Jessi Towne

EDUG 507
PRQ #4
September 29, 2015

You may have heard the phrase Cs get degrees. In my mind, a C

might as well have been an F. It was only through self-discipline and hard
work that I was able to persevere in school. All of my teachers and professors
cared about me and wanted me to succeed in school, even if I did not
perform well on the assessments. I want to care about my students in the
same way my teachers cared about me and help them succeed in their
educational endeavors. In order to accurately assess how my students are
performing in my classroom, pre-assessments, formative assessments, and
summative assessments are essential for students academic growth.
The only assessment measures I was familiar with were tests, papers,
and workbooks. There was no differentiation or engagement of the students.
My senior year of high school, I took an elective called History Through Film,
in which we watched movies following American history. After we finished
watching a movie, we would have a class discussion about the main ideas
and then write a paper to determine our grasp of the concepts. With only
assessing us with class discussions and papers, the measuring standard my
teacher used in grading us was the criterion-referenced standards which
involve comparing a students performance to prespecified standards set by

the teacher, usually indicated in percentages of material learned (Burden &

Byrd, 2013, p. 319). We were only assessed after the material was
presented. Sometimes the movies were difficult to understand, and it would
have helped to have pre-assessments to gauge what we already knew about
the topic and what content was going to be presented in the movie.
Not all assessments have to be the same. As a teacher, it is crucial to
know your learners and meet their needs. According to TPE 3.1, Candidates
understand and use a variety of informal and formal, as well as formative
and summative assessments, at varying levels of cognitive demand to
determine students progress and plan instruction (Commission on Teacher
Credentialing (CTC), 2013). Formative assessments are what the teacher
gives in the middle of a lesson. Today, my 2nd graders were working on a
math lesson comparing greater than, less than, and equal to symbols. One of
the strategies my teacher used was the I do-we do-you do strategy. She did
the first problem by showing the students how to do it, the next problem she
did with the students, and the final few she had the students do by
themselves for a final check for understanding.
According to Vygotskys (1978) zone of proximal development, if a
student is doing fine when working with an adult or other peers but
struggling when working by himself, his actual development is lower than his
potential development (Interaction between learning and development, p.
208). My master teacher did a great job of modeling formative assessment

for me so I can see how effective it is in teaching and helping students to

learn the material.
One of the ways I can enhance and enlarge student learning is through
summative assessment. Universal Design for Learning allows my students to
use Multiple Means of Action/Expression to have creative control about how
they would like to present the information I have taught them (Universal
Design for Learning, 2014, p. 9). All students are different and have various
ways of receiving and presenting information. According to Howard Gardner
(1991), some students are musically intelligent, some are mathematically
intelligent, and some are spatially intelligent (Creating the future:
Intelligence in seven steps, p. 98). By using Multiple Means of
Action/Expression, students can present the information from the summative
assessment in a way that makes sense to him or her.
Education for our students is crucial. In order to properly and
accurately assess our students, teachers have to make sure to provide preassessments, formative assessments, and summative assessments to better
prepare our students for their educational futures.

References
Burden, P.R., & Byrd, D.M. (2013). Assessing and Reporting Student
Performance. Methods for effective teaching (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
Burkhardt, W. (2014, July 1). Universal Design for Learning: An Overview and
Examples of How to Use It in the Classroom. Retrieved September 24,
2015, from
http://learn.vanguard.edu/pluginfile.php/420250/mod_resource/content/1/
UDL - Burkhardt.pdf
Commission on Teacher Credentialing. (2013). California teaching
performance expectations. Retrieved from
http://www.ctc.ca.gov/educator-prep/TPA-files/TPEs-Full-Version.pdf
Gardner, H. (1991). Creating the future: Intelligence in seven steps.
Baltimore, MD: New Horizons for Learning.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Interaction between learning and development. In

Mind and Society: The development of higher psychological processes
(pp. 79-91). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.