Chapter 7b

One thing I enjoyed reading about in this section of text was assessment and evaluation. It is common for educators to often mistake or confuse one for the other. This chapter makes it clear that assessment is the process of seeing how and what students are understanding and evaluation is the process of understanding what makes sense from the assessment given to students. Assessment has many purposes such as help learning, find strengths and weaknesses of students' abilities and knowledge, find how useful a specific activity, strategy, or program is to the students, to improve instruction, to aid in decision making for each student, and to provide the parents, school, district, and state with information so that all may understand where students are in the educational process. By assessing and evaluating, an educator may see that he or she needs to expand or even review a subject so the students may build upon their knowledge. In my own classroom, I plan to use assessment for these previously stated reasons as well as to help me, as the educator, understand what I need to do to help my students succeed inside and outside the classroom. I want to give my students all that I can during my time as their teacher and I believe that assessments will aid in accomplishing that goal.