Teacher Discussion Forums

Hellow everybody!
I am about to become an English teacher and i am taking a course on alternative assesment.
I wanted to ask you how do you assess your students knowledge ?
and if you have other suggestions in addition to tests, i will be happy to hear about it
Thank you all
Shiran

You could choose a performance-based assessment in the form of group projects, student portfolios or journals. These types of assessments may be more time-consuming than a typical test because students are being tested on the process of performing various tasks and meeting the objectives. This type of assessment is learner-centered and allows for students to show their creativity in the process. This could be a fun alternative to tests!

For courses in writing, having individual conferences with the students might be a great idea, too! There are many different purposes for conferences including:
- reviewing and commenting on writing drafts
- reviewing portfolios
- responding to journals
- guiding a student on their plan for a project or paper
- discussing feedback on an evaluation
- helping the student to establish goals for their near future

Conferences are a wonderful tool because they allow for private interaction that students might need in order to feel comfortable asking questions and taking constructive criticism. Also, the teacher can use their role as a facilitator and/guide instead of being a looked at as a controller, manager, director, or someone who gives the final grade. The students should find conferences as intrinsically motivating! Hope this helps!

Formal tests are great tools in measuring your students abilities or knowledge in a given domain. They are carefully designed and have identifiable scoring rubric. However, if you want to measure a much wider domain and the ongoing process, you may want to use an assessement. Tests are subsets of assessment. Other kinds of assassment that you may want to use are group projects, individual/group presentation, journals, conferences, observations/fieldnotes, portfolios, and self- and peer-assessment----just to name a few. Hope this helps!