Tue, Nov 08, 2022 5:52 PM
Zoe Knott STEM Class
The article I was assigned was "Alternate Assessments for English language learners". I thought this article was a great read and very informative. In the article it said, "We found through classroom observation and analysis of student products that while ELL students have difficulty writing in English, they can speak about science with a level of sophistication not reflected on written assignments." I find this statement to be accurate and this article goes deeper into explaining what we can do as teachers to help. I thought the strategy they talked about in this article is great! This strategy is use of pictures/drawings, as we know the saying goes "a picture is worth a thousand words", the article really takes that saying and turns it into something that would be useful for ELL students. It says, " Because drawings do not require mastery of the English language, they likely have fewer barriers than other written assessments for ELL students." This means by allowing a student who struggles in English to draw their response they are able to communicate more efficiently than writing it out. We are still able to assess a students understanding and learning over time through pictures, it does not need to be written or even a test. Even though drawings can be used for assessment, it is a little harder to grade and determine how much a student actually knows. In the example given in the article it talks about rating the drawings by sophistication, this refers to "the accuracy of the placement of living organisms and how well the drawing reflected an understanding of major marine science concepts." There were four different scores that the student could have gotten and each score represented a different level of understanding. Overall, the student showed improvement throughout the drawing that they did. Their sophistication score increasing from 1.72 in September to 3.68 in June. It is recommended, just like with any pother assessment or assignment, that teachers provide a rubric in advance that way a student knows what they are expected to do. Over all I enjoyed pretty much this whole article and I feel as though it gave me another strategy to out in my "teacher pocket" so that I could potentially use it in the future. The only thing that I wish this article included was more examples, this is because I have never seen this strategy done before and it is super interesting and I would have liked to see more examples and more grades given on those examples that way I have a good basis of judgment for grading when I use this strategy. Another thing was that this article did not explain how to asses NGSS and/or each of the three dimensions in that context. However, it does tell you at the end of the article how to connect this strategy to standards, but there is barley any information given.