The beginning of the new school year makes you think again about the school along with its grades, which can upset both children and their parents. Let's talk about whether evaluations are needed at all, and how to make their use more effective.
Rankings are uninformative
The first problem with using assessments is that they provide very little information. They only record the degree of success of the work, but do not help to understand what the problem is. Moreover, the missing work and work with a large number of errors will be evaluated equally in the form of a deuce. How do you judge progress here? Such a system can easily deprive a child of the desire to develop and generally learn, when no one notices his efforts anyway. If you understand the reasons for the low rating, then it is easier to correct it, but the figures do not give such information.
Grades should help, not scold
The point of using assessments is that they should indicate whether the child is moving in the right direction or not, but in our practice, assessments are more likely to act as a supervisor who should be respected and feared.
This situation leads to the fact that getting good grades replaces the very idea of education. We get used to thinking that we need to fight bad grades, while the causes of failures remain behind the scenes. And after all, maybe the thing is that the child is simply not very interested in the topic, or he did not have time to learn the material, or missed the right lesson - for example, he was sick. It is important to remember that you should not blame the child for low grades, without having understood the reasons. Most often, behind the three or two there are specific circumstances that can be corrected if you pay attention to them in time.
In this regard, it is better not to put cold grades, but to encourage the student with the records "Well done", "You coped", even if it took more time than usual. This approach will preserve the desire of children to learn and improve their skills.
Talk about assessments
From the above, the following advice seems logical that grades should be discussed with the child. Of course, you get tired at work and the last thing you want to sit in the evenings with schoolwork, but without this your child will be quite difficult.
When a child receives a low grade, then you should not scold him or dismiss him with on-duty phrases. A low grade is a signal that he needs help with some topic, that the educational system is not coping. It may be worth taking the time to talk to the teacher about it to understand what the problem is, to try to disassemble the task with the child. Thus, it will be possible to avoid unnecessary stress during your studies and achieve good results without the help of tutors.
How grades are made
There are at least three types of knowledge testing during classes:
- Preliminary assessment of knowledge. The point is to understand what level students are at at the beginning of the school year or after a break in classes. Based on these assessments, a training program will be built.
- The ultimate assessment of knowledge. This test is most often found in the form of a final test or exam, which should show the degree of assimilation of the material at the end of the training course. As a rule, the final grade is correlated with the score for a quarter, year or the entire school course.
- Intermediate assessment of knowledge. Intermediate checks are aimed primarily at helping the student during training, timely identify gaps and take them into account in individual work. As part of the intermediate assessment, the student can receive feedback and work out those topics that are given to him with the greatest difficulty. The main objective of this method is to direct the student to achieve the best results within the program.
The combination of these approaches allows you to increase motivation to study and give effective feedback that allows you to get an adequate idea of the real state of affairs.
There are at least two important reasons why it is useful for a teacher to conduct an intermediate assessment:
- This gives more complete information about the current level of knowledge of students.
- Feedback on the results of the audit allows you to correctly adjust the curriculum in order to achieve the greatest results.
At the same time, to increase the motivation of students, you can use game and interactive methods of self-verification. For example, to issue cards by which the child will be able to independently assess their knowledge during the lesson and talk about what caused the difficulties. Then you can conduct test work and divide the children into groups depending on their level of knowledge. In the next lesson, each group will have its own kind of tasks, which will allow children to consolidate exactly the material that they do not underemple.
To help the teacher
Of course, not every teacher in real conditions will be able to perform such a thorough analysis, so it makes sense to use auxiliary services. For example, on the Uchi.ru platform, the teacher can see complete statistics for the class and for individual students, which will include a list of errors and poorly learned topics, in order to then recommend suitable tasks for consolidating the material.
Such services help to perform the main function of assessment - to motivate students and help them easily and effectively cope with the training course. More actively you can use electronic diaries, exchange working methods with colleagues (including online, online, on thematic sites) - there are ways, the main thing is not to be lazy to look for (and persuade the head teacher).
