Conclusion

     

     Well, I have been sharing some forms of assessments for the past few weeks and I hope you gain something through what I wrote. Assessments happen in our everyday lives and it can be in so many different forms. Even though through all my posts, the assessment that I am talking about are all about education, but you need to understand that assessment happens in all sorts of situations. 

     

     Throughout this assignment, I know that there are two types of assessment, which is the Formative assessment and Summative assessment. These two types of assessments are used widely in the education system, where the teacher may not realize that they are actually having assessment in their classroom. Formative assessment is an ongoing assessment that provides information that will be used by the teachers to improve their teaching. And the summative assessment is the assessment that occurs at the end of a period of time or a unit of learning. These assessment information should be used to benefit the children through improved teaching and learning. 

     Through this assignment, I gained a lot of experiences. And the most significant experience to me is searching for information. It is not easy to search for topics related to assessment through the internet and then you have to relate it to your past experiences. Time management is also another thing that I learnt about throughout the assignment. We should be updating out blog weeks by weeks but I sometimes missed a week and did not update my blog. Managing my time is very important in order to complete all the work on time. This assignment has finally come to an end and thank you for all the help from my course mates and also our lecturer Miss Moon. 

     

Essay Writing

     

    Good morning everybody! :) Today's topic will be about essay, which is another form of assessment that teachers used in today's classroom. Essays can be long or short, depending on the questions and it is usually about the writer's own argument about the questions. Erm, in Malaysia's education system, there will always be essays questions during the examinations and this is unavoidable. No matter how much you hate to do essay questions, you still have to do it. The reason i chose this topic is because I have experienced this kind of assessment and the feedback i got from this kind of assessment is a wonderful one. 

    The purpose of essay as an assessment is to test the student's writing skills, their on-the-spot reaction when answering, their creativity and also their knowledge. Through essay writing, a teacher can spot if the students read extra information or not. An argumentative type essays requires the student to support their own stand and if the student read a lot materials, argumentative essays are easy to him because he is able to support his argument with relevant proofs and data. This type of assessment is easy, where the teachers need to read the students' works and give appropriate marks based on their works. There will be rubrics for the assessment and teachers may or may not follow the rubrics as different students will produce different essays and not all their essays fit the rubrics. As long as the teacher think their essays fits to what the question wants, then the students will gain appropriate marks.

     My opinion about this type of assessment is that teachers tend to be bias when it comes to marking the paper. If the teacher favors this student, the students work will gain slightly higher marks if compare to the other students' works. In order to overcome this issue, the teacher can ask the students to write down their ID number on their question paper. Like this, the teacher will not know whose paper is she marking and she will be able to mark the papers fairly. Also, do not allow the subject teacher to go into the classroom during the examination because some teachers tend to give hints or tell the students if they answer the questions right or wrong. 

     I think that is all from me for this post and the next post will be the conclusion about the assessment. Ciao! :)

Project-based Learning

    

     Good day everyone! :) How's life lately? Mine has been hectic since it is currently assignments' week. So, today's post will be about project-based learning, another type of assessment method that teachers implemented in the classroom. The reason I chose project-based learning is that it is a fun assessment method for me and I think that project-based learning is a good way to strengthen what the students have learn in the classroom. It allows the students to investigate a matter or a complex problem based on their knowledge. The students will be able to gain more knowledge and skills after they have done the project. 

     The purpose of project-based learning is to help the students to gain more knowledge and skills after they gain the basic knowledge their teacher teaches in the classroom. The students need to explore on a complex matter with the knowledge they have learnt. They need to investigate the problem and think of a solution to solve it. Through this process, they are able to expand the knowledge and learn different types of skills. And about how project-based learning assessment is conducted, it is very easy. The subject teacher will be assessing from the side and only interrupt when needed. The teacher will be assessing if the students cooperate well with each other, if they are able to solve the problem or if they are creative in their problem-solving processes. 

