The traditional nature of assessing student learning continues to undergo several changes as it adapts to the series of educational reforms made for the purpose of improving the quality of education across all areas. Assessment has now become more worthwhile, significant, and meaningful.
The following are the forms of authentic assessment used by the teachers at VRU Demonstration School:
1. Research Paper and Written Report
In order to assess the level of students’ inquisitiveness as well as their reasoning and critical thinking skills, the teachers from VRU Demonstration School require students to come up with a detailed and focused study using scientific methods in order to understand certain relationships between given variables, discover processes that are involved in a certain occurrence, and how certain variables can be applied in real world settings. With this, teachers can assess if the learners can generate useful outputs and discoveries, follow a given set of systematic procedure, embody a set of specific skills, and display fortitude and discipline within the entire span of time.
2. Oral Student Debates
Teachers make use of debate as a form of assessment to look into how students behave in a formal discussion and how well they can express and stand for their own viewpoints in opposing arguments. This measures students’ logical consistency, factual accuracy, and some degree of emotional appeal to the audience while debating. Furthermore, the teachers are able to identify how well the students interact between social interactions, organize thoughts and ideas in a short period of time, and how well they can handle circumstances under pressure.
3. Poster Making/Drawing
This form of assessment is found to be more likely a way of increasing students’ motivation to learn something through visualization. This is used by teachers to measure students’ capacity to evoke simplicity in the said visual art, present it effectively containing an enough amount of words and figures, ability to make the poster correspond to the given theme, and the creativity to make the poster in its appropriate size, design, and color.
4. Experiments
Teachers in the said institution make use of this form of authentic assessment to assess students’ ability in generating data and behavioral observations; critical thinking skills in analyzing data, examples, and models; diligence in working together in groups to solve problems, devise strategies, or understand concepts; and the ability to compare experimental results to classroom theories and use them to confirm or critique theories.
5. Reflection Entries
This form of authentic assessment looks into how each learner appreciates and makes use of a particular experience in order to gain and learn something for oneself. Moreover, the capacity to make connections between the theories learned and the experiences as well as the ability to formulate useful realizations for the sake of self-improvement and self-assessment are also taken into consideration.
6. Dyad/Triad/Group Discussion
Necessary skills in student learning which includes critical thinking and abstract reasoning, communication skills, organization and brevity, spontaneity, and social skills are all measured with the use of this authentic assessment.