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Traditional vs. Alternative Assessment
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Traditional vs. Alternative Assessment
Tijani Fearon
Kimoy Beroni-Scarlett
Zarah Tyndale-Murray
Christan Young
Definition of Assessment
What is Assessment?
According to the Glossary of Education Reform, the term assessment refers to the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students.
Traditional Assessment Definition
According to IGI Global, traditional assessment refers to such testing techniques as multiple choice questions, fill-in-the-blanks, true-false, matching, and essays.
Traditional
Advantages of Traditional Assessment
According to Flight Literacy, tests of this nature do have a place in the assessment hierarchy. Multiple choice, supply type, and other such tests are useful in assessing the student’s grasp of information, concepts, terms, processes, and rules—factual knowledge that forms the foundation needed for the student to advance to higher levels of learning.
Advantages
Examples
Examples
12. What does the diagram above represent?
a. carbon cycle b. air cycle c. water cycle
d. nitrogen cycle
13. In the diagram, which process is taking place at the section labeled ‘A’?
a. collection b. evaporation c. condensation
d. precipitation.
Alternative Assessment Definition
Alternative
Alternative assessment is a form of student performance grading that allows for a more holistic approach to student assessment. The traditional form of student assessment involves the average grading of a cumulative set of work for a given time period. With alternative assessments, students are enabled to provide their own responses rather than simply selecting from a given list of options (Teachnology, 2019).
Advantages
Advantages
Often because of class size or as a method for saving time in grading, traditional testing has been utilized. Alternative assessment gives the student the opportunity to demonstrate the depth and scope of what they have learned rather than being limited to just a few responses on a traditional test or exam.
The compression of an entire semester of work into a single hour of testing that can account for a major portion of a grade can often be a misrepresentation of the efforts of students.
Examples
Examples
1. Proposals: Students try out their ideas and set their own goals for learning before actually carrying out their projects.
2. Simulations: students act out various roles within a case, requires background information that can then be supplied to the role.
3. Fish Bowls: similar to debates, promotes active listening, critical inquiry, professional communication and group discussion.
Summary of Assessment
Traditional Assessment Analysis
The assessment given was a Grade Four End of Term Examination. This means that the test is supposed to evaluate the knowledge of the students over the course of the final term.
The set up of the test is fully multiple choice, which makes sense for children of that age, and contains a total of 60 questions.
The topics that are being assessed on this test are: water, air and its components, diseases and forces. According to the NSC, the topics to be explored are water and air, as well as the ability to identify examples of water-borne and air borne diseases.
Is this Test Suitable?
Is it suitable?
Looking at the topics covered in this test, it is suitable and aligned with the NSC for the time period. The cognitive domain is the only one targeted fr this test, which is reasonable for what it is. It is a 60 question, multiple choice end of term assessment.
E.g. Water in air is found as?
a. smoke
b. dust
c. vapor
d. ice
Even though this assessment is strictly cognitive, it deals with more than one area of Bloom's Taxonomy. The test contains a mixture of questions and so, even though it was not perfect it is an acceptable assessment. Too much emphasis is placed on recall in this test, one suggestion for improvement of this test would be to add some more higher order thinking questions to test students understanding and not just recall ability.
Is this a Good Test?
Is it Good?
This test targets the knowledge, comprehension and analysis levels of the pyramid. For example, there is a bar graph that has questions attached to it which requires the students to use their mathematical skills and recognize trends.
The instructions on this test are clearly given and key words are highlighted. If a diagram or graph is being used, the instructions are above it highlighting the questions it should be used for.According to Gronlund, assessment processes should emphasize students ability to link ideas, apply knowledge and solve problems. This test needs students to not just recall, although that is the chunk of the test there are a few higher order thinking questions.
Looking at the qualities of a good test, this document has many of them, the questions are relevant, especially when looking at the topics to be covered in the given term. Also this test will give the ability to discriminate between the stronger and weaker students, especially when it comes to the analysis questions.
Summary of Assessment
The alternative assessment chosen was the creative project. Creative Educator defines the creative project as the tangible products of creative behavior and creative thinking. A project is creative when:
1. It asks, or attempts to answer the correct questions.
2. Requires collaboration or cooperation.
3. Is unique.
Alternative Assessment Analysis
Is It Suitable?
Is this Assessment Suitable?
For Grade 4 Science a creative project is suitable. It combines all the domains of learning. Cognitive in that they have to know what they are talking about and make meaningful connections. It touches the affective in that the students are in charge of their own learning and changing their own thinking. It also affects the psycho-motor aspect as students have to be hands-on in their approach to making the project.
Is it Good?
This type of assessment is good for children of this age for the purpose of an end of term project. This is because they will have adequate time to work on such a large presentation and learning will be ongoing as during the term they will learn new things that they can add to make their presentation better.
One issue that can arise with this form of assessment is making sure that the students are actually the ones doing the work. In many cases parents get overly involved in such types of carry-home or long term assessments. This can invalidate any results obtained as the students did not have as much input to learn as needed.
To eliminate this, projects can be done at school, during allotted times, giving the teacher a way to observe work being done, answer questions, clear up misconceptions and evaluate learning.
Longmore Elementary and Junior High School End of Year Creative Project
Three topics were give to span the time period and topics were assigned to groups of four.
The students will make a model and present an oral presentation at the school science fair. There is also a written presentation, to be handed to the class teacher, at the end of the time period.
The Assessment
examples
Final Thoughts
Conclusion
In conclusion, both traditional and alternative methods of assessments can be utilized and meet standardized objectives. The difference between traditional and alternative assessment are their target skills. This simply means that each has its place and should be used in the way that brings out the strengths of the assessment and the best use case in the ideal fashion.
All students can be accommodated if creativity and knowledge are employed in the assessment process.
References
References
Alternative Assessment. (n.d.). Retrieved June 17, 2019, from http://www.teach-nology.com/currenttrends/alternative_assessment/
Using Alternative Assessments. (n.d.). Retrieved June 17, 2019, from https://ctl.byu.edu/using-alternative-assessments
What is Traditional Assessment. (n.d.). Retrieved June 17, 2019, from https://www.igi-global.com/dictionary/assessment-tasks-online-courses/30335