Assessment and Feedback

This semester i took EDUC 325 which is Classroom Assessment, and I must say true useful assessment is very hard to come by. To make it worth the teacher and student's time, the assessment and feedback has to be very structure for a purpose.  From what I learned in that class, many teachers just do not have the time to create a good assessment that will be helpful for students. It seems that many teachers due to the time constrains just assess for the sake of assessing.  There are many times where the assessment is pure memorization and not understanding the material.

It also often that teachers will look at the curriculum and create their outlines for that year and have assessment around those outlines rather than the actual curriculum.  As mentioned in Mamchur's traps of evaluation, I believe this is the first one where teachers are finding the easy way out.  I realize this is a major problem with teaching as i learn more and more about education.  This job is so overwhelming that teachers are bound to take the easy way out of things.  Be it assessment or management of the classroom.  I often ask myself "is this their fault"?  In elementary you have a class of 30 for the whole  year with different socioeconomic backgrounds and they will have different cultural and moral values.  In high school you have around 6-7 classes of 30, how can you effectively teach them.  

I believe the system will eat up any young and new enthusiastic new teacher that wants to change the world because they find it difficult to go against the system for the greater good and just conform. Well I am going off in a tangent here.

Let's focus.
Effective feedback is key for a student's growth.  As mentioned in Mamchur marking stuff endlessly and correcting. feedback that is precise should be focused on as it will help the student.  In my experience as a student, i did not learn much from my mistakes when teachers just circle my grammar problems and write short statements asking me why i didn't include this in my writing.  These comments did not help me as it just points to the fact that I was wrong.  However, I know what is effective feedback is.  I had professors who wrote a one page single space critique of my 10 page papers.  They would write what was weak about my paper and actually give me feedback as to how I could have improved my paper by including other material.  This is true feedback, as it will help me in the future or make me notice my own weaknesses.

It's hard being a teacher, but it's worth it.!