Things to think about when choosing a mode of Education for your child
The purpose of this blog is to inform parents of the types of assessments available through various schools; online, public, private, correspondence, and home-schooling programs/curriculum. It is very important, when choosing the program that you want to use to educate your child, to determine how your child will be assessed. How will you know whether your child has learned what you were hoping they would learn? To help you make that decision, I will tell you a little bit about the types of assessments that you are likely to encounter.
Traditional Assessments
These types of assessments are what you may have remembered under the name “quiz” or “test” back when you were in school. The first assessments we will discuss are called selective response, because there will be a question or statement and the answer will be selected from a list of choices. For the sake of this blog we will assume that all the assessments are well written and do not contain “give-away” answers.
First up, Binary Choice assessments. These assessments have two choices of answer, usually True or False. These assessments can be a decent indicator of whether a student knows the answers since the statements are either true or false. A concern would be if any of the questions could have a “grey area” for some students where the item could seem to be neither true nor false.
Multiple Choice assessments have a stem or base question or statement, then several choices of answer. In a well written assessment, the choice will not be immediately obvious to someone who has not mastered the concept being assessed. A few downfalls in these type assessments occur when choices “all of the above” or “none of the above” are included as choices. It could also be bothersome if a student were able to argue an exception to the rule/answer that is not included as a choice.
If the assessments are given online, there is another option for multiple choice. This is called Discrete Option Multiple Choice (or DOMC). In this format, the choices of answer are shown one at a time, rather than all at once. For each of the multiple choices, students choose either True or False regarding that choice.
Matching is another common traditional type question on assessments. There are words and definitions, or names and facts, states and capitals, etc. The student then matches the items to each other.
DOWNSIDES: All of these “choice” type assessments fall victim to “multiple guess”. Some kids are better at guessing or finding cues than others. There are loads of websites that offer tutorials on how to take these “choice” assessments. In a way, these assessments are more like gambling.
Less Traditional Assessments or more time-consuming Assessments
A tried and true assessment is the Essay or “Paper”. Other assessments include projects, portfolios, presentations, and demonstrations of knowledge or skill. These sorts of assessments can very clear evidence of the students’ knowledge. Downsides to these sorts of assessments are that they take longer to evaluate/grade. They also rely on a rubric, a chart of goals/skills/knowledge that the student is being assessed for and sliding scales for each item to score the work. If the rubric is unclear, or the person scoring is not scoring the same way for each student, the scores may be off. But, the works themselves do paint a clearer picture of the students’ skill level than traditional “choice based” assessments.
Now that I have told you a bit about assessments, maybe you will have an easier time choosing the way you want your child to be educated/assessed. Choosing the means of assessing your child’s progress is just as important as choosing the location of their learning environment.
Cheers!
References
Papenberg, M., Willing, S., & Musch, J. (2017). Sequentially presented response options prevent the use of testwiseness cues in multiple-choice testing. Psychological Test and Assessment Modeling 59(2), 245–266.
Popham, W.J. (2020). Classroom Assessment: What Teachers Need to Know (9th). Pearson: Boston. ISBN-10: 0–13–556910–9
Tandemir, M. (2010). A comparison of multiple-choice tests and true-false tests used in evaluating student progress. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 37(3), 258–266
****All Images were lifted from Google Images search******
