Assessment Strategies That Can Increase Motivation

 

ASSESSMENT STRATEGIES THAT CAN INCREASE MOTIVATION EleaxarAbesamis and Claren Dale Halili  Introduction An indispensable part of the teaching learning process process is assessment. It is usually at the end of a lesson plan termed "evaluation". A lesson plan is not complete without an assessment. The instructional cycle indeed is not complete without assessment. Assessment is at the service of learning, thus the phrase assessment for learning. Assessment is meant to ensure that learning takes place. This is possible only when the assessment process motivates students to learn. Unfortunately, in many instances, assessment as a process does not motivate, instead threatens. How can we make assessment a motivating and a facilitating experience experience is the concern of this module. Motivating students has consistently been a concern of educators. In 1987, Howard Hendricks claimed that “the number one problem in education e ducation today is the failure to motivate students…..to get them off the dime and into action.” act ion.” A decade later, a survey survey of elementary school principals found that ninety-seven percent identified motivating students as either an important or very important issue in their schools. Motivation is defined as “the process whereby goal-directed goal-directed activity is instigated and st udent motivation can be sustained” (Pintrich and Schunk 1996). In the realm of higher education, student sustained” thought of as the overall drive of the student to succeed in the classroom – classroom – learning  learning is the goal-directe goal-directed d activity. It is not uncommon for teachers to blame students for lacking motivation when they do not achieve at the level their teachers would expect them to. However, the literature on student motivation indicates that teachers can have an extraordinary impact on their students drive to achieve and succeed in their classes. Most research on student motivation focuses either on student characteristics or teacher traits that impact, positively or negatively, neg atively, students‟ motivation to learn. learn.  

How to Use Assessment to Motivate Students As teachers, we often spend countless hours grading papers and writing comments in margins, only to have our students look at the grade and then toss the paper in the wastebasket.

While we must evaluate our students’ work, we also need to develop opportunities for our students to think about their work and use our corrective feedback to develop next steps for meeting the learning targets we have set.

How Assessment Affects Learning The difference between good students and weak students is that good students are able to absorb our feedback and use it to create a pathway toward understanding learning targets.

 

Weak students, however, have trouble understanding feedback and need us to give them specific next steps in order for them to develop a growth mindset and see a path toward understanding. Unlike our good students, our weaker students often have given up trying to

understand our comments comments written in the margins of their papers or don’t know how to find solutions to the test items items they missed. Because they don’t understand understand how to improve, they often dismiss school and school work as “stupid” or simply say, “I don’t care.”  When we teach our students how to use our feedback to analyze their work, it not only gives meaning to the time and effort we have put into grading and commenting on thei theirr work, but also engages our students in the learning process. Requiring students to think about and apply criteria for meeting learning targets in the context of their own work encourages students to monitor their own work and take responsibility for their own learning. Getting students involved in analyzing their mistakes on tests helps them to understand the intended learning, the immediate next steps they need to take in their journey toward learning targets, and gives them a clearer picture as to just where they are in the journey.

Hattie and Timperely’s (2007) review of the research on feedback determined that analysis of mistakes is one of the most powerful ways students learn or increase their learning.

Assessment strategies that can increase motivation How can we make assessment a palatable menu for our students? Experiences in classroom assessment and principles of assessment tell us the following: 1. Make clear your learner's objective every time. It time.  It is good if students are clarified on the objectives they are working on and the criteria that will be used in evaluating their learning. 2. Make your students own the lesson objective. Allow them to set their own personal learning targets based on the lesson objective. Initially their personal target may be lower than the learning target set for the class but with the expectation that they will gradually bring them up according to their pace until their personal targets coincide with the class target. This will make them feel unthreatened and comfortable. 3. Engage your students in self-assessment self-assessment.. They have established their own target against clearly set lesson objectives. They are in the best position to determine if they have met their own targets and the class target or objective. When learners are given the opportunity to evaluate their own performance, they bring to mind the personal task and strategy variables applicable to them. They reflect on their personal characteristics characteristics that affect their learning task they need to work on and the strategies that can help them. In this way, assessment empowers empowers the student to take a more active role in their own learning process.

 

1. Practice criterion-referenced assessment rather than norm-referenced assessment. assessment. Make  Make your students compare their performance against establish criterion, i.e., the learning objective or target and not against other students' performance. Comparing a student's performance with the latter makes assessment threatening. 2. If you are indeed criterion-refe criterion-referenced, renced, then your assessment is certainly based on established criterion, your learning target or objective. It objective. It has been observed, however, that a number of teachers set learning objectives but assess another. This leads to students' confusion and discourageme discouragement. nt. 3. Inspire your students to have mastery-focus rather than performance-focus. performance-focus. Set  Set their hearts on lesson mastery for the love learning rather than on scores, grades and performance. If they fail to get an item or items in a test, tell them not to worry and assure them that they will be taught again until mastery. 4. Have a "growth mindset". Believe that your students can improve. Failure or wrong answer is welcome. Assure your students that they are not made less of themselves by a wrong answer or a mistake. What is most important is that they learn from their mistakes and continuously grow and improve. 5. Your assessment practice must be sensitive and constructive because assessment has an emotional impact. Bear impact.  Bear in mind that your comments, marks and grades, as well as the manner you communicate them to students, can affect their self-confidence. Assessment should be constructive as much as possible. Judging students harshly to the point that they feel belittled or insulted will kill their spirit and may lead them to have a negative view both of themselves and the subject.