School and classroom evaluations of students have long been a source of discussion. Educators are always striving to create an effective evaluation technique that takes into account all of a student’s skills while also recognizing their talents and potential. An alternative assessment method has developed because the standard or traditional evaluation form may not be the most beneficial to students. This technique is more inclusive and realistic in its approach, and it has produced some excellent outcomes in terms of its effectiveness and efficiency.
Definition
The alternative assessment method emphasizes the proficiency of a student rather than their level of knowledge. The primary objective of alternative assessment is to provide a space for students where they can demonstrate their knowledge through the execution of tasks. It is also known as a performance test or authentic assessment among academicians, as students will complete the assigned tasks that will reflect their understanding of learning objectives. Through this method, student’s analytical, reasoning, and logical thinking capabilities also can be assessed. This approach has been proven to be more comprehensive and beneficial than the traditional assessment from various experiments.
Few things about alternative assessment
Even though alternative assessment has been a more comprehensive assessment procedure, it is not a standard method to check a student’s knowledge. The alternative assessment has been meant to check individual students’ specific needs and abilities, not an all-size-fits-all process. The alternative assessment has been an instructor-led assessment process that means it’s up to the teacher to design a unique method to evaluate the student’s ability. The authentic assessment style explores various learning styles, and it is continuously adaptable. Based on goal, objective, class training, the alternative assessment style changes. There are multiple methods you can follow if you want to canary out an authentic assessment or alternative assessment, such as portfolio, performance test, open test, crib test, take-home assessment, collaborative testing, etc.
Advantages of alternative assessment over traditional ones:
· The most prominent advantage has been, it provides the student enough room to apply their accumulated knowledge in real-life situations to solve practical problems.
· This method pushes students to get out of their comfort zone and use their innovative thinking to find solutions to different problems. Hence, instructors become aware of student’s problem-solving skills. The teacher also gets left with more information about students, which can be used for identifying the weaknesses.
· Authentic skills and alternative skills have been proven to be effective methods to build students’ cognitive skills and thinking capability.
· Teachers or instructors also get to know about any unique set of abilities of students. Then the student can be redirected towards their field of alignment, where he has a better chance of success.
· A strong relationship between the students, teachers, and classmates gets established in this alternative assessment method. More engagement in this assessment process increases students’ communicative and interactive skills.
Drawbacks of alternative assessment
· In some cases, the alternative assessment becomes a rigorous process, and teachers may find it harder to evaluate. In those cases, teachers have to put more time and effort into comprehending student’s work and rightly assess them.
· This assessment method has a scope of bias and preferences of teachers. Therefore, this cannot be termed as an ideal assessment method.
· Results of alternative assessment methods cannot be expressed in numerical quantitative form. The qualitative form of assessments often inflicted pressure and hardships on the teachers as they find it difficult to collate and interpret results.
· Teachers also need training and courses to become familiar with the alternative assessment, which inflicts the cost of resources on institutions. Hence, it becomes expensive to train teachers and set up test preparations. If you are also assigned with any of these exercises, you can take help from our assignment writing company.
In recent times many universities across the globe have adopted the alternative assessment, as this has rightly assessed students’ different abilities. Reports, summaries, and take-home assessments are the methods that universities predominantly use to assess students’ understanding of the topic.
