One constructivist approach to assessing student learning is the use of portfolios. The contents of a portfolio demonstrate what a student knows and can do. The portfolio indicates actual products and processes a student has developed, as exemplified in the description of the contents of a student portfolio in a teaching methods course. Portfolios…

Students individually or in committees with teacher guidance need to develop a portfolio to indicate the quality of school work that has been accomplished. Student portfolios are a purposeful collection of work that illustrates the students' efforts, progress, and achievement in given areas. Portfolios provide ongoing and authentic records of…

Portfolio assessment is a rather recent concept in the evaluation of student achievement even though the separate items in a portfolio have been used for decades. Students are involved in selecting what goes into the portfolio, and which emphasizes the achievement of objectives from within the classroom. In mathematics education, the portfolio is…

Suggestions are given for evaluation of school principals by teachers. In developing an evaluation instrument to appraise principal performance, one need not start from scratch. The Organizational Climate and Description Questionnaire (OCDQ) of Halpin and Crofts (1963) is a useful tool for pinpointing areas of strength and weakness. Four subtests…

The use of portfolios and rubrics in assessment developed in part as a reaction to limitations of standardized tests for student evaluation. Portfolios relate directly to what students are learning, but there are many problems in evaluating their contents. These center on: (1) time involved in scoring; (2) lack of validity statistics; (3) relative…

There are numerous issues in the teaching of mathematics that need to be clarified and meaningfully understood by teachers, supervisors, and administrators. This paper discusses some of these issues, such as the integrated versus the separate subjects curriculum, the level of application versus knowledge for its own sake, state mandated versus…

This paper comments on three concepts in mathematics that need harmonizing: attitudes, mathematics, and evaluation. Some ways of evaluating achievement are suggested. Discusses portfolios as an evaluation process and provides information about additional assessment procedures. (ASK)

The advantages and disadvantages of state mandated and locally developed curricula are discussed. State mandates emphasize a measurement philosophy of education in which testing is the name of the game to determine how well students are achieving. One of the advantages of a state mandated curriculum is that the curriculum is aligned with the…

Materials to use in geography instruction and ways to evaluate student learning in geography are described. Portfolios are a good way to determine whether students have achieved the desired objectives in geography. Portfolios also require that the student be involved in both learning and assessment. For learning to use maps and globes, student…

The use of portfolios is a rather recent innovation in teaching the language arts. A characteristic of the portfolio process is that students are led to notice their own progress through the work included in the portfolio. Many educators welcome the portfolio process because they recognize that standardized tests do not tell enough about what…

There are many ways guidance counselors can help teachers achieve more optimal reading instruction. Counselors first may have to ascertain the kinds of problems faced by a student in learning to read. Assessing a student's ability to use picture clues to decipher words may be necessary with primary grade students. Knowledge about phonics, using…

Achieving a fair and objective evaluation of teacher performance is not easy. Student test results have been used to assess teacher performance, but this approach has many weaknesses, especially because students differ from school to school and standardized tests are open to questions about their fairness. Criterion-referenced tests have been…

Summative evaluation of student achievement in reading emphasizes determining learner progress at the end of a unit of study, end of course, or end of the school year. Generally, state mandated tests stress an end of the school year percentile which is to indicate the present state of learner achievement. This paper discusses and analyzes…

There are a plethora of ways which may be used to ascertain learner achievement in reading. This paper discusses such procedures. Comprehensive teacher observation of reading, using quality criteria, can be an excellent approach to assess reading progress. Selected criteria are discussed. Six categories of word recognition skills are important.…

The testing and measurement movement has certainly become important in United States education. Test scores are looked upon as being quite valuable in ascertaining student achievement, especially in the reading curriculum. Percentiles, standard deviations, stanine scores, and other indicators are given to show objectively how well the reading…