Reflection #2

Offering only multiple choice questions prevents the students from thinking outside of the box. The questions are straight forward and they only have to decide between four choices.  These choices are usually also straight forward and many of the students only remember the information for these tests long enough to pass.  Once they have taken their test and passed they often forget the information altogether.

                When I was in High School I had some teachers that offered only multiple choice tests and other teachers that gave us open-ended and fill in the blank exams.  The tests that I took that involved having to learn the information and understand what it meant were the open ended tests and not the multiple choice tests. The information in the open-ended tests was the information that I still remembered the answers to at the end of the year.  When I entered college I was forced to learn and understand the material that I was going to be tested over. That was in a large part because I was tested using essay questions and not only multiple choice questions. 

                Overall I believe that when students are given only multiple choice questions and are not required to use their critical thinking skills they are less likely to learn the information.  Students need to be pushed and forced to use their critical thinking skill so that they can also improve their problem solving skills.  My biggest fear about not helping students develop critical thinking skills is that it will lead the students further into their learned helplessness and prevent them from succeeding when they are older.

i)                     Two examples of formative assessments that I am using now are group activities, including labs, as well as participation grades, the latest being a card sort requiring the students to match cell organelles to their picture and function.

ii)                   Currently I am using chapter tests to assess students summative as well as worksheets that involve the students using any knowledge of the information to answer them.

iii)                  It is important to have a combination of the two so that students are being assessed on various levels. Some students have test anxiety or just are not able to perform well on tests for a number of reasons.  If students were only being graded based on test performance many of them would fail.  However when other types of assessments are given such as group discussion students are able to display their knowledge of the subject to the teacher as well as their peers.  Being in a classroom setting where there are several MOD students I have been able to see that those students that fail a test are not failing because they are unfamiliar with the information covered in the exam but because they simply do not test well.  Giving students various outlets to display their knowledge proves not only to the teacher but to the students themselves that they are competent and that they can master the information.

iv)                 List three kinds of assessments:

1.       I would like to incorporate an exit slip (formative assessment) into the end of the class period and have the students place them in an organizer hanging on the door or near the door of the classroom.  They students will have a certain pocket they put their exit slip into so that I can collect them easily and so that they will already be in alphabetical order.

2.       I would also like to have class projects (summative) where each student has a responsibility for the project and the class completes them together.  I would give them the prompt and allow the students to delegate a leader and divide the components for the project so that each student within the class has one job to do to help complete the project.  I would like to do this once in the fall and once in the spring so that students will learn responsibilities and how to work as a team.  I would allow a select amount of time throughout the weeks to allow the students to talk about their progress and put the project together.  The students might even be divided up into smaller groups so that each group could take care of one part.

3.       I would like to do multiple group act ivies (formative) in the lab so that the students are able to perform hands-on activities to supplement their learning.  At the end of select units the class would enter the lab and complete an activity top demonstrate what they just learned.  Such as when the students finish learning about how plants absorb water the students would complete a lab in which they would place white carnations into various colors of water and hypothesize what will happen to the flower.