Assessment is the process of gathering and interpreting evidence to make judgements about student learning. It is the crucial link between learning outcomes, content and teaching and learning activities. Assessment is used by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are at in their learning, where they need to go, and how best to get there. The purpose of assessment is to improve learning, inform teaching, help students achieve the highest standards they can and provide meaningful reports on students’ achievement. Assessment is the gathering of information about what students know and can do in order to make decisions that will improve teaching and learning. Assessment and evaluation are necessary and important elements of the instructional cycle. Evaluation is a judgement regarding the quality, value or worth of a response, product or performance, based on established criteria and curriculum standards. Evaluation gives students a clear indication of how well they are performing based on the learner outcomes of the curriculum. The payoff of effective evaluation is that students learn how they can improve their performance. Assessment and evaluation always go together.22 With information from assessment and evaluation, teachers can make decisions about what to focus on in the curriculum and when to focus on it. Assessment identifies who needs extra support, who needs greater challenge, who needs extra practise and who is ready to move on. The primary goal of assessment is to provide ongoing feedback to
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Assessment is the process of gathering and interpreting evidence to make judgements
about student learning. It is the crucial link between learning outcomes, content and
teaching and learning activities. Assessment is used by learners and their teachers to
decide where the learners are at in their learning, where they need to go, and how best to
get there. The purpose of assessment is to improve learning, inform teaching, help students
achieve the highest standards they can and provide meaningful reports on students’
achievement. Assessment is the gathering of information about what students know
and can do in order to make decisions that will improve teaching and
learning. Assessment and evaluation are necessary and important
elements of the instructional cycle.
Evaluation is a judgement regarding the quality, value or worth of a
response, product or performance, based on established criteria and
curriculum standards. Evaluation gives students a clear indication of
how well they are performing based on the learner outcomes of the
curriculum. The payoff of effective evaluation is that students learn
how they can improve their performance. Assessment and evaluation
always go together.22
With information from assessment and evaluation, teachers can make
decisions about what to focus on in the curriculum and when to focus
on it. Assessment identifies who needs extra support, who needs
greater challenge, who needs extra practise and who is ready to move
on. The primary goal of assessment is to provide ongoing feedback to
teachers, students and parents, in order to enhance teaching and The Holly Lane Elementary
Staff believes the primary purpose of assessment is to gather
information and to promote student learning. Assessing students allows staff the opportunity to
identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in both individual students, as well as whole class
instruction. Assessments are a means to evaluate student progress in order to provide evidence
for reporting. Our staff believes assessments are used to drive instruction and adjust curriculum
as
needed. Assessments can be used to determine instructional groups as well. We believe a final
purpose for assessment is to provide both written and verbal feedback to students, parents,
teachers and administrators.
Assessment: from the Latin root assidere, to sit beside another. ago, Thomas Gilbert summed up
the principles of good feedback in his delightful and informative book Human Competence. In it,
he catalogued the requirements of any information system "designed to give maximum support to
performance." The requirements involved eight steps:
1. Identify the expected accomplishments.
2. State the requirements of each accomplishment. If there is any doubt
that people understand the reason why an accomplishment and its
requirements are important, explain this.
3. Describe how performance will be measured and why.
4. Set exemplary standards, preferably in measurement terms.
5. Identify exemplary performers and any available resources that people
can use to become exemplary performers.
6. Provide frequent and unequivocal feedback about how well each
person is performing. This confirmation should be expressed as a
comparison with an exemplary standard. Consequences of good and
poor performance should also be made clear.
7. Supply as much backup information as needed to help people
troubleshoot their own performance.
8. Relate various aspects of poor performance to specific remedial
actions.
Gilbert sardonically adds that "these steps are far too simple to be called a 'technology,' but it
may be that their simplicity helps explain why they are so rarely followed." He elaborates, "In
years of looking at schools and jobs, I have almost never seen an ideal [feedback] system.
Managers, teachers, employees, and students seldom have adequate information about how well
they are performing." A key question to ponder is: why are such "simple" steps "rarely followed"?
What views and practices in schools cause us to ignore or violate such commonsensical views
about performance?
