week 3 response

Pam

No, academic achievement should not be the main criterion for assessing student outcome. Each student comes to the classroom with his/her own uniqueness. Teachers should accept ownership over their student's performance in their classroom. All teachers should continue to be highly qualified to teach the subjects and grade levels they are assigned. I do not believe that academic achievement should be the main criterion for assessing student outcomes. Evaluations are important because they help the teacher gain a better understanding of the knowledge that the learner has learned. Students learn subject material differently, have different learning styles, and retain information differently. Positive early and elementary literacy environments can mean the difference between the creation of a lifelong reader who is a lover of literature and a lifelong struggling reader (Nathanson, Preslow, and Levitt, 2008). No two children are the same. I do think that academic achievement should be included but not the main assessment tool.

It is important for schools to utilize multiple measures for evaluating not only the curriculum but also student achievement because not all students test well. Everyone doesn’t learn the same way, and they surely do not perform or complete a task by approaching the solution the same way. Because of the No Child left behind Act of 2001 mandates that public school students take a statewide standardized test regardless of their race, learning abilities, and family social status. The student must earn a certain score to achieve mastery. This score determines the student’s grade, this score also, determines the teacher VAM score which effects the teachers’ pay. With the goal being that all students reach proficiency, many teachers followed a repetitive “testing script” for daily practice. However, at the time, there was little understanding of how this practice would affect students’ engagement, critical thinking, and creativity (Levitt 2007).