Portfolios And Standardized Tests - Pros And Cons Portfolios and standardized tests are two types of ways teachers can assess their students. There are many advantages and disadvantages to both assessments. Right now, whether teachers agree with standardized tests or not, all teachers have to give them to their students. Portfolios on the other hand, are not required in a classroom, because it is not a required assessment for all teachers to use. Portfolios are folders that hold students works in any or all subjects that teachers choose to use them for.
They hold all different types of work a student creates. It has A work to work that needs more improvement on inside the folders. The students choose what goes in their portfolio, not the teacher. Standardized tests are tests administered to each student at the same time. They have a time limit to them and their test scores are based on the norm.
Much of school-based assessment does actually prevent students from becoming thoughtful respondents to, and to be able to judge their own work. Portfolios help students learn to assess their own progress as learners, and teachers gain new views of their accomplishments in teaching. They also give students responsibility for taking the lead in evaluating their own work, enlarging the view of what is learned, a place for process and a developmental point of view. Some important things that matter when dealing with portfolios is a student's performance on the kind of skills that appear on tests, that first-draft work is good enough and achievement matters to the exclusion of development. There are centrally two aims that teachers have for student portfolios.
The first is to design ways of evaluating student learning that, will be essentially providing information to teachers and school systems, it will also model personal responsibility in questioning and reflecting on one's own work. The second is to find ways of capturing growth over time so that students can become informed and thoughtful assessors of their own histories as learners. What teachers have students do is at the end of the school year, is let the student go back inside their portfolio and reflect on their own work. The students return to their portfolios or collections of work, and see what has changed from the beginning of the school year or what still remains to be done or worked on. This gives students a responsibility, because they are responsible for evaluating their own work.
Authentic or performance assessments do provide opportunities for students and teachers to learn, often together, about the standards of good work with respect to more valued outcomes. Each student is often incorporated in as an active agent in the evaluative process, not as an object to be evaluated. The portfolio activity is a process of production, perception, selection, and reflection that is exercised by each student over his or her collections of school work. Portfolios even provide a school district with a level of achievement. Portfolios are profoundly important to children.
All children have a natural ability and desire to tell a story through the contents of the portfolio. Student portfolios tell a story. The real contents of a portfolio are the child's thoughts and his or her reasons for selecting a particular entry. That selection process reflects the interests and the metacognitive maturity of a child and the inspiration and influence offered by the teachers. Portfolios serve as a metaphor for our continued belief in the idea that children can play a major role in the assessment scene of their own learning.
Using an authentic assessment tool could provide a more realistic picture of each student's individual subject achievement and progress by demonstrating growth and development over a period of time, involving students in assessing their own growth and reflecting many aspects of students area of knowledge and understanding.Portfolios provide teachers with information about students' progress, thought processes, achievements and needs. They should accommodate teachers' and students' individual needs, while allowing students to take an active role in assessing their work and encouraging them to take responsibility for their own learning. Students should begin to set goals for themselves and check their progress toward reaching these goals. This will help promote self-esteem.
Students and teachers can fill portfolios with individual journals entries on any subject area, explanations of problem-solving activities, individual interpretations, results of group projects or any other items that students may feel are important and demonstrate the student's abilities. Physical knowledge is gained by observing and manipulating objects. Portfolio development redirects student learning in mathematics from computation and application towards problem-solving and reasoning, which every student should have built into their classroom curriculum.They also demonstrate the value of problem solving, communication and confidence to preservice teachers and to allow these teachers to gain insights about their own students' perceptions of their teaching. Assessment in education has clearly become more of a problem in today's society. Every state reports above average scores on norm referenced achievement tests and everyone agrees that these kind of tests should not drive instruction but their number and influence should nevertheless increase.
Assessments are responsive to individual students and to school contexts. Evaluation is most accurate and equitable when it deals with human judgement and dialogue, so that the student that is being tested can ask for clarification of questions and explain his or her answers. An authentic test does not only reveal a student's achievement to the examiner, but also reveals to the test-taker the actual challenges and standards of the field.Using authentic standards and tasks to judge intellectual ability is very labor-intensive and time-consuming. An authentic test enables teachers to watch a learner pose, tackle, and solve slightly ambiguous problems. To design an authentic test, we must first decide what are the actual performances that we want students to be good at or improve on.
Most criterion referenced tests are in adequate because the problems are contrived, and the cues are artificial. All tests should involve students in the actual challenges they will face, standards, and habits needed for success in the academic disciplines or in the workplace.Standardized tests are systematically compared with the performance of other similar students. There are some negative aspects to standardized achievement tests. They begin with not being able to promote student learning, poor predictors of individual student performance, mismatched with the content emphasized in a school's curriculum and classrooms, are racially, culturally, and socially biased, measure only limited and superficial student knowledge and behaviors.
Also, standardized tests might lead some teachers to teach to the test rather then to teach material that would address broader educational goals for their students. They do have the potential for racial or gender bias and this could make standardized tests an unfair indicator of a student's competence.Standardized tests are well suited for assessing students' recall of factual knowledge and their ability to solve problems that have unambiguous right answers. When u ...
