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Hi everyone!

I am a fourth-year Elementary Education major with Reading and Early Childhood endorsements. One thing that I've realized is that I struggle with coming up with good assessments for my students once they are done learning about a unit. As someone who has always hated taking tests, it is hard coming up with ideas to make one. Have any of you struggled with this as well? If so, do you have any suggestions or tips that could help me? Anything is appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

Lexi Monahan

Hi Lexi -- The type of assessment you use really depends on the learning objectives. For those that ask students to explain or describe (rather than recall), perhaps encouraging them to draw and label a response may work. For example, in my middle school life science class, a task was to describe how cephalopods (squid, octopus) move.  A student said to me that he had a hard time finding the words, and asked if he could draw a picture. I said of course, and he drew a detailed diagram showing how the siphon takes in water and expels it, with arrows showing the direction of the water and the subsequent movement of the animal. It showed that he really did understand the concept! --Mary B

Remeber your assesments don't always have to be test based. They can be project based. I personally prefer for the bigger science and math topics to do a project. Also as long as you remeber the objective of the lesson plan that you taught it makes it easier to write questions that will target the lesson objective. 

In my classroom, I assess students in several ways. One way that I like to see if a student knows something is by doing a ticket out the door assessment. Just by giving students a few problems on the lesson from the day will let you know whether they understand the subject or not. Sometimes I will give as few as three problems, or sometimes one, either they know how to do it or they do not.