Assessment Appreciation

I have been learning a lot about the different ways that teachers can assess their students. These include formative, diagnostic, and summative assessments. One of the sites I viewed, What is Authentic Assessment?, introduced new types of assessments, authentic and traditional. Traditional assessment is geared more towards memorization and test taking, which is very prevalent topic in today's educational world due to the heavy emphasis on standardized tests. Authentic assessment focuses on students completing meaningful tasks that allows them to put their knowledge and skills to the test. This article helped to show how these two different types of assessment can ultimately complement each other if used in a skillful fashion.

The article "Deep and Fragile Knowledge" stood out to me because it discussed how it is difficult for teachers to truly know if a student understands what they are learning or if it is just superficial understanding. I feel that throughout my education I would just learn to have an understanding of what the tests would entail. I was gaining inert knowledge. I would lose most of the knowledge I studied because I was only trying to memorize to pass and receive a good grade, not to learn things that I can apply to life and becoming an effective member of society. I found this article to be incredibly interesting, and I think it is important for teachers to be able to identify the type of knowledge that a student has on a topic throughout different periods of time.