Assessment and Training

Once in class we talked about assessment and training. First of all it is important to know that we can’t evaluate all our students in the same manner. According to this we have to establish some criteria and these are depending on the level of our class. So it will be different in every single class. 

There is an example: to round off the students mark. In ESO we round off their marks but contrary to this in the university entrance exams we do not round off the marks. We need decimal marks because it is a criterion for the access to university.

What we also should have in mind is to increase the complexity our exams during the course. Why do we have to do this? Our students are going to increase their knowledge during the whole course. So we should adapt the exams to their knowledge. It means, there has to be a difference between the first evaluation and the third or fourth one. The third evaluation can’t have the same level of difficulty like the first evaluation. Students learn they get to increase their knowledge, so we have to adapt our exams to their learning process.

There are coming up some questions talking about assessment and training. When could be the best time to evaluate our students? First of all our teacher gave us an advice which was to evaluate every single topic. Why we should do that? We enable our students to create certain study habits. Probably they exert themselves in the next exam to get a better mark and they reach to get a habit to do exams what makes the exams more accessible to them.

Another good advice was that we could start the course with an initial assessment. Doing this kind of assessment we get to know what our students already know and what they don’t know yet. Iñaki also recommended us to do a general repetition to remind them of what they have seen in the last year.

How should I do the exam? To create an exam depends on the level of every single class. I already said that every class is different and we can’t always use the same exams for all our classes, because they have different levels, different knowledge, different study habits, different learning processes, etc. We have two possibilities, a formal exam and an informal exam.

Formal Exam: it is the written way. That means in an exam we can give some exercises which include an example to help the students to understand the exercise. We only should do this when we think that our students need to get this example to complete the exercise successfully. Contrary to this example we may have classes without the necessity of an example and they are able to complete the exercise without given help.

Informal Exam: it is just another way for a teacher to do an assessment. It requires more work for the teacher but it is almost impossible to do a written exam in a class without any intentions to study.

In general, exams shouldn’t have more than two pages and it should be possible to complete successfully the whole exam in 50 minutes. The part of writing: we never should asked for more than 75 words and there should be some help depending on the level of the class. In the end, an exam should not be decisive. We also should have in mind other aspects to evaluate our students. We could access to the profiling. Profiling means to use the notebook of the students tutor. It simplifies the work and we can follow their behavior during the course, their aptitude, their daily effort, etc. It could simplify to decide if we let them pass or fail.