Additional+questions

While I was trying to answer the question “how does authentic assessment effect student learning in a social studies classroom” there were a number of other questions that came up. While they all may be different from my initial question, I feel they are all essential in the answering of my original question. Individually the following questions make up a part of deciding if and how authentic assessment impacted my class and student learning, and a collective group they provide an answer to the larger question.

By following Lance and Sammi and breaking down their projects, exams, and interviews I was able find my answer to this question. Highly motivated students are very often bored with traditional assessment, while authentic assessment gives them an opportunity to really showcase their ability and challenge themselves. Both Lance and Sammi have produced some really great work in the past for me, but they were constrained by the limitations of traditional style assessment. Once they were allowed to be in control of their own assessment and were offered open possibilities for the look and feel of the end product, they blossomed. Lance was a little slower to grasp this than Sammi was. Lance with his poster project for the Mesopotamian unit had a hard time breaking out of the traditional assessment shell. While it was of very high quality there was very little creativity. His projects just got better and better as the semester progressed. His Egyptian newspaper offered a lot of creative insight and and his overall product greatly improved. His work was capped off with his Greek project. His script, acting out of the script, and costumes that went along with it were absolutely great. He seemed to very much enjoy the freedom to create projects that really represented his style of learning and offered him a chance push himself. He said in his exit interview with me that he really enjoyed the open-endedness of the projects and how he was able to display his information and what he learned in different ways. Unlike Lance Sammi embraced the opportunity to create her own assessment right out of the gate with her Mesopotamian travel brochure. She followed this up with her very creative and well done articles in the Egyptian newspaper and finished it off with a very different style writing in her Greek poem. I thought her projects showed a lot of range and really allowed her to continue to push herself. She could very easily have done projects that would have gotten her an A with far less work, but she used this opportunity to push herself and produce some really great work. In her exit interview with me she said how she liked that this class was not just spitting out facts and how the projects helped her to remember the information by making it more relatable. The end result seems to be that authentic assessment pushes motivated students to produce projects and assessments that are continually of higher quality. Motivated students didn’t seem to get complacent and allow themselves to just start getting by once the teacher gave them some control. Both of my motivated students really used this as an opportunity to enhance their own learning.
 * How does Authentic Assessment affect highly motivated students?**

Nick was my run of the mill, average student, a student who could do good work and who could be motivated, but could also just as easily tune a project out and turn in very average work. Nick probably represents the majority of students that we as teachers see everyday. These are students who we know have a lot of potential but we just can’t seem to motivate on a regular basis. As the semester progressed I was very surprised at how Nick responded to authentic assessment. Once the reins of traditional assessment were taken off he pretty much was running free. He started off with a very creative diorama that represented all the information he needed but in a very unique way. He followed that up with a very creative and funny newspaper that once again covered the required material and much more. Lastly, with the final project he became so ambitious and his plans were so grand that he unfortunately was unable to finish everything he had wanted. It almost seemed that he was a student who was just waiting to be given a chance to display what he was learning and what he was able to do, and once that chance came he just kept thinking bigger and bigger. I think most of our students are very motivated, they just need to be allowed to find something that motivates them. No student wants to sit all day doing nothing and being bored, and all students want to do well in school. The fact is I don’t think we let them. Traditional assessment keeps so many of our average students from feeling like that need to or are able to do well and really apply themselves. For highly motivated students like Lance and Sammi, they will still feel motivated by traditional assessment, but for students like Nick and Arriel, they often don’t see the point. Nick’s sudden ambition and desire to create, what would eventually become very ambitious, projects really shows that he wants to do well and he wants to feel challenged. Authentic assessment gives the average student an opportunity to find a style of assessment that fits them and allows them to really push themselves, because they see a point to it and they enjoy doing it. In his exit interview with me Nick said he really enjoyed this class because it was a different style of teaching, he felt more involved and he really had to think and learn the material. Students do like to learn, but they like to do it in a way that makes sense to them and allows them to succeed. Overall I think authentic assessment is a great thing for the average student. I was unsure at the start how most students would react, but as Nick shows it really benefits them.
 * How will authentic assessment affect the typical student?**

As a teacher you always have those students who you know are intelligent but just seem to be disengaged and completely unmotivated by school. Arriel is very much this type of student. She would have no problem makes comments about how pointless assignments were, or how when we are taking notes or doing a classroom activity she would comment that we just need to get it over with. However when she participated I could tell she understood everything, her assignments, when she decided to do them, were always correct. How was she going to react to something as open as authentic assessment? What I found was a student who previous only turned in work when she felt like it and rarely put much effort into it, was getting all her projects in, finishing them early and putting in a lot of extra work. I think Arriel started off the semester thinking this was going to be just like every other class, her short report for her Mesopotamian project displays that pretty clear. However as the semester progressed she very quickly turned a corner with her work. She was still not thrilled about the day to day happenings of the class, but she embraced the projects with a new found determination. Her Egyptian newspaper was probably one of the best in the entire class. Her Greek poem was also very well done, and completely done outside of class within the first day or two we were working on it. She went from a student with no motivation to one who pretended like she didn’t have any but really was. I think many of these “disengaged” students are really just not connecting to the style of assessing. They don’t see the point and they are uninterested. But by letting them create something that interests them and makes sense to them, it all of the sudden motivates them to apply the material we have been working with. And once they are using the material, not matter how hard them try not to, they will be learning it. I really thought Arriel was not going to do well with this style of assessment, I thought it was going to be too much freedom. I was very much proven wrong, she really showed that all students can and will do well if they are given the chance. She said in her exit interview how she ended up actually really liking the projects because they were fun and she got to do things she liked to do. What she probably didn’t realize was that by doing such a nice job on her projects she as learning the material.
 * What is the effect of Authentic Assessment on students who are typically disengaged with school?**

