Teacher work sample phase 3 analysis and implementation

¶ … Student Learning with Qualitative and Quantitative Assessments

Often overlooked in any discussion of assessments is their bilateral value for both the instructor and the student. Taxonomies designed to measure the specific levels of academic achievement, performance and retention need to also be considered as measures of instructors' relative levels of performance as well. This insight was gained based on the coaching and feedback sessions that my advisor, Michelle D'Amour, has provided based on my in-class teaching sessions and her assessments included in the Indicators of Student Teaching Effectiveness evaluations. Based on the lessons learned from the evaluations, it is clear that for assessments to be effective they must be bilateral, taking into account measurements of student performance and instructor effectiveness.

Using Assessments to Increase Learning and Teaching Performance

Ultimately, assessments need to be foundation of long-term learning motivation and mastery of specific tasks for students. Only when an assessment framework includes the qualitative and quantitative factors, balanced and in equilibrium to each other, will a student have the necessary foundation to grow. An assessment-based framework must also be solidified on a strong foundation of trust as well, as this attribute of any relationship is its strongest accelerator over time. For assessments to be effective they also must be modeled to the specific learning styles and innate strengths and weaknesses of a student. Ultimately an assessment framework must also seek to drive long-term educational global attainment by seeking to balance the highly quantitative measures of educational performance (individual course and standardized test scores, class-based and school-wide metrics of performance; benchmarks of yearly test scores, and many other forms of highly quantified measurement). Quantitative assessments however can lead to a myopic, often short-term view of a student's potential. This can be inferred from our group conversations and the observations made in class situations and teaching scenarios. As the experience of coaching a young man to be more confident in his ability to learn showed, there is often even more qualitative learning potential in a student than those areas that can be quantified. This is evident in the introverted, shy young man's progress to "owning" the role of Word War I expert in the class. If evaluated only on quantitative metrics, the students' potential would not have been observed and nurtured.

Based on these insights the following proposed Balanced Learning Assessment Framework has been created.

Balanced Learning Assessment Framework

This framework takes into account both the need on the part of educators to balance the quantitative and qualitative aspects of assessments while continually striving to be worthy of students' trust. It also shows the reciprocal nature of how effective an instructor is at their teaching duties, as reflected in how well students learn by combining quantitative and qualitative measures to define educational goal attainment. Those who are mathematically included could produce an equation or algorithm that could, with a fairly high degree of accuracy, define an aggregate education goal attainment score based on the combination of quantitative and qualitative assessments. These would together be a truer measure of student performance than just taking one over another.