Another busy week at ISHCMC completed. It has been a good week for demonstrating who we are as a school. It started with Graduation for the Class of 2015 which was an excellent showpiece for our school and community. We had excellent speeches from An Vo the student elected speaker, Han Byeol Kim, the Valedictorian and our guest speaker Thoa Hung Nguyen, author of We are here , the story of the escape of Thao's family from persecution traverses the horrific jungles of Khmer Rouge Cambodia and into the crowded refugee camps of Thailand. The school choir and orchestra complemented the speeches performing beautifully Then the week closed with the final Grade 5 assembly of the year which demonstrated how independent and talented this group of students have become. Any parent watching would have been proud to have their child educated at ISHCMC. Followed by a wonderful end of year staff party.
This weeks food for thought builds on the conference I attended and the article by Grant Wiggins from last weekend. This shortened TED video, only 4 minutes lays down the challenge that we need to be thinking about as we prepare our students for the modern world not that of the newly industrialized 19th century.
This article which futher contributes to the discussion by raising the question of how we should assess students today for our modern world.
"21st Century Skills, 
trans-disciplinary skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration, communicating using various technologies, and learning to learn. In the paper, “21st Century Skills Assessment,” the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2007) describes this need and the implication for assessments of students:- The tests are not designed to gauge how well students apply what they know to new situations or evaluate how students might use technologies to solve problems or communicate ideas.
- While teachers and schools are being asked to modify their practice based on standardized test data, the tests are not designed to help teachers make decisions about how to target their daily instruction.
In an era in which students can “google” much of the world’s knowledge on a smart phone, an argument can be made that the outcomes of modern schooling should place a greater emphasis on
“While the current assessment landscape is replete with assessments that measure knowledge of core content areas such as language arts, mathematics, science and social studies, there is a comparative lack of assessments and analyses focused on 21st century skills. Current tests fall short in several key ways:
The Partnership proposes that needed assessments should “be largely performance-based and authentic, calling upon students to use 21st century skills” (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, 2007, p. 6). I agree!
Many current classroom- and school-level assessments focus on the most easily measured objectives. The pressures of high-stakes accountability tests have exacerbated this tendency as teachers devote valuable class time to “test prep” (at least in the tested subject areas) involving practice with multiple-choice and brief constructed-response items that mimic the format of standardized tests. While selected-response and short-answer assessments are fine for assessing discrete knowledge and skills, they are incapable of providing evidence of the skills deemed most critical for the 21st century.
Dr. Linda Darling Hammond, a professor at Stanford University and authority on international education and assessment practices, elaborates on this point (2013):
As educators, we know that today’s students will enter a workforce in which they will have to not only acquire information, but also analyze, synthesize, and apply it to address new problems, design solutions, collaborate effectively, and communicate persuasively. Few, if any, previous generations have been asked to become such nimble thinkers. Educators accept the responsibility to prepare our students for this new and complex world. We also know that in our current high-stakes context, what is tested increasingly defines what gets taught. Unfortunately, in the United States, the 21st century skills our students need have gotten short shrift because our current multiple-choice tests do not test or encourage students’ use of these skills.
Ironically, the widespread use of narrow, inauthentic assessments and test prep practices at the classroom level can unwittingly undermine the very competencies called for by the next generation academic Standards and 21st Century Skills. To be blunt, students will not be equipped to handle the sophisticated work expected in colleges and much of the workforce if teachers simply march through “coverage” of discrete knowledge and skills in grade-level standards and assess learning primarily through multiple-choice tests of de-contextualized items. Moreover, such teaching and assessment practices are unlikely to develop the transferable “big ideas” and fundamental processes of the disciplines. Moreover, they deprive students of relevant and engaging learning experiences.
In order to counter to these trends, we need to significantly increase the use of authentic performance tasks that require students to apply their learning in genuine contexts. We need to assess the performance outcomes that matter most, not simply those objectives that are easiest to test and grade. Indeed, meaningful and lasting learning will be enhanced when school curricula are constructed “backward” from a series of rich performance tasks that reflect the “end-in-mind” performances demanded for college and career readiness."
For a collection of authentic performance tasks and associated rubrics, see Defined STEM: http://www.definedstem.com
For more information about the design and use of performance tasks, see Core Learning: Assessing What Matters Most by Jay McTighe: http://www.schoolimprovement.com
Article originally posted:
URL: http://www.performancetask.com/why-should-we-use-performance-tasks/ | Article Title: Why Should We Use Performance Tasks? | Website Title: PerformanceTask.com | Publication date: 2015-05-04
URL: http://www.performancetask.com/why-should-we-use-performance-tasks/ | Article Title: Why Should We Use Performance Tasks? | Website Title: PerformanceTask.com | Publication date: 2015-05-04
No comments:
Post a Comment