Sure projects are fun, students enjoy them, I like correcting them, but are they really helping to retain the information? If the information is not being retained than even if the students are doing well on them, they are really no different than traditional assessment. While I was doing some initial research on authentic assessment I came across this statistic on the website RichardByrom.com that he had entered April 16th 2007. He couldn’t recall the original source but it really made sense me to. It said: · 83% by sight · 11% by sound · 3.5% by smell · 1.5% by touch · 1% by taste · 20% of what we HEAR · 30% of what we SEE · 50% of what we HEAR and SEE · 70% of what we DISCUSS · 90% of what we MAKE and MANAGE ourselves While without knowing the exact source and how this was determined, I did think it seemed right on. I also immediately thought authentic assessment was something that you make and manage yourself. Regardless of whether this statistic is completely correct or not it did make me feel I was on the right track with authentic assessment. Over the course of the semester I tried to do some activities where the students had to compare the current civilization we were discussing with a previous one in an attempt to try and gauge if information was being retained. I was often very surprised at the ease to which students were able to answer, but I knew the best way to see if the information was retained throughout the semester would be my final exam. As I said before I did not offer a study guide for this, but instead told them it would deal with the themes we have focused on the entire year and they should use their projects and classroom materials to prepare. The exam was all short answer so there would be no way for the students to guess and randomly select the right answer. When I started to correct the exam, I was very surprised how well the students were doing. People were consistently scoring in the A and B range. In the past when I have given final exams my classes tended to average around a low C. I asked Lance, Sammi, Nick, and Arriel about the exam and I got some very telling responses. All three responded that they thought about their projects while taking the exam to help with answers. Nick and Sammi both responded that they liked how the exams had the same information that the projects focused on. In other words they remembered what their projects were about and the information they put on them and it made the exam easier. With traditional assessment students do not retain much information, the result is probably a final exam where they students think the teacher is using all sorts of random information that was never gone over. When the reality probably was the teacher probably tested on the same material on the final as they did on the unit exams, only none of it was remembered by the students. My students thought I was taking it easy on them, while in reality I was also testing them on the same material with the final as I did after each unit, only this time the seemed to remember it. students were given the information by me, they organized it, applied it to a project that was their own, and the end result was actual learning and more importantly retention of the material.
 * Will authentic assessment help students retain information?**
 * How we register information**
 * How we retain information**

Again I used my final exam to answer this question. I was very concerned at the start of this project that I would have students who could create just amazing projects, but were unable to take the information they used for the projects and apply it to a more traditional assessment. Authentic assessment is great and it is fun, but students still need to be able to do well on traditional style assessment. It is the format used for college placement exams, for the ACT and SAT, and for the all powerful WKCE. We live in the age of standardized tests and our schools demand students be able to take them and do well on them. If authentic assessment can not help improve scores on traditional assessment, my administrators could very easily tell me I need to do less of it, plus I would be setting my students up for failure down the road. As I said I was concerned about this. I felt from the beginning that if done right authentic assessment could help student learning, but I as not sure about it’s impact on traditional assessment. This was the primary reason my final exam was not authentic like most of the previous assessments, I needed to see if students could do just as well or better on a traditional style final exam. As I said above, as I scored my exams I was very surprised to see that students did much better than I had experienced in years past on final exams. I took this a step further and looked at the areas where Lance, Sammi, Nick, and Arriel felt they did the best projects and the areas where they liked the project the most and compared the scores on their final exams in those areas to the rest of the exam. The area where they most enjoyed the project and the area where they felt the created the best project were the areas where all four of them scored the best. This tells me that if you can create a form of assessment that still covers the material but is also fun for the students and allows them some freedom, they will learn and retain that information and be able to apply it to other forms of assessment. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. If you have truly learned something you should be able to do more with it than just use it to fill in a multiple-choice bubble. And if you are able to use that material to, say create a political cartoon, then you should definitely be able to use it to help you select an answer on a tradition style of test.
 * How will authentic assessment impact student achievement on more traditional forms of assessment?**

I was concerned, particularly after my first project, that I wouldn’t see a lot of improvement in student projects as the semester went on. I really felt that the first projects that we did were the weakest ones, and it would be hard to justify continuing authentic assessment if the projects stayed at that level. I was also worried that students would become complacent with their projects after a couple and eventually not care again resulting in a lack of effort and interest similar to what I saw with traditional assessment. As the semester went on my worries quickly proved to be unwarranted. It seems what brought the first set of projects down was simply lack of practice. Students were not used to authentic assessment and as a result were just not able to think the right way to produce good projects yet. Lance made a similar comment when I asked him about the progression of the projects. He said that he also felt they got a lot better, and it was because he began to understand how to do them and his head got more into the work. If a highly intelligent, motivated student like Lance needed a little practice getting used to thinking and creating this way, it is far to assume all students did. After the first project most of the students seemed to get it because I saw a huge improvement from the Mesopotamian project to the Egyptian project, and the Greek project was by far the best of them all. Students are so used to being told exactly what to do and not allowing their own creativity to drive them, that when they were finally allowed to they couldn’t. it took a little practice but by the end of the semester the projects progressed greatly. My concern about the students losing interest and motivation with the projects also seems to be unwarranted. As the situation with Nick’s Greek project I described above shows, this was not a problem at all. As I previously said, it seemed as the semester went on the students became more and more motivated by the projects instead of the opposite. The situation with Nick was not an isolated one. All my students progressed greatly during the course of the semester, and they were far more motivated during the final project than they were during the first one. It seems they just needed to have their brains turned on or taken off idle.
 * Will student projects improve as the year progresses?**