One reason we rarely follow such simple steps is that there are fundamental misconceptions about assessment generally and feedback in particular among educators. As I have argued, far too many educators treat assessment as something one does after
teaching and learning are over instead of seeing assessment as central to learning. (If I were to say that learning requires Assessment and feedback are crucial for helping people learn. Assessment should mirror good instruction; happen continuously as part of instruction; and provide information about the levels of understanding that students are reaching. In order for learners to gain insight into their learning and their understanding, frequent feedback is critical: students need to monitor their learning and actively evaluate their strategies and their current levels of understanding. (How People Learn by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 1999)Individuals acquire a skill much more rapidly if they receive feedback about the correctness of what they have done. One of the most important roles for assessment is the provision of timely and informative feedback to students during instruction and learning so that their practice of a skill and its subsequent acquisition will be effective and efficient. (Knowing What Students Know: The science and design of educational assessment by Pellegrino, Chudowsky, and Glaser 2001)
Assessment Is Needed for Effective Teaching
Two important conclusions about the best college teachers:
• How do they prepare to teach? They begin with questions about student learning objectives rather than about
what the teacher will do.• How do they check their progress and evaluate their efforts? They have some systematic program to assess
their own efforts and to make appropriate changes. They assess their students based on the primary learning objectives rather than on arbitrary standards.
(What the Best College Teachers Do by Bain 2004)
“People tend to learn most effectively (in ways that make a sustained, substantial, and positive influence on the way they think, act, or feel) when
• they are trying to solve problems (intellectual, physical, artistic, practical, abstract, etc.) or create something
new that they find intriguing, beautiful, and/or important;
• they are able to do so in a challenging yet supportive environment in which they can feel a sense of control
over their own education;
• they can work collaboratively with other learners to grapple with the problems;
• they believe that their work will be considered fairly and honestly; and
• they can try, fail, and receive feedback from expert learners in advance of and separate from any summative
judgment of their efforts.” – Ken Bain 2004
all of the Assessement methods
assessments we have experienced and give today fall into one of four basic categories of
methods:
1. Selected response
1. Selected response and short answer2. Extended written response3. Performance assessment4. Personal communicationAll four methods are legitimate options when their use correlates highly with the learning target and the intended use of the information.Performance AssessmentPerformance assessment is assessment based on observation and judgment; we look at a performance or product and make a judgment as to its quality. Examples include the following:• Complex such as playing a musical instrument, carrying out the steps in a scientific experiment, speaking a foreign language, reading aloud with fluency, repairing an engine, or working productively in a group. In these cases it the doing—the process—that is importan
is • Creating complex products such as a term paper, a lab report, or a work of art. In these cases what counts is not so much the process of creation (although that may be evaluated, too), but the level of quality of the product itself.As with extended written response assessments, performance assessments have two parts: a performance task or exercise and a scoring guide. Again, the scoring guide can award points for specific features of a performance or product that are present, or it can take the form of a rubric, in which levels of quality are described. For example, to assess the ability to do a simple process, such as threading a sewing machine, doing long
division, or safely operating a band saw, points might be awarded for each step done in the correct order. Or, for more complex processes or products, you might have a rubric for judging quality that has several dimensions, such as ideas, organization, voice, word
choice, sentence fluency and conventions in writing, or content, organization,
presentation,
and use of language in an oral presentation. Again, scores could be reported in
number or percent of points earned, or in terms of a rubric score. WHAT IS IT? Performance assessment, also known as alternative or authentic assessment, is a form of testing that requires students to perform a task rather than select an answer from a ready-made list. For example, a student may be asked to explain historical events, generate scientific hypotheses, solve math problems, converse in a foreign language, or conduct research on an assigned topic. Experienced raters--either teachers or other trained staff--then judge the quality of the student's work based on an agreed-upon set of criteria. This new form of assessment is most widely used to directly assess writing ability based on text produced by students under test instructions.
HOW DOES IT WORK? Following are some methods that have been used successfully to assess performance:
• Open-ended or extended response exercises are questions or other prompts that require students to explore a topic orally or in writing. Students might be asked to describe their observations from a science experiment, or present arguments an historic character would make concerning a particular proposition. For example, what would Abraham Lincoln argue about the causes of the Civil War?
• Extended tasks are assignments that require sustained attention in a single work area and are carried out over several hours or longer. Such tasks could include drafting, reviewing, and revising a poem; conducting and explaining the results of a science experiment on photosynthesis; or even painting a car in auto shop.
