Module 4 Activity 2: What We Assess

Assessment is an integral part of the whole education process and serious attention needs to be paid to what we assess as educators. It is amazing the wide range of things that are recorded in this activity by group members on the activity's brainstorm page on what we can assess. While brainstorming, we recognize the diverse abilities of our learners and just as how we plan our lessons taking our learners individual differences and multiple intelligences into consideration, similarly the way we assess and what we assess must be accorded the same consideration, if we are going to be fair as educators. It is a cause for reflection.

A knowledge-based, highly technological economy requires that our learners master higher-order thinking skills and that they are able to see the relationships among seemingly diverse concepts. For this to be realized, assessment must guide the process. They need to be able to recall, analyze, compare, infer, and evaluate, and these are the kinds of skills that aren't fully measured by our current tests. In addition, skills such as teamwork, collaboration, and moral character traits that aren't measured in a typical standardized tests, are increasingly important.This require us as educators to include many more skills on our assessment agenda.