Assessment is a crucial part of the educational process, but it can be hard for teachers to break outside of the test and quiz norm. It is an important skill to develop however, as teachers need to be able to assess their students accurately, and tests rarely are able to show the full potential of all students. Another issue to consider is how to properly assess that students are actually learning properly under the Know-Be-Do Framework. To accomplish both of these goals, a teacher could create a Rich Performance Assessment Task (Drake, Reid, & Kolohon, 2014). I personally love the idea of the Rich Performance Assessment Task. Essentially, Rich Performance Assessment Tasks, or RPATs, are large projects that require a significant effort on the students’ part. The task that they are expected to complete should be one that the students feel is worth doing, and that gives them authentic opportunities to use their skills and display their abilities and what they have learned (Drake et al., 2014). It also can involve some degree of authentic assessment, where the students are not just expected to memorize, but instead learn skills they will be able to use later in life, in more practical contexts! This video does a really great job of explaining (in a creative way!) what authentic assessment is.
Chelvanayagam, M. (2014) Authentic assessment. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlHUqHTxgLc
I realize now that I have completed Rich Performance Assessment Tasks in school, and personally I loved them. Creative projects are almost always more fun than taking a test, in my opinion anyways, and I feel like it can give students a better opportunity to fully show what they know. I remember completing an “Unconventional Book Report” in grade four on the novel James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. We were given the option of either creating a short movie summarizing the book or a diorama that showed the main events of the book. Alternatively, we could write a short paper summarizing the book, but I do remember that NO ONE chose that option. The dioramas and movies that people made were all so different, and represented so many different ways of looking at the book. It demonstrated not just our memory of the events of the book, but also our abilities to identify important plot points, who the main characters were, and our presentation abilities, as we had to give a short talk about our projects, explaining them to the class. We had an amazing time completing this project, and learned so much from it.
This method of assessing is so valuable for teachers to keep in mind, and as future teachers we need to start considering things like this now. The website TeachHub offers suggestions for creative assignments that could be given at http://www.teachhub.com/40-alternative-assessments-learning With a little bit of creativity, teachers can find so many different ways to assess the Know-Be-Do areas of a lesson in their students, and make the classroom a dynamic and fun learning environment!
References
Chelvanayagam, M. (2014) Authentic assessment. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch v=tlHUqHTxgLc
Drake, S.M., Reid, J.L., & Kolohon, W. (2014). Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment: Engaging the 21st century learner. Don Mills, ON: Oxford.
