Evaluations and Assessments Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Evaluations and Assessments - Essay Example The purpose of these assessments is to ensure that students are acquiring the essential skills, concepts and subject knowledge in social studies; that they have the opportunity to engage in a broad range of social topics that include civics, economics, geography, history, and general social studies skills. The plan is to eventually these across the state by 2008-09 in order to measure student learning in social studies. 9 CBAs are targeted for elementary school. They are believed to be better able to assess the subject as compared to standardized multiple choice and short answer questions for instance as well as have other advantages. The main component of the CBA is the rubric page. This details how a student can reach proficiency for the particular assessment. Besides this, the CBA mentions support materials, provides a student checklist, suggested resources etc. Both formal and informal assessments are similar in that they seek to provide a measure of student performance, usually as a summative assessment of learning. However, formal assessments are conducted under stricter exam conditions because their scores are noted on the student records. On the other hand, informal assessments are typically used to provide students with practice for the real formal assessments and may not be conducted under such strict conditions. The CBA issued by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction are formal assessments. Any other student assessments conducted entirely by the teacher would be considered as informal. The Content and Regional Focus for GLEs for grade 1 is based as Families and the concepts of near and far, now and then; for grade 2 is based on Community and the same concepts. A simple example of a pre-assessment question is given below. Another question could test the student’s knowledge and understanding of a