home

The lesson started by presenting a personal story about assessment from a higher education girl (Orly's daughter who studies psychology and education). The aim of telling the story was to show the importance of assessment and how lack of seriousness of assessment can be harmful. Then the class discussed last week's group work about how much alternative assessment (AA) is used in our schools and classes. The following are some statements that reflect students' opinions about AA. Orly summed up the discussion by stating that AA is coming in worlwide but not very strongly. This is due to three main reasons according to research. First, external exams such as Mitzav and Bagrut have very strong backwash effects. Teachers are teaching in order to prepare the students for these particular exams. Second, the issues of [|validity] and [|reliability] are problematic and questioned. These two are useless for AA. Third, the general move which began ten years ago in USA and changed the western world, [|accountability].The word accountability is taken from the business world which is different from the educational world. Following that, we went over the page we got two weeks ago (Lambert and Lines, 2000). This page is actually a suggestion for an alternative type of assessment. This type of educational framework includes six terms that are used to describe AA. Since some concepts like validity and reliability are not good for AA, they were replaced with other terms. One example is "validity" is replaced by "curriculum fidelity". One more example is the term "comparability" that replaces the term "reliability". Furthermore, Orly added when explaining "dependability and public credibility" that there is a correlation between "validity" and "reliability". The two terms are opposite of each other and that there is a need for both. Orly advises us to write down the educational reason for using AA for the aim of justifying its use with inspectors, parents and everybody involved in the education system. Finally, Orly asked us to write what we think about the bias of AA.
 * Samar said that school's policy is highly crucial. Some principals and coordinators obligate teachers to use traditional assessment (TA). Lial agrees with Samar's point regarding school's policy and says that in her school the principal encourages teachers to use (TA).Samar added the issue of doing homework. She complained about pupils not dong their homework. Haifa responded to Samar and suggested to allow pupils do homework in pairs in the last five minutes of the lesson.