Third Week Reflection

Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed. ~Marva Collins

Today we talked about the five major principles of language assessment. I chose the above quote because we mentioned today in class how teachers need to reflect on their teaching and one method of doing this is by assessing how well the students understood what we taught them. During class we discussed practicality, reliability, validity, authenticity, and washback. Once we were done with our group discussion, we broke up into two groups to work on a cooperative learning assignment. Heidi, ValeneAnn, and I were asked to define practicality and reliability and give some personal examples of each. Marvin, Lucille, and their daughter were asked to define validity and authenticity and give some personal examples of each. Since my group finished a little bit early, we were also asked to put together a short skit about one of our topics.

I think the most interesting part of the whole activity was hearing about my fellow classmates’ personal experiences with taking different tests and assessments. A lot of us seem to have had similar good and negative experiences with tests and assessments. The whole class pretty much agreed that tests need to be administered correctly, students need to have ample time to complete tests, raters have to concisely follow rubrics, and the future of students should not be based strictly on one test score. I really enjoyed the group activity today and look forward to doing more of them with my classmates. It makes learning a lot more fun than just listening to a lecture.