Assessment Article

Article: Assessment design- helping preservice teachers focus on student thinking

For this article it talked about how to make tests and quizzes the best way to find out the most information on a student. Tests and quizzes can be just a way to check memorization and facts but it can also really look at how a student is thinking. The right questions must be asked though to really pull the information from the student. If a teacher wants to just look at the students steps in a problem they can have short answer questions where students write out their whole process of the problem. This way teachers can see where a student might go wrong or if they just made a minor mistake. Using tests and quizzes to have students use higher level thinking can be difficult. Teachers must make sure they are asking the right types of questions. This takes a lot more time rather than copying and pasting some simple math problems for them to do. They recommend teachers to use lots of different types of assessments. All the kinds of assessments that are out there are beneficial in some way. While tests and quizzes have been the main focus of most math classrooms for awhile that doesn't mean you should no longer use them at all.