Assessment Tools

1. Rubrics – are scoring guides used to evaluate the quality of students’ written and oral work.

2. Teacher Made Tests/Quizzes – written or oral assessments that are not commercially produced or standardized. In other words, a test a teacher designs specifically for his or her students.

3. Accelerated Reading (AR): is a daily progress monitoring software assessment in wide use by primary and secondary schools for monitoring the practice of reading, and it is created by Renaissance Learning, Inc. Accelerated Reader is an assessment that primarily determines whether or not a child has read a book. The software provides additional information to teachers regarding reading rates, amount of reading, and other variables related to reading.

4. Portfolios: a collection of student work gathered for a particular purpose that exhibits to the student and others the student’s efforts, progress or achievement in one or more areas.

5. Performance Tasks: encompass many skills and usually have a direct application to real tasks people are asked to do in everyday life.

6. Self-Assessments/Evaluation: used to help individuals and groups process and reflect on their individual work or their group work.

7. Learning Logs: consist of short, objective entries that contain mathematical problem-solving entries, observations of science experiments, questions about the lecture or readings, lists of outside readings, homework assignments, or anything that lends itself to keeping records. Often the responses in these logs are usually brief, factual, and impersonal.

8. Journals: usually written in narrative form, are subjective, and deal more with feelings, opinions, or personal experiences. Journal entries are usually more descriptive, longer, open-ended, and freer flowing than logs. They are often used to respond to pieces of literature, describe events, comment on reactions to events, reflect on personal experiences and feelings, and connect what is being studied in one class with another class or with life outside the classroom.