Portal:Assessments/Intro

Assessments are a critical component of the learning process. Assessments are meant to be reflective exercises for the teachers in assessing the effectiveness of the learning process as well as feedback processes for the learner to help them understand their learning needs. For such an assessment to happen, it must be structured in a participatory manner with the learner. Further, the teaching learning process must be structured in such a way that the results from these assessments can be used to make decisions about the learning design and sequence. Such an assessment method, as can be expected, is called formative assessment. There is yet another assessment process which has as its objective checking the competency and mastery of an area of knowledge. This is often a one-time exercise and is best used as a measure of readiness for moving to the next level of competency. Such an assessment is called summative assessment. While the summative assessment is intended to test learning outcomes, there is enough room in this to structure it such that different skills are tested and concepts and not facts are tested.

In reality, however, assessments stands far removed from these two positions Read more