Week 8 Workshop Blog

Week 8 reading one was focussed on the assessment of writing according to Winch et al. (2010, pp.370-398). The reading was useful in determining principles of effective assessment and reporting, which included many obvious factors such as being clear and direct, balanced and comprehensive and time efficient.

 

The reading continued to discuss the assessment of writing in the classroom. It summarised that the assessment or writing should be determined by the learner’s ability to handle different kinds of writing tasks and their familiarity with the content and structure of each. It should also include the more obvious grammar and spelling aspects.

 

Later in the reader there was discussion of data collection, informal/formal assessment, and writing assessment criteria.

As a pre workshop task group members were required to take note of four methods for assessing reading or writing and construct a table.

Some of the common responses included the use of language portfolios in which students will eventually gather a wide variety of their work which shows their competencies in writing, and any improvement as the year progressed. Another assessment strategy focussed on was the cloze method which requires students to omit words or parts or speech at a particular interval. This can be done in partners.  

It was discussed amongst the group and collaboratively it was agreed that children’s assessment needs to be open ended to cater for the individual. As a follow up activity we looked at Chapter 7 of winch as a supplementary group reading and then had some discussion on the key factors. From this it was agreed that assessment needs to be closely linked to the classroom program which includes what students can do already, how will they do it, and how will I know when they have achieved.

Authentic assessment was also crucial to the reading and can be summarised as the planning of assessment around real life experiences. It can include checklists, profiles and be cumulative.

Daniel C. Kelly