     

     Project-based learning requires the students to solve higher complex problems and to solve these higher complex problems, the students need to have fundamental skills (reading, writing, Mathematics) and also 21st century skills (teamwork, problem solving, research gathering, time management). Through this project-based learning, the students are encouraged to become independent workers, critical thinkers and also lifelong learners. Project-based learning can be independent work or group work, depending on the teachers. Through this approach, the students can learn how to be independent in solving the complex problems. They know that they have to explore the knowledge on their own if they want to solve the problems creatively when compare to others. 

     This project-based learning gives every student a chance to demonstrate his or her capabilities during the process. Teachers might not realize the student's capabilities and project-based learning is a good way to let the teachers to learn more about their students, whether it is their skills, their attitudes or what they are capable in, 

     I personally favors project-based learning and I support that this approach is used frequently in the classroom, maybe twice in a month as it helps the students to become engaged in the everyday teaching and learning processes. As for the ways to improve this type of assessment, teachers can get involved in the students' discussion or brainstorming sessions more often. Maybe teachers wanted the students to think on their own and be independent during the whole process. But, if the teachers are involve in the discussion sessions, students are able to think out of the box and get lots of interesting ideas. Teachers do not need to spoon feed the answers to the students but instead asking the 5W1H questions and lead the students to think in a different direction. We want our students to be creative and innovative and why not join in their discussion and help them out a little bit? Also, teachers should avoid bias and favoritism during the assessment process as it will be really unfair to the rest of the students. 

     I guess that's all for today. Enjoy reading and have a good day! :) 

Read more : http://www.edutopia.org/project-based-learning-guide-importance

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (MCQ)

     Hello everyone! Today, I will be taking about Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) as MCQ is also a type of assessment that are being used in the school. I remembered when I was still young, I LOVE MCQ examination. This is because MCQ exam is very simple and it does not consume a lot of time. If you ask around, you will find out that your friends like MCQ exam for the same reason. They will tell you that they like MCQ exams because they can just "tembak" for the answers and they do not need to study much for the MCQ exams. 

     The purpose of MCQ exam is to measure the students' knowledge, skills, abilities, values and thinking skills. Even though most of us would agree that MCQ exams are easy and simple, but it can actually evaluate if the students ever do their revision or read through the books. MCQ is very easy to conduct, whereby the teacher will set the items and each items will contain three to four options for the students to choose. Each set of MCQ will have a time limit for the students to answer. For example, one and a half hour for the students to answer 40 MCQ. 

     MCQ consists of a stem and a set of options. The stem is the question or problem to be solved and the options are the possible answers that the students can choose from.The correct answer in the options is called the KEY and the incorrect answers are the DISTRACTORS. 

     The advantage of the MCQ is that it takes less time to complete. Each question in the MCQ set only required less than one minute to answer. If you do your revision, when you read the question, you can straight away locate the answers from the options. Because it takes less time to complete, more questions can be assessed. Teachers can set a lot of questions to assess the students because the students doesn't need a long time to answer the questions. Also, MCQ gives feedback in a short time, whereby the teacher only need to mark the correct answers based on the marking schemes. The teachers do not need to think if the students' answers is relevant or not because in MCQ there will only be a correct answer and the rest of the options are irrelevant. 

     My opinion about MCQ is that students tend to receive higher marks in comparison with the other types of assessments. MCQs are easy and students can score better because they can guess the answers even when they do not study. This can sometimes be very unfair to those who study the whole book and they do not score well than those who just guessed the answers. Besides, MCQ cannot test the students' oral and written skills. Most examinations are to test the students' skills, mostly on their oral and written skills but MCQ does not test those skills. It can only be used to test the students' knowledge, the theories that they have learnt. As for the ways to improve MCQ, I hope the teachers would check the items that they set for the MCQ examinations to ensure that the questions do not repeats. From my experience, there will always be repeated questions for the MCQ exams. Teachers need to check through the questions, from number one to the last question, to ensure there is no questions repeating. Also, the teachers need to be careful when preparing the items for the MCQ to make sure that there is only one key for each question as there will always be incidents like one question having two answers and the students will get bonus marks for that question.