Assessment Anxiety

When I think about my career as a student, I remember a lot of conventional testing. At the end of every unit we faced multiple choice and short answer questions from third grade right through high school. I like to think I was a good student, my grades were always good, but no matter how confident I was in the material, when test time rolled around, I would get nervous and stressed.

Conventional assessment tends to create a high stress level in students because they are more aware of what is expected of them. Consider a multiple choice question... Your student, Gabby, knows there is only one right answer and will spend more time reading and rereading the answers to make sure she has selected the correct one. By the time Gabby makes it through five questions, she is out of time and didn't finish the test. What if Gabby has to complete short response questions? She will spend so much time contemplating her responses and choosing words she thinks are just right, and again, she will run out of time.

A way to avoid this kind of situation is offering authentic assessments throughout the year as a more comfortable way to gauge student understanding. Let's use Gabby again; she has demonstrated that is a very careful and analytical thinker. Instead of making her sit for a multiple choice math test on measurement, have Gabby help measure a poster that needs to be framed and hung in class. If she can measure the dimensions of the poster accurately, you know that she mastered the skill. Creative students may be better off building a diorama, for example tell students that have to create a model of a park but it can only fit within certain dimensions. The students' grade would be heavily based on whether or not they measured their model correctly. You could also go a step further and say each area in their park had to fit within certain dimensions. Students would then be using spacial reasoning skills as well as simple measurement to make sure their park fit together perfectly.

There are many ways authentic assessment can play a role in the classroom, but unfortunately for teachers, they are time consuming. Consider assignment the model park diorama to your fourth grade class. You then have to take time to create a rubric and explain the project clearly with set expectations. A chunk of class time may be devoted to presenting the dioramas. Finally, countless will be spent grading them. For a teacher, it may seem overwhelming, but the pay off for your students in the end is what makes a project like this seem worthwhile. Easier forms of authentic assessment, like journaling, can be used every day and may not require grading. A teacher can give students thirty minutes to an hour of free write time every day. Then at the teacher's convenience, he or she can read the journals to see how the students are progressing.

I think if I was given more authentic assessment opportunities I would have enjoyed school more than I did. Especially as I got older and was capable of more complex thinking, simple multiple choice and true/false questions didn't seem to really determine whether or not I understood what I learned in US History that month.