiggins, 2007, p. 22).

In order to keep up with the changing needs of students and to effectively inform instruction, teachers must use a variety of assessment tools. Traditional forms of assessment, such as quizzes, standardized tests, and multiple-choice tests, have been most often used for determining student progress and assigning grades. Although traditional forms of assessment have value, research has shown that if they are misused or poorly designed, the effects on student motivation can be detrimental and indeed demotivational.

Assessment for Learning

    It is critical that all students experience the productive emotional dynamics of winning. Therefore, rather than continue to rely solely on assessments that verify learning (assessments of learning), teachers should also include assessments that support learning, or assessment for learning. Among the traditional forms of assessment—predictive, diagnostic, summative, and formative—the latter is most conducive to assessment for learning.

Formative assessment is used to inform teachers about students’ progress, as well as about the success or failure of their instructional strategies. Using observations, anecdotal records, and other formal and informal assessment strategies, teachers can adapt and revise their instructional efforts. Formative assessment also provides useful feedback to students. Because it occurs during the learning process, teachers can identify students’ strengths and weaknesses in a timely manner and support them accordingly.

What Is Performance Assessment?

    Properly designed performance assessments are authentic tasks that result in the creation of meaningful products or performances. While students need to learn the traditional basic skills of reading, writing, there are additional skills they will need in order to be successful in the workplace. Skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, and interpersonal communication must be taught explicitly. What’s more, students must be provided opportunities to develop and practice these skills. Performance assessment gives them these opportunities.

    Traditional assessments are usually not designed to test those kinds of skills. Therefore, performance assessments have emerged as an alternative tool. Through performance assessments, students can demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of key concepts by doing something other than answering questions on a test. Students may make presentations or perform plays, interpret new information through music or develop a product.

    Recent research supports the use of performance assessment, because we know that students learn best when they are active and engaged. Other traits of performance assessment, such as allowing students to choose a topic or a way to demonstrate their learning and providing authentic purposes and audiences, have proven to be very motivational for students. Motivated students take ownership of learning and pride in showing their work to others.

Five Characteristics of Performance Assessment

    There are five key characteristics of performance assessment that teachers need to keep in mind:

Learning is assessed for both knowledge and skills.

Process is engaging and authentic for students.

The task is requiring students to stretch their understanding.

The task follows a logical process.

The validity of the assessment results must be consistent.

     Grant Wiggins, a well-known co-author of Understanding by Design, says assessment reformers are interested in assessment that is instructional, educative, revealing, and insightful. Performance assessments are valuable tasks performed by students that inform both the teacher and the student about progress and mastery of instructional goals.

     As a conclusion-we must explain to our students that they study not for marks but for knowledge & skills they can use in future.