Out of the three articles, I felt that the last one that I chose to read, "Gaining Insight into Students' Thinking Through Assessment" was both the most interesting and helpful. Honestly, when reading about backwards design it never occurred to me that educators planned lessons any other way. I have never planned a lesson or activity without beginning at the end and first considering the desired results. How can you plan a lesson without really thoroughly thinking about where you want it to go and what you want the students to accomplish intellectually? It was interesting however to read about the "backward design" phenomenon and acquire an actual term for the particular philosophy, which apparently I had been looking at a bit naively.
That being said, the actual snapshots of multiple activities in the 3rd assessment article really made me reconsider the outcomes of certain assessment questions. For example, the author provided 8 different answers they had received from the question, "The Clearview Little League is going to a Pirates game. There are 532 people, including players, coaches, and parents. They will travel by bus and each bus holds 40 people. How many buses will they need to get to the game?” When I first glanced at the answers (and then took 5 minutes to do the math in my head, I thought, yep ’14,’” but as I began to look closely at how each student worked out the problem, I noticed that even though some of the students had the correct number answer, they clearly still did not fully understand the math they were performing. One of the students actually divided wrong getting the answer of 14 R12 instead of 13 R12 but because of their logic, they technically wrote down the right answer.
This solidified for me the importance of students’ assessments including explanations, presentations, written work, and the like. As teachers we have to, as the backward design model insists, remain focused on the real goals of assessments. When we assess we must assess not just the answers or the students’ abilities to fill in a blank with the appropriate information, but our students’ understanding; the process of their learning not just what they “learned.”
I think this is a very good point. It is just as important to know how a student came to their answer instead of only if they had the correct answer. Assessing a student's understanding is much harder than assessing their answers. This is why I think assessments sometimes stray away from their main goal: to find out what the students are capable of and to make sure they are using the correct terminology and tools to come to their response.
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