Week 3 questions IP&T 301

1. What are some examples of formative and summative assessments? Can a formative assessment be used as a summative assessment later?
-Formative assessments can be anything like homework assignments and quizzes. These kinds of assessments make it so teachers can plan what instructions they need to give their students as they progress through their grading area.
-Summative assessment can be things such as test and cumulative projects. These kinds of assessments are used to assess how a student is doing at the end of a grading period rather then during a grading period.
-In many cases a part of a formative assessment can be used for a summative assessment, but not usually a whole one. The reason I say this is because a formative assessment is assessing detail information that children are studying in the unite. Because the information is more detail, most teachers would not expect their students to remember all of, but just portions of it instead.

2. What is the difference between a standardized aptitude test and a standardized achievement test? Are they criterion-referenced or norm-referenced test?
-A standardized aptitude test assess a students future potential such as their capacity to learn. These test are then used by teachers in helping to place them in particular areas such as special classes or schools.
-A standardized achievement test asses current knowledge students have and help to identify the different strengths and weakness students have
-for both of these test, they could be used as a criterion or norm referenced test. It really depends on whether the education system wants to compare their students to a certain standard or a norm sample. Depending on which one of these the teacher chooses will determine which reference they will fall under.

3. Please read the case scenario on pg. 518-519. After reading the teacher responses, in your opinion, how concerned should Alexandria be about fall standardized scores?
-I feel that Alexandria should not be to concern, yet should still take a few actions on improving the test score. As many of the teachers pointed out, there were many factors of concern/ problems that could have affected the test, yet even with all these factors, the scores don’t seem to be extremely low yet. So although some improvements need to take place in order to improve test scores, I don’t feel that the school as of yet needs to make giant changes in improving their test scores.

4. How do you think you might specifically use the information from Modules 26 & 29 as a classroom teacher? What about as a parent?
-as a teacher, I see that there are a lot of different types of test/assessment that can be given to help determine different things about students. Because of this, I would want to use a number of these assessments and not just one. By using only one, it seems that you a limited on the information you can gain about your student and therefore cannot help them completely
-As a parent, this information helps me know different things about my child. I can see that just because my child did badly on one test, it does not mean that he is bad overall in his school curriculum. Instead, I can see that there may be a couple of areas to help my child improve in, but I would know that my child was probably not failing in ALL of his education.