Informal assessments are very important for students and
teachers in the classroom. For a teacher, the informal assessments can be
helpful in determining if a specific lesson is successful or not. A simple
strategy such as an exit ticket can help teachers identify which strategies are
successful and which are not. Another
way informal assessments can be helpful in the classroom is by helping the
teacher determine if a lesson needs to be retaught. Many times a specific topic
is difficult for students to grasp and in such cases the informal assessment
would reveal where students are facing difficulty. Informal assessments can
also help teachers identify where in the curriculum students excel and where
they need more attention. The teacher can then use that information to create
activities and lessons that address those specific strengths and weaknesses. The
main goal of informal assessments is to detect where students are struggling so
that teacher can address it appropriately.
Couldn't have said it better myself Fatima. If informal assessments continue to develop at the rate that it's going, pretty soon there will be no need for any tutors. The teacher would be the teacher as well as the tutor rolled up into one.
ReplyDelete-Earl
Hi Fatima,
ReplyDeleteYour comment about assessments being used to determine whether or not a lesson should be retaught reminds of the coverage method that we read about in Chapter 1. If a teacher were using this method he or she may not want to repeat a lesson even if students have not grasped the content.
Also, I agree with your idea that assessments can be used in order to determine the length of time that should be spent on each topic of the curriculum. Perhaps if there are topics that require less time than others, lessons that are more difficult can be repeated as you stated in your post.