In today's world of education we hear words like differentiation, personalized education, student centered learning. Yet, we continuously come back to the age old traditional assessments that are one type fit all. This is one of the issues with today's educational system. Can one assessment truly determine what a child knows? There are several areas of education that standardized tests can not test. For example, standardized tests have a difficulty testing students creative and analytical skills. Often times questions can only reach low levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, because of the limited types of questions available in traditional test making. As a result, there are only certain elements of student understanding that can be tested. Testing is a very individual focus and does not promote cooperation and communication among peers.
There are several reasons why traditional testing does not always work or is beneficial. However, what is the alternative? If we can not assess students with a test, how do we know that students are understanding the content? There is a wide variety of assessments that can take the place of traditional assessments. Portfolios, project-based assessments, performance tasks, and oral presentations are all examples of alternative assessments. The benefit of the alternative assessments is the wide variety of skills needed to complete the assessments. Students are not able to just provide an answer, they most justify, explain, and expand on their answers. This provides a great deal of insight into a student's understanding of the material. Additionally, the evaluation process of these types of assessments are typically done through a rubric style grading. Rubrics allow students to have creativity and freedom within their presentations and puts the learning and assessment truly in the hands of the students.
There are a wide variety of reasons as to why alternative assessments are beneficial. Regardless of the type of assessment that is given you will always find pros and cons for each. It is important to have a clear understanding for the goal of the assessment and use that to select the best method of evaluation.
Kwako, J. (n.d.). A BRIEF SUMMARY OF TRADITIONAL AND ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENT IN THE COLLEGE CLASSROOM. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
