"I Personally Believe..."

“I Personally Believe…”

I personally believe that I have a responsibility to use the information that I gather, in my classroom, in a way that is appropriate for the decisions I need to make. All other more specific responsibilities always come back to the idea that educators base many important decisions with serious consequences on the information that they gather from a variety of assessments. I also believe that my undergraduate, as well as current professional development opportunities, have not sufficiently prepared me to fulfill all of these responsibilities. Taking this course and reading this book have opened my eyes to the many ways that I can improve how I fulfill those responsibilities from now on in my classroom.
There are three general responsibilities that I definitely agree with strongly. They are; responsibilities when crafting assessment procedures, responsibilities when choosing assessment procedures, and responsibilities when interpreting and using assessment results. The first two have become an increasingly important part of my overall teaching philosophy. I believe that what I have learned in this class so far, has made me more capable of crafting better assessments. They are better because I have approached creating them in a much more systematic way. I am now better informed when it comes to applying sound principles such as, task development and item writing. Being able to apply these and other principles when creating an assessment also helps to choose assessments for classroom use. Teachers are often presented with assessment procedures developed by others. It is sometimes necessary to modify or change completely these assessments to fit your purpose.
I believe that the responsibility when interpreting and using assessment results are extremely important. The specific responsibility that I connected with the most was the second one under that heading; to interpret students’ performance on one assessment by considering the results from other assessments. I strongly agree that, “no single assessment procedure is comprehensive enough to cover every important learning target.” I find myself constantly looking for multiple ways to assess whether or not a student has reached the desired learning targets. I refuse to base important decisions such as retaining a student, solely on his or her performance on one assessment.
I am finding it difficult to disagree with any of the responsibilities discussed in this chapter. If I have to disagree with something, I guess it would be the idea that it is the teacher’s responsibility to use the results of standardized tests in an appropriate way. I do believe that the results should be interpreted properly. I do not believe that teachers are given the necessary information to be able to do so. I have personally never seen more than a final score on those tests for my students. Yet I have been told that I am responsible for creating academic interventions for students who have scored below a scaled score of 3. Those scores hold little meaning for me when I am developing these plans. I have looked at chapter 16 and agree with much of what is discussed in the section about the misuses of standardized test results. I feel that, unfortunately, teachers hands are tied in many ways when it comes to standardized test results.
Teachers have many decisions to make. Some have more serious and long lasting consequences. If we as educators do not take our responsibilities concerning assessments seriously we will not make the best decisions we can possibly make and may cause harm to our students.