Blog # 6: revisiting post # 4

After revisiting entry # 4 written about assessment. I found that I left many unanswered questions and many undeveloped thoughts about ideas that I posed. In this blog post I am going to be taking a deeper look at two of the ideas I discussed in my previous blog post.  

Disclaimer: all of my responses are given with early childhood students in mind (K-2)

Is there a time when a teacher should not correct a student?

When a student is working in their journal or creating a draft of some sort i feel that a student should not be corrected. i feel that if a student is not being graded on their correctness of the work, the teacher should not correct them. this might encourage students to try and push themselves to work harder or try something different without the fear of being wrong or getting a low grade. 

I recall many times when my students were working in their journals and they would just stare off into space because they did not know how to properly spell a word...the fear of being wrong is something that I feel students struggle with day in and day out. The idea of just trying their best or sounding out the word or even using their inventive spelling scared my students. They feared being wrong would lead to failure. 

This is another reason why students need to be pushed to try new things. Students trying new things would push them to reach outside their comfort zone. When a student knows they will not be graded or corrected on their journal or note taking maybe they will be encourage to finally reach outside their zone of comfort. 

The next problem that rises after that would be when do you start correcting students? 

I feel that if an assignment is given the student should knowingly be working their best on it. That being said, I feel that a student should have the opportunity to have many different drafts of their writing. Their reading should not be graded based on the correctness until the end. The students could be graded on their steps taken throughout the assignment or the students could be graded on their ability to stay on track. However, having the students being graded on correctness should not be done until the final product. 

Depending on the grade of the students, I feel that even during a test if a student spells a word wrong, they should not be punished unless of course it is a spelling test. I want my students to feel comfortable to reach for the stars and to reach for success. I want them to be comfortable to try anything and to reach out of their comfort zones without the fear of being wrong or worse failure. 

What about using assessment over technology? 

Using assessment over technology is a completely new idea to me as a hopeful teacher, However, I feel that this type of assessment could done correctly. I feel that the use of rubrics might be the best way to go about assessing over technology. Rubrics give the students guidelines to follow when completing an assignment. A rubric also gives the student an idea of what the teacher is looking for. This would help the students organize their work. That being said, I cannot think of any other assessment tools that would work for an assignment over technology. This is an idea I hope to learn more about during the semester.