Assessment

=Assessing meaningful learning: authentic and/or performance assessment= Authentic assessments are used to assess authentic learning. Learners engage in meaningful tasks that are directly related to real tasks that they may have to perform in the future. **Example: have students poll public opinion on a local issue instead of taking an exam on the principles of democracy.**

"Performance assessment" means assessing a student's skill by asking the student to perform some task that requires those specific skills. Such as,
 * students create a product or a response of some sort instead of picking from a list of answers. **Example: students create a news broadcast about current events instead of taking a multiple-choice test on current events.**
 * assessment can be direct observation of a student's behavior on tasks or the product they produced - that is, when the tasks or products resemble activities required in the real-world (outside of school).

Learning tasks and assessment tasks are quite often inseparable. We can simply assess the learner's performance by assessing the product of the learning activity.

=Other examples:= media type="youtube" key="3ufRtoS6usw" width="420" height="315"
 * assess learning over time with ePortfolios. As students create digital artifacts of their learning (such as presentations, reports, brochures, newsletters, blogs, wikis, websites) have them put them all together to represent a body of work that addresses your defined learning outcomes.
 * a spreadsheet of data collected at a local stream might demonstrate the student's ability to perform simple descriptive statistics and draw conclusions from the data
 * narrative documents might demonstrate literacy or writing skills
 * students create and name a new disease based on elements learned in biology
 * students create a video about a period in history
 * students produce a blog based on a character in a book - such as one of the characters in //The Diary of Anne Frank// to demonstrate understanding of the book, concepts therein, etc.
 * a student could create a video clip of his/her news editorial to demonstrate his/her persuasive argument skills or oral presentation skills
 * students create conversation of tweets between characters in a novel, scientists exploring theories, etc.
 * [[image:Greatsciencetweets width="270" height="306" align="right"]]
 * students create a rap about MacBeth:

Authentic Assessment Video Example: media type="custom" key="23219682" =Questions to think about:=
 * Is assessment a separate activity from learning?
 * How could you use technology to make assessment activities less threatening to your students? or maybe even make it a positive experience?