Being a teacher is one of the most difficult jobs in the world, they have to constantly remain alert about the students who are performing well and keep introducing reforms in the classroom to increase everyone’s productivity. This might not seem a difficult task in theory, but in practice, it is difficult to perform because there are different types of students in every grade who need to be addressed uniquely. The same goes for their assessment patterns, middle school, kindergarten, and high school students cannot be given the same pattern of assessment sheets for assessing.
Since institutions have been using LMS portals for conducting online examinations for the longest time, this year most institutions will be holding offline exams for the first time in two years. Some students might find it difficult to cope because they are out of touch with offline assessment patterns. Even institutions are using the digital platform for everything, like the school management system, fees management software, assignment management software, etc. There is a need for both students and teachers to cooperate and arrange their adjust ability with offline or online classes to come to a common ground that could be established for taking examinations.
Here are some of the simplest assessment strategies that teachers can use everyday, applicable in both offline and online classes;
Open ended questions
The first form of questioning students is to make them participate in the discussion. Assessment does not only mean a written form of examination, sometimes when teachers assess the knowledge of students after a class productive session it could be termed an assessment. Open-ended questions are a great way to involve students because rather than answering with a simple yes or no, they have to use their brains to think about the answer.
The best part about open-ended questions is that there is no one particular answer to them, students would have to give logical reasoning or their part of thinking to justify their answer. Since there are no wrong answers, and a variety of answers could be correct, students let go of their fear of being wrong and try to pitch into the classroom discussion during open-ended question-answer sessions.
Creativity imagination and other intellectual values are enhanced when students are used to answering open-ended questions. It is like a brain exercise for them that makes them think out of the box, making them realize that knowledge is not only about what they read in a textbook but also what they perceive from it.
Quizzes
Quiz is a fun word for multiple choice questions. Students are pretty tired of answering multiple choice questions because for two years of online examination that is what they have been doing. Instead of labeling it as a multiple choice question, teachers can start coming up with fun quiz formats to upload either on the LMS portal or to distribute in the classroom as printed-out sheets. Making quiz only about academic matters bores students and no one enjoys answering them. Allowing them to do the quiz word for homework is also not good enough because they end up procrastinating and not using this quiz for any educational value.
As a measure, teachers can try to distribute quizzes at the end of the class with only five or ten questions related to the topic taught that day itself. This way teachers can evaluate how much attention students were paying during the class, they’re focusing capabilities, and their ability to absorb information during an ongoing class.
Group learning
As a method of allowing students to socialize and get to know each other better, with some learning values, teachers implement group learning sessions. The students in a classroom are divided into two sections, where one group asks the other questions in the first round and vice versa in the second round. Similarly, this keeps going on till a specified number of rounds that teachers have mentioned. The group who was able to answer the most amount of the questions with accuracy wins.
This assessment method is very useful because students strive to score better than the other group which makes their preparedness with the subject or topic even better because there is a recreational factor in it besides an academic factor. It is a fun way to learn, understand, and share knowledge in a classroom where both the participating groups can learn a lot from each other. It also improves their communication skills, makes them capable of performing better in groups, and builds leadership skills or other values necessary for a student to have.
