I thought assessment looked a very specific way and the knowledge I had of assessment mainly consisted of assessment my previous teachers had used. My perspective on assessment was narrow simply because I had never experienced any other alternative forms of assessment. I never fully understood how limited my perspective was Hinchey (2010) compared it to music. The analogy she used was that people who have listened to rock music their whole life will have a limited concept of what music can be in respect to genre, style, mood, culture, etc. (Hinchey, 2010, p. 34). I knew a times new roman three-point essay, short answer and multiple-choice like the back of my hand but not much past that. Volante (2006) noted that this is effective in measuring reading comprehensive skills but misses the representation speaking and listening skills almost entirely (p. 138). Not only is this an inaccurate depiction of the skills students form throughout the year, but it also favours students who excel at reading comprehension and gives them an unfair advantage.
Summative assessment provides students with opportunities and as stated in Brown, Race and Smith (2004), can lead to a qualification that allows individuals to have certain professions. School is the starting point of change in society and teachers need to be particularly sensitive to issues regarding gender, class, and race to ensure they are a main contributing factor to the inequalities and unfair advantages that exist in society. I thought of politics in the classroom as simply interactions that occur between you and your students, but instruction and assessment are an integral part of that. I thought of assessment and instruction as mutually exclusive before this class and believed that being able to rattle off names and facts was an indication of knowledge. Sackstein (2017) disrupts this when stating that, “feedback isn’t separate from teaching: the teaching is in the feedback” (p. 41). I now know how vital assessment and feedback is when it comes to learning, and that reiteration is a mere factor of authentic knowledge.
Dochy and McDowell (1997) wrote about “authentic assessment”, a new form of assessment that accounts for skills such as communication, information technology, and personal or interpersonal skills such as working with others, improving own learning and performance, and problem-solving are important (p. 284). In my short time at pre-internship, I noticed how many students were completely unfamiliar and uncomfortable with problem-solving and open-ended questions that required them to apply knowledge. It was extremely difficult and uncomfortable to give these but the quality of answers and collaboration it led to was far better than the specific information questions. This reminded me of the point made in the lecture from week three, where it was stated that 21st-century jobs are not just labour and basic task-oriented like they were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. If society favours creativity, ingenuity and engineering in individuals, then assessment and instruction should be tailored towards these attributes. What I had never thought about before this course was how often assessment looks for one specific answer to be given, and how that deters away from individuality and imagination.