Designing the Test

A lot goes in to designing an assessment!

Learning takes place in students heads where it is invisible to others. We as teachers, must assess what our students can do with the material they have learned. Assessments can be formal or informal, high or low stakes, anonymous or public, or individual or collective.

Assessments answer a lot of questions for us as teachers, such as:

Am I teaching this effectively?

Should I reevaluate how I am teaching this lesson?

Should I reteach this lesson?

Should I move on to the next lesson?

Am I teaching to all the students?

All these questions are answered based on the results of an assessment, so we must be sure our assessments are effectively evaluating what the students have learned. We created a post assessment to assess our students after our Medieval Times lesson. Each group created five questions based on their lessons. My group created questions based on our lesson about merchants, markets, mud and towns. Our lesson goal is "The students will gain a better understanding of the process of buying and selling goods as a merchant in Medieval Times." We based our questions off of our goal to see if the students have mastered the lesson objective