Differentiated/ Personalized Assessment

Differentiated assessment is an ongoing method through which teachers gather information to identify how their students learn by observing their strengths and weaknesses. Each student learns in different ways this is known as the different learning styles such as audio, visual, and kinesthetic. Students also learn at different paces some individuals are very fast learners and others are slower. Other students vary in knowledge and skills that they possess, even how they connect to their previous knowledge. Therefore, differentiated assessment is needed because no one form of assessment works (Chapman & King, 2005)

 

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This picture is a perfect example of why differentiated assessment is needed within the educational system. Without it our educational system can alienate children who don’t learn as fast or learn in different ways than the norm.

            There are also multiple factors when thinking about differentiation assessment within the classroom. They include knowing the learner, assessing the learner, adjustable assignments, questioning strategies, and curriculum approaches. This five factors all enable the teacher to have a more beneficial differentiated assessment for their students. It does not just change they way they assess, but also the strategies they use to teach. All of these factors allow the teacher to provide the best learning environments for their students by allowing them to reach their full educational potential. Differentiated assessment fosters student’s motivation within the classroom because they are producing work that they are passionate about and actually care for. No body enjoys or takes pride in work that they don’t enjoy so by giving them options that play to their strengths it allows them to. The teacher provides students with instruction, but adjusts it to better suit the learning needs of the students. It is ultimately the teachers responsibility to provide this varied instruction to the students to aid in their learning, but also allow them to take accountability for their own learning (Drake, Reid & Kolohon, 2014).

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A personal experience that I had within the classroom with differentiated assessment was actually just last year in university. It was a small class about 20 of us and we had to do a presentation on our lives. The teacher gave us multiple options with how we could present. It could be a poem, a painting, a power point presentation, a scrapbook, or even a song that you wrote. This gave everyone in the class an opportunity to play to their strengths and achieve the best that they possibly could through a way that they were most successful at. By providing us with these different forms of assessment is made everyone feel comfortable and gave them more motivation to do the assignment because they actually enjoyed doing it. The people who were musical wrote a song and performed it, they were in their own element allowing them to enjoy and get marked on something they actually excel at instead of writing essays or doing exams.

In saying this, one of the major issues that comes to mind when looking at differentiated assessment is how as a teacher to implement it within a big classroom. This makes classes in university very hard for teachers to implement differentiated assessment. It would take to long and be way too hard for the teachers to go through every single persons assignments. This can also raise a problem with how consistent the teachers marking is too. From marking an essay to marking a painting or even a power point presentation can be drastically different because they are all different in their own way (Varsavsky, & Rayner, 2013).

            One idea that I had thinking about differentiated assessment is that it is one small part in making a school experience for all children differentiated. Differentiated assessment is only a small portion of it. By making the content, the classroom, and instructional strategies that the teachers use all play a huge role in making schooling differentiated to suit all students needs. Differentiated assessment is yet just one of the many ways a teacher can achieve this for their students providing them with an environment to help foster them to reach their full educational potential.

References

Chapman, C., & King, R. (2005). Differentiated assessment strategies: One tool     doesn't fit all. Corwin Press.

Drake, S., Kolohon, W., & Reid, J. (2014). Interweaving curriculum and      classroom assessment: Engaging the 21st century learner. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press.

Varsavsky, C., & Rayner, G. (2013). Strategies that challenge: exploring the use of             differentiated assessment to challenge high-achieving students in large            enrolment undergraduate cohorts. Assessment & Evaluation In Higher       Education, 38(7), 789-802. doi:10.1080/02602938.2012.714739