FIAE Chapter Three

This chapter mainly focused on the topic of assessment and how teachers should use assessment in the classroom as a means of a learning experience. The author outlines that there are three main types of assessments that teachers should implement in their classrooms, pre-assessment, formative assessment and summative assessment. Each of these assessments is important in a student’s learning and can help them better their skills in the classroom and assist them in understanding the unit and the achieving the overall goals of the unit.

Pre-assessment is when teachers find out where the student’s knowledge is on a unit before it begins, the author says that teachers can achieve pre-assessment by doing some kind of activity or test prior to the start of the unit. This assessment determines where each student is when it comes to the unit content. Formative assessment, is, according to the author, the most important type of assessment. Formative assessment comes into play during the unit and is when the teachers test the student’s progress thus far. The reason the author considers this the most important kind of assessment is because it allows teachers to change how they are teaching something and allows students to adjust their learning if the assessment determines that things aren’t working.

Summative assessment is the end of the unit assessments. This determines how much students learned in the unit and how well they retained the material. The author makes sure to state at the beginning of the chapter, that when planning a unit, teachers should start at the end and determine what they want the goals of the unit to be before beginning the planning. This stuck out to me, because the same thing was said in Understanding by Design.