Thursday, 6 February 2014

Reading Response -- Chapter 5

Summary:
The fifth chapter, entitled "Evidence of Learning" touched upon things that I feel passionately about -- a more summative approach to assessment.  Davies discusses the different sources a teacher can look at to assess a student's learning and she introduced the very interesting concept of triangulation.

Response: 
As I had mentioned before, I really love assessing students based on their evidence of learning rather than, for example, memorization for an exam.  I still run into this issue in university.  I've taken a few biology classes over the past two years, as thy correspond with my biology minor, and every syllabus that I would get would be essentially the same thing -- A midterm(s) and a final comprising 80+% of my final grade and a few extra assignments sprinkled in to top off the percentage.  Unfortunately for me, I'm not all that good at exams.  Throughout the years, I have tried several different study techniques, but they've all proven to be sub-par.

I don't feel as though my 60s and 70s are indicative of what I have learned in those classes.  I could tell you exactly why an electric car is useless in Saskatchewan and why Hydro-power isn't as green as people make it out to be, and I learned those things in my environmental biology class.  The class in which I failed the midterm. 

I found the topic of triangulation to be really interesting.  It shows teachers how to balance three different kinds of evidence over a period of time that bring out trends and patterns of people's learning.  The diagram on page 53 showing the triangulation of evidence for a grade nine English class really helped me tie together the theory, and it's something I think I'd like to take a deeper look into.

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