This week we watched a video highlighting assessment and performance task. The performance task is a summative assessment used to show subject knowledge and real world application of knowledge. All to often tests are given to students the later real world application gets lost in standardized testing. Students take tests and the answers are just mere facts that they read and now regurgitated in a multiple choice exam. We as teachers need to take our performance tasks and make them meaningful and apply to real situations. This can be done for example by having a student who has completed a unit on World War II write an essay not only based on the factual information he/she learned and applying it to the know. Questions like this. We know what lead to the Third World War,but how do we prevent future wars? It's this performance task that will help students think critically and help them draw conclusions to situations they may face. This product provides us with feedback that we then use to assess their knowledge and our instruction. All of what I have described here fits into our responsibilities as teachers. It's clearly written in standard 4 and 5 in the NCSCS handbook. Standard 5 is based on reflecting, being dynamic, and analyzing our students learning. We can do this by looking for new creative ideas to enhance performance task that have been proven through evidence based data. A very simple way to put all this is that we need to base our performance tasks on what we taught and ensure the task applies to real world application. We then asses the feedback we receive and make the appropriate changes to our instruction. We as teachers also will need to be open to change and find new engaging material to enhance teaching that's based on fact.
