October 16th reflections

Assessment....

I'm not sure if Piaget ever directly addressed assessment but some of of his ideas definitely indirectly can be used to help deal with the "issue of assessment". When I think of assessment, I think the most important reasons to do assessment is to gage if your teaching style is working and gage what the learners are actually understanding. Piaget says a teacher should listen, watch and question students - this is key in assessing learners. The reading says that a Piaget classroom may not have workbooks or predetermined assignments. Instead, the teacher will determine what the course of learning will be by the students' interests and natural participation. I think that when assessing learners you should be highly flexible in changing the activites or lesson plan to accomodate the learners - at their level, what they are interested in, ect. Also, it may be beneficial to assess the learner to determine what stage of development they are at.
I think Vygotsky would also agree that assessment was vital. One must assess where the learner is at in the zpd in order to offer just enough assistance and a task at high enough level but that can still be accomplished with help. Also, assessent so one knows when to decrease guidance (scaffolding).

Then of coarse there was the info on all the inteligence tests. I find them interesting and usefull to some extent but not the type of assessment I'm interested in. (I'm focused on classroom assessment - how are the learners doing and how am I as a teacher doing?)

In class we discussed zpd and the idea of "who would be the more skilled learner increasing the others zpd". In theory, you could split learners up into groups and one is going to better at "something" than the others while another is better at something else. In this aspect you would have a bunch of "slightly more skilled at something" in the group and so they would all push each other together into higher levels of zpd. This ideally would work best if the teacher really, really knew the students strengths and weakness (through monitoring and assessing) to split them up into groups that would benefit each other. I think this would be extremely hard but maybe at least somewhat possible. Plus, just having them in groups has other benefits.

It's interesting to think about how giving grades falls into Skinners theories. He would probably agree that it's good to assess and give out grades. I can't remember which one, but I know one of the theories was completely against rewards and punishments. So, I wonder if they are then against grades?