“Learning to Love Assessment” -by Carol Ann Tomlinson- analysis

You will find below a review to Carol Ann Tomlinson´s article “Learning to Love Assessment” as well as my own experiences and impressions on each understanding proposed by the author. 

Hope you enjoy it!

Informative Assessment Isn´t Just About Tests

As a student, from school to university, I was mainly assessed by means of tests. Nonetheless, as I see it, we don’t need to wait to finish the unit plan to do a test and see what students understood and what they haven’t done well. Moreover, it’s too late because even though we could provide some feedback, we will be moving onto a new unit plan so we won’t have time to help correcting wrong assumptions.

For this reason, nowadays, as a teacher, I always try to use a wide range of tools to assess students learning because I consider it fairer and it allows me to see different kinds of learning and understanding. For example, during my classes I try to ask students to do exercises on the board to provide them with some feedback about the things they can work on in order to improve their learning, as well as work in groups to foster a differentiated classroom that allows me to walk around and give feedback either to some students in particular or some groups.

Informative Assessment Really Isn´t About the Grade Book

In my student life I have hardly ever received feedback from my teachers, neither at the school/high-school nor at the university. For this reason I couldn’t agree more with the author when she mentions that feedback is far more useful for students than giving them just grades. When I give feedback to my students, they can understand their main strengths and which aspects they can improve.

Informative Assessment Really Isn´t Always Formal

Informative assessment doesn’t always occur during a class, it can happen at any place and any moment when we talk to a student, either in the courtyard or in a student-tutor meeting. Moreover, when we talk to our students in a more relaxed way we can get much more useful information about their own interests than during a class.

Informative Assessment Isn´t Separate From The Curriculum

Many teachers do not think about assessment up to the end of the unit plan, so when teachers don’t know how they are going to assess the students, students don’t know how they are going to be assessed, which means that they usually become nervous and their performance could be worse than expected. This happened to me as student and recently as a teacher when doing a placement. Later on, shortly after I started teaching in a school, during this course I heard about background design. It was then when I first thought about the outcomes, the main goals I want my students to achieve, so together with their own interests about the topic I changed my way of teaching. Unfortunately, the substitution I was doing finished shortly after that, but I’m doing it in a new substitution so I hope the performance of some students will improve during the next term.  Therefore I consider assessment as an essential element of the curriculum and it should be our first component in mind when the planning process takes place.

Informative Assessment Isn´t About “After”/ Informative Assessment Isn´t An End In Itself/ Informative Assessment Isn´t Separate From Instruction

As I said before, waiting to finish a unit plan to give feedback is too late because when we are moving onto a new topic or unit there’s not much we could do at that stage. For this reason I totally agree with Tomlinson when she mentions the “crucial role of pre-assessment or diagnostic assessment in teaching”: only when we know at what point of the learning process our students are we can increase their knowledge, skills and understanding. As a matter of fact, when we assess our students’ understanding during the learning process we can adjust our way of teaching, we can now when we need to reteach something that is not clear enough to them, as well as organizing our time much better.

Informative Assessment Isn´t Just About Student Readiness

When we talk about assessment teachers usually focus on seeing whether the students have grasped or not the contents of a unit and whether they are ready for the next step, in this case to start a new unit. However, if we want to make assessment more valuable for both teacher and students we have to change our mind and think about what our students want to know about that topic so learning will be more significant for them. When I started teaching Social Sciences in 1^st year “ESO” (1^st year MYP”) we started with Ancient Greece, so one of the very first things I did was to ask students about which aspects of Greek culture they were interested in. Thus, I devoted some classes about topics such as the Olympic Games, Greek gods and the relationship between Greek democracy and our democratic system nowadays, something that in the Spanish curriculum
is not considered as important as other aspects.

Informative Assessment Isn´t Just About Finding Weaknesses

Certainly assessment cannot be used to find weaknesses but to help students developing their strengths. Informative assessment has to be used to give effective feedback to our students in order to let them know about their process, helping them to overcome their weaknesses focusing on where we can see room for improvement, as well as reinforce their strengths.

Informative Assessment Isn´t Just For The Teacher

Of course assessment isn’t just for the teacher but for the students. However I think that when we are new to the job of teaching, as my case, we try to find balance between doing our job correctly and our students learning process, and as we gain experience it can be more student focused. As I have previously said, I always try to give individual feedback to my students so they can benefit and become better learners.