Assessment+(continued5)

**How can assessment** //**help**//  **or** //**hinder**//  **the process of teaching students problem solving and collaboration?**

Assessment can help the process of teaching students problem solving and collaboration. By being able to see the questions that students have to answer, children are able to work together and help one another.Collaboration is a great way to students to learn the information and see it through someone of their own age and mindsets eyes.

Assessment can help teach students in problem solving and collaboration activities by giving students feedback that will help them meet the goals and objectives. Using technology is also a way that can help teach students problem solving and collaboration because it will allow teachers the opportunity to design, develop, and create new and more effective assessments. By using technology to support the information that is being taught or feedback, children will be able to see the information in front of them and collaborate together to understand the different materials.

Assessment helps the process of teaching students problem solving and collaboration. Assessment provides an opportunity for students to collaborate with one another. They are able to assess each other’s work and provide feedback to help their peers succeed. Students can use different technology tools such as wikis and blogs to collaborate with one another. As students are providing feedback on one another’s wikis and blogs, the teacher can use this collaboration method as a graded assessment.

Assessment can help collaboration and problem solving through studying together. When students know they will be given an assessment at the end of a unit, some students will choose to study together, participating in collaboration. If one student does not understand a certain concept and they know that it will be assessed, they may ask a peer to explain it better to them. Students collaborate to study for assessments or may work together on assignments which will be graded as an assessment. This GoogleDoc is a perfect example. This document will be graded as an assessment. We are all working together to complete the questions and feed off of one another, participating in both collaboration as well as problem solving.

Assessment may hinder the process of teaching students problem solving and collaboration if the written standardized test type is given as the assessment. These students will not be able to collaborate or use each other’s ideas to build problem solving skills. Although assessment in the form of standardized testing is much easier to administer, this is not the best way for assessing problem solving and collaboration. Assessment tools such as clicker technology can work wonders for students’ collaborative abilities. After students have worked as a group on an assignment, it is not always easy to capture their attention. They are still in the mode to talk with their partners and it may take them a while to calm down. Clicker assessing can be used as a transition from a fun group activity to an assessment that helps students settle down. Students will look at the board in front of the classroom. There will be answers to what they have just been working on and students have to click a button on a remote to answer a question. This is something like a team Jeopardy game. Students can have fun while learning. This assessment also shows the teacher which groups are having the most trouble grasping the material. After using this assessment, the teacher can go on to create study groups of students who seem to be closely to the same level.

Assessment can hinder the process of teaching students because if you grade students on collaborating projects everyone in the group must have the same grade. A group project is done together and the main point is that everyone contributes the same amount of effort. If one student does all the work all the other students did not have to do work everyone gets the same grade. This is not fair.

To make assessment more equitable in group projects, the teacher can assign each student a different role in the group project. They may break the project down into different sections and assign a different student in each of the groups to the different sections. That way the teacher knows who did what in the project. If one section is not complete, the student who completed that section will get a lower grade than the others. All of the students should be graded individually.

Another way to make assessment more equitable in group projects is to have each student fill out a confidential survey form stating any problems they may have had with group members. Here the students can confidentially say which groups members did not work as hard as others.

Collaboration can also coincide with the assessment in order to make it a more rich meaningful assessment. Students can work together to create a final project such as creating and building upon answers to questions through Google Docs. Students have to use skills to edit and reevaluate what they have written and also what their peers have written in order to make the project come together as a whole and not just individual responses. Students need to analyze and evaluate text to make sure that it firs accordingly. This is making the collaboration piece more effective because it its combining multiple peoples thoughts and knowledge in order to come up with the best answer.