• Portfolios are selected collections of a variety of performance-based work. A portfolio might include a student's "best pieces" and the student's evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of several pieces. The portfolio may also contain some "works in progress" that illustrate the improvements the student has made over time.
These methods, like all types of performance assessments, require that students actively develop their approaches to the task under defined conditions, knowing that their work will be evaluated according to agreed-upon standards. This requirement distinguishes performance assessment from other forms of testing.
WHY TRY IT? Because they require students to actively demonstrate what they know, performance assessments may be a more valid indicator of students' knowledge and abilities. There is a big difference between answering multiple choice questions on how to make an oral presentation and actually making an oral presentation.
More important, performance assessment can provide impetus for improving instruction, and increase students' understanding of what they need to know and be able to do. In preparing their students to work on a performance task, teachers describe what the task entails and the standards that will be used to evaluate performance. This requires a careful description of the elements of good performance, and allows students to judge their own work as they proce
For performance assessments to have a positive impact on instructional practices in the classroom,
teachers need to become familiar with the nature of the tasks, what content and thinking skills the tasks
assess, and what constitutes a high quality response. Teachers in the QUASAR schools participated in
workshops and collaborated informally with their colleagues to gain these types of experiences. They
focused on two important aspects of performance assessment:• Performance assessments allow students to show how they arrived at their solutions and providing
explanations for their answers, thereby providing rich information about students' thinking and reasoning.• Performance assessments reveal different levels of understanding of the mathematics content.
Therefore, evaluations of student responses should focus on the content of the response, not its length.
ed.
mathematics
It is no doubt that the world today is greatly indebted to the contributions made by Indian
mathematicians. One of the most important contribution made by them was the
introduction of decimal system as well as the invention of zero. Here are some the
famous Indian mathematicians dating back from Indus Valley civilization and Vedas to
Modern times.Aryabhatta worked on the place value system using letters to signify
numbers and stating qualities. He discovered the position of nine planets and stated that
these planets revolve around the sun. He also stated the correct number of days in a year
that is 365.
The most significant contribution of Brahmagupta was the introduction of zero(0) to the
mathematics which stood for “nothing”.ramanujan is one of the celebrated Indian
mathematicians. His important contributions to the field include Hardy-Ramanujan-
Littlewood circle method in number theory, Roger-Ramanujan’s identities in partition of
numbers, work on algebra of inequalities, elliptic functions, continued fractions, partial
sums and products of hypergeometric series. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis is the
founder ofIndian Statistical Institute as well as the National Sample Surveys for which he
gained international recognition. Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao, popularly known as C R
Rao is a well known statistician, famous for his “theory of estimation”.
D. R. Kaprekar discovered several results in number theory, including a class of numbers and a constant named after him. Without any formal mathematical education he published extensively and was very well known in recreational mathematics cricle. Harish Chandra is famously known for infinite dimensional group representation theory.satyendranath bose Known for his collaboration with Albert Einstein. He is best known for his work on quantum mechanics in the early 1920s, providing the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate.Bhaskara Bhāskara was the one who declared that any number divided by zero is infinity and that the sum of any number and infinity is also infinity. He is also famous for his book “Siddhanta Siromani”. Narendra Karmarkar is known for his Karmarkar’s algorithm. He is listed as an highly cited researcher by Institute for Scientific Information.
RAMANUJAN
• He was born on 22naof December 1887 in a small village of Tanjore
district, Madras.He failed in English in Intermediate, so his formal studies
were stopped but his self-study of mathematics continued.
• He sent a set of 120 theorems to Professor Hardy of Cambridge. As a result
he invited Ramanujan to England.
• Ramanujan showed that any big number can be written as sum of not
more than four prime numbers.
• He showed that how to divide the number into two or more squares or
cubes.
• when Mr Litlewood came to see Ramanujan in taxi number 1729,
Ramanujan said that 1729 is the smallest number which can be written in
the form of sum of cubes of two numbers in two ways,i.e. 1729 = 93 + 103 =
13 + 123since then the number 1729 is called Ramanujan’s number.
• In the third century B.C, Archimedes noted that the ratio of circumference
of a circle to its diameter is constant. The ratio is now called ‘pi ( Π )’ (the