Formal and Informal Assessment in Class

When trying to think of possible ways to assess student knowledge in my class, I immediately think of testing. My thought process is that assessment is testing, and I have to get away from that.I have to understand that testing is just one form of assessment.

With that being said I must think about a way to assess my student's acquisition of knowledge in an informal way that does not require traditional testing. The first way I believe that I could do this is simply to ask my students to discuss with me their feelings on what I am teaching that day. This simple discussion would allow me to evaluate both individual and class feelings on the material. Another informal assessment would be journal entries both before and after classes. I see using these journal in lessons that I perceive to be particularly difficult for my students and  I would ask them to journal before the lesson and after the lecture So I can judge how they have grown in the material. This would allow me to see my students growth as it relates to their own prior knowledge.

Formal assessments in History always make me think of horrible multiple-choice question tests that only aim to teach you specific answers to questions. Education is and should be so much more than just asking a student to repeat an answer their teacher gave them. Due to this, my preferred form of assessment would be open-ended essay questions that ask students to give an answer and explain it. While they may have an answer I was not looking for, it may still be right. This would allow me to assess their ability to reasonably answer a question rather than regurgitating answers. The last form of assessment is the classic projects history is known for. Without the specifics of a project, I can say that the assessment of these projects wold be rubrics that describe exactly what I am looking for and would have an analytic form. That is, the rubric would be on a continuum that would have specific criteria for each aspect of a portion of the project. The specific criteria would be helpful in performing the task and not contain any "unnecessarily negative language"

I believe these assessments  would help me to judge where my students are. I also believe that they are especially conducive to history classes. In writing this I was able to find an amazingly helpful article on this matter specifically. The article is from the Serve Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and is called, "How to Assess Student Performance in History: Going Beyond Multiple-Choice Tests."