The Benefits of Integrated Assessment
While testing in schools often focuses on periodic paper and pencil tests whose results are used to determine how much a student has learned over the course of a year, these tests often fail to reflect the many ways that students learn. They can be particularly damaging for students with learning disabilities, students with testing anxiety, and students who started the school year with limited academic skills. Integrated assessment offers an alternative way of measuring student learning, one that better accounts for the many ways that students learn.
What is Integrated Assessment?
Integrated assessment does not view assessment as a one-time measure, but rather as an ongoing process. It consists of three different types of assessment. The first, summative assessment, is the conventional way of measuring learning outcomes: an exam given periodically to measure student learning at a given point in time. Thus, integrated assessment still retains the benefits of formal testing, it just supplements them with other forms of measurement.
The second type of integrated assessment is the formative assessment. These assessments measure student learning across time, tracking progress as students gain mastery over content domains. The third aspect of integrated assessment is a particular type of formative assessment. Assessments for learning are specific tools for measuring student progress. They are administered throughout the school year, and can provide immediate feedback to teachers to help them shape individual and classroom goals. Find out more about these assessments here - https://www.westcoastpsychological.com/.
Benefits for Teachers
Integrated assessments provide many benefits for student learning. First and foremost, they help teachers understand how much a student is learning as that learning is occurring. This information allows teachers to change their classroom practices, intervene with students who are falling behind, and track progress in real time. Collecting data on progress also helps schools evaluate their success more accurately. Psychovocational assessments would also benefit teachers, themselves.
Benefits for Students
Integrated assessment also leads to student empowerment. By taking the pressure off a single test, students can get a more realistic sense of their strengths and weaknesses. Students can become invested in tracking their own progress, and can begin to guide their own learning. Just as teachers can adjust their teaching with the information gathered by frequent assessments, students can adjust their learning. The fine detail that integrated assessment offers can help students learn about their own learning. By measuring aspects of learning that are not captured by standardized testing, children with different learning styles can be rewarded for their strengths, leading to increased agency and confidence.
Integrated assessment also relies more heavily on observations by teachers. This can be helpful for students who are making efforts but continuing to struggle, or for students who are acquiring mastery of subjects in a way that is not reflected on test scores. By focusing on student learning in many modes, and across the course of a semester or year, integrated assessment provides a more accurate, more useful measure of student and teacher success. Contact West Coast Psycological Services for more information.
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