Assessment for special need students
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Kay Lombard
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Sun Feb 29, 2004 9:54 pm
Assessment for special need students
How do teachers ensure against bias in their assessments and differentiate them for kids with special needs? Some teachers ensure against bias by writing student's name on the back of tests to eliminate favoring any student. Some teachers write numbers on tests so they can't identify the student until they look up the number with the corresponding name.
Last edited by Kay Lombard on Tue Mar 02, 2004 4:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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serendipity
- Posts: 110
- Joined: Mon Mar 01, 2004 4:49 pm
- Location: Wiener Neustadt, Austria
Bias...
Well, I suppose a minimal amount of bias will *always* be there, no matter how much care you take to be objective. It makes a difference, for example, if a paper is neatly written and well-organized, or if you've got to do a whole lot of guess-work in order to figure out what the student had meant to say.
Generally, I *like* the overwhelming majority of my students, and I'm not really the sort of person who bears a grudge. My goal is to see them improve, and resentment because they feel that I've discriminated against them for what reason ever would stand in the way of improvement - and this holds true both for "ordinary students" and for kids with special needs.
I usually grade papers without looking at the names, but I don't really feel I'd have to take special precautions against bias. Somehow this is much less of an issue than I had thought before I went into teaching - a general atmosphere of trust and mutual goodwill is much more important than each and every grade being 100 percent objectifyable - they've got to trust me to be able to tell good English from not-quite-so-good English, and they've got to trust me not to double-cross them at will.
And they usually do. I think that's what this boils down to, ultimately. It's a matter of trust.
Generally, I *like* the overwhelming majority of my students, and I'm not really the sort of person who bears a grudge. My goal is to see them improve, and resentment because they feel that I've discriminated against them for what reason ever would stand in the way of improvement - and this holds true both for "ordinary students" and for kids with special needs.
I usually grade papers without looking at the names, but I don't really feel I'd have to take special precautions against bias. Somehow this is much less of an issue than I had thought before I went into teaching - a general atmosphere of trust and mutual goodwill is much more important than each and every grade being 100 percent objectifyable - they've got to trust me to be able to tell good English from not-quite-so-good English, and they've got to trust me not to double-cross them at will.
And they usually do. I think that's what this boils down to, ultimately. It's a matter of trust.