response to discussion 4

Mariah

After rereading the two "But What Does This Have to do with Teaching" segments in Chapters six and seven, there are two key ideas I have identified. The key idea I identified from Chapter six that resonated with me as an educator was the premise that for biases to be eliminated from assessments, educators must put in the work to eliminate biases from their own understanding. Popham asserts that if educators are able to identify the biases they carry and avoid them, then "any gaps between the performance levels of minority and majority students can be attributed to instruction, not shortcomings in a test" (Popham, W.J., 2019, p. 150). Therefore, no test can be used unjustly against minority students as was the case in the Debra P. v. Turlington case. 

Secondly, the key idea that resonated with me from Chapter seven was the premise that teaching mastery should be approached through a varied lens. If teachers attempt to teach mastery through a favored type, even inadvertently, they can skew their students generalized mastery of a subject. Popham expounds upon this by saying "A cognitive skill that’s been learned well by a student will be a cognitive skill that can be displayed in all sorts of ways, whether via selected-response items or constructed-response items" (Popham, W.J., 2019, p. 177). I think this should influence teachers to be self-reflective in the same sense as the aforementioned key idea from Chapter six, that educators should put in the work to continuously better themselves for the sake of their students.

Kadeidra

"Students ought to master the skills and knowledge they're being taught so thoroughly that they can display such mastery in a good many days, not just one."

This excerpt is one of the many powerful statements mentioned in Chapter 6's "But What Does This Have to do with Teaching" segment. The author believes for a student to show true mastery, they should be able to display proficiency at all depths of knowledge (DOK). The DOKs can be tested using various test question styles like selected and constructed responses. Chapter 6 also advises teachers to teach their content in a generalizable way. This form of instruction allows the students to associate the lesson with other subjects and real-world experiences. The author urges teachers to utilize various assessment question items like true/false, short answer, multiple choice, etc. It's believed that students will base their learning depth on their teacher's favored test question item minimizing their effort and learning capacity. 

Chapter 7 focuses on the creation and scoring of constructed-response. The author acknowledges the difficulty associated with constructed responses. I tend to stay away from this question style because scoring these types of questions is quite tricky. The author suggests that teachers reserve constructed-response questions/assessments for a modest amount of important instruction content. I agree with this statement. Most schools like mine require their teachers to enter at least two grades a week. The rigor of grading and creating a constructed response once or twice a week seems time-consuming. 

Orien

One key idea that resonated with me in Chapter 6's "But What Does This Have to do with Teaching" segment is that when a student's cognitive skill is learned well, the same cognitive skill would be able to be displayed by the student in more than one way, whether by selected-response items or constructed-response items. We as educators have to promote our students' general mastery of what we are teaching them. When students' general mastery of what we teach them is promoted, then the student will be able to successfully answer any category of question that they receive, whether if the questions come as multiple-choice or short-answered questions. This key idea in Chapter 6 resonated with me because I strongly believe if we motivate and try to push them to become high-functioning students, then our students will be able to successfully pass any state exam or classroom test. 

Chapter 7's segment can correlate to Chapter 6's segment with the key idea of letting us know that one way that we can see our students' mastery progress is to have them "display what they've learned by generating answers to constructed-response tests" (Popham, 2020, p. 198). To have our students being able to create a response from their own learned knowledge instead of them just looking at the few list of options that are already created allows us to see that our students have an extensive knowledge and mastery. The type of assessments that we create for our students usually shows the expectations that we expect our students to master.