Educational assessment is a process of documenting the learners’ knowledge, attitudes and skills. Assessment focuses on an individual student, course group, or an organization. Assessment in learning is an essential practice to every instructor.
An Instructor assesses the students’ learning process using two major approaches. Traditional assessment relies on forced choice and written measures while authentic assessment involves the incorporation of a variety of written and performance measures.
Summary
Assessment is an essential component in realizing the success of a teaching process. Students regard assessment as an important part of their academic work. As a result, they dedicate most of their time on assessed academic work. Most students spend a significantly small portion of their time on non-accessed academic work (Lombardia, 2008).
To transform students’ learning, the concerned individuals should focus on improving the current system of learning. Several factors necessitate the need to change the current methods of assessment. These include the economic conditions, availability scholarship, and the students’ population.
Institutions of higher learning should recommend strategies for equipping students with the skills necessary for realising economic development. Considering the market demand, graduates should be well equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge by the time they leave college.
Subjecting students to a huge workload of learning materials at a go significantly affects their understanding power. Therefore, students should be provided with a few learning materials that are more specific in their content.
Of late, there has been an observable trend among the undergraduate students preferring to be taught more on innovation unlike in the past where students were only concerned with the final mark at the end of their course (Lombardi 2008).
The Implementation of the authentic assessment goals may be complicated in some scenarios. For example, most faculties think that accommodating open-ended challenges in the actual cases of problem solving is challenging. However, research shows that several methods have proven to be effective among various academic faculties. These methods include rubrics, research portfolios and peer assessments.
By using a grading rubric that comprises of a given set of scoring guidelines, the assessor can differentiate easily between a brilliant and a poor student. Another strategy that instructors use is known as Peer assessment. Students are presented with an opportunity to think critically and share the assessment workload.
Unlike the individual projects, group work assignments often relate to the actual scenarios in the marketplace. Furthermore, students seem undertake their group work assignments more seriously if they are graded. However, it is significantly challenging for instructors to evaluate this mode of learning (Lombardi, 2008).
Moreover, in the undergraduate curriculum, the formative assessment strategy employs the use of research portfolios. The portfolio assignments enable the replication of numerous reporting procedures that occur in the real world situations, and students are required to evaluate and solve various problems.
In conclusion, the author provides various methods of incorporating the actual scenarios into the normal undergraduate learning experience. This includes case studies, literature reviews, simulation and project-based learning.
In my opinion, if instructors adopt these methods, the undergraduate learning experience will be significantly transformed. Furthermore, student’s assessment impacts positively on the various aspects of learning and instruction.
Reference
Lombardi, M. (2008). Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning. Learning Initiative , 30(19), 1-16.