Assessment

I suck at writing tests.

There I said it. It has taken me some time in my teaching practise to admit this, but it feels good to get it out there.

And knowing this full well, I had a plan to make sure my assessments for my flipped science class were going to be useful. I took all of the public copies of previous Provincial Achievement Tests, pulled out the relevant questions and organised them by the topics in the unit. This I did during my break, figuring I could easily finish it up during my free time when school started. (feel free to derisively snort at my naivete)

Thus began the longest, and most complex test preparation of my life. I needed 8 tests (well 9 actually, but I couldn't find any questions that fit one topic) which meant 8 sets of questions. Originally I thought I would just scan them all and then post the test electronically, but it was beyond my personal ability at that point and I was out of time. I figured paper copies would do for this go-around and start cut-n-paste old school style.

It. Was. Painful.

Five days later and I was done. All the tests I needed to make were photocopied. I don't need to detail the agony of putting the tests together, all the mistakes I made and re-made, and finally once everything was copied and set out, discovering there were still mistakes, forcing me to go back and re-do three of those tests. Suffice to say, it was not the solution I had hoped for.

And the worst part of all of this, is that I really did not have a strong desire to put the tests together in the first place, I just knew that I needed to have something tangible for parents to put their finger on as we went through the flip together.

Well, maybe the worst part is that all the marking I need to do every class is taking away from the time I actually spend interacting with the students. You see, I allow the kids to work at their own pace, answer each learning outcome in their own time, which means they need to be assessed at their own pace too. I thought by having all these tests out there, the kids would then be able to work, be formatively assessed and then moved on to summatively assess their knowledge for each topic (in regular-person-speak, they show me their answer to the question, I give it a passing mark and then I give them the test). In practise, this means I never leave my intensity table, and am marking something like 6 to 10 pieces of work every class. I almost need to have parent volunteers come in to do my marking so I can do my teaching.

The obvious answer is to digitize the tests, have a self-scoring system in place and then provide access codes to the kids so they can write the tests and we can see the scores when they are finished. Which is what I planned for year two of the flip (baby-steps you see).

But frankly I am getting worn out and I am not meeting my criteria of seeing the kids work. So I am moving to an intermediate step. Tests only happen on two days of the week, preferably in the classes where I have another instructor present (we combine three periods into two by having 1.5 classes in a room with two teachers, I dunno how that makes the math work out, but its what we do). We'll see if that has any salutary benefit.