Inquiry Project Reflection
After going through the research and presentation, I feel like the process was smoother than research has been in the past. Research for my topic was abundant, though frustratingly adjacent to what I wanted to research about. When I originally posed my Inquiry question, I was hoping to find more concrete ideas, strategies, or resources around turning inquiry assessment into a percentage-based grade. Unfortuantely, it's an area that doesn't have a lot of focus, maybe because researchers are just starting to focus on inquiry base learning assessment. Maybe other systems aren't requiring teachers to give percentage-based grades for inquiry learning, but I assume that a lot still are.
With the information that I did find, it opened my focus up to a lot of assessment perspectives that I hadn't considered. When originally posing my question, my thoughts about formative assessment were fairly formed and I thought that I had a good grasp on the practice, but my research really opened up my understanding of the realities of using it and the challenges that you need to think about in implementing it. Things like the necessity of setting criteria early possibly bounding inquiry itself was a new idea for me. It was a strange dichotomy of trying to implement strategies for improving students' ability to take control of their own learning, and yet with those same strategies limiting what they can do with their learning.
I'm not sure exactly which direction I want to take this in Inquiry 2. Considering my biggest focus on formative assessment was only found through research, perhaps more research will shine a light on some new angle. But also, I think I'd like to investigate different strategies of turning assessment into grades in a way that's consistant across teachers. More discussion with teachers and possibly running more 'experiments' like my activity in my presentation with different strategies would help.
I think another area I would want to focus on is ideology of assessment and diversity and equity. How do our designs for assessment privilege or benefit different groups? How do they disadvantage different groups? What are our policies for re-tests or extensions? What are our policies for workbooks and the cost? What's the context of the problems and assessments we present? This is such an important area of assessment design that I haven't had any focused education on, so this may be an area to study further in Inquiry 2.
With the information that I did find, it opened my focus up to a lot of assessment perspectives that I hadn't considered. When originally posing my question, my thoughts about formative assessment were fairly formed and I thought that I had a good grasp on the practice, but my research really opened up my understanding of the realities of using it and the challenges that you need to think about in implementing it. Things like the necessity of setting criteria early possibly bounding inquiry itself was a new idea for me. It was a strange dichotomy of trying to implement strategies for improving students' ability to take control of their own learning, and yet with those same strategies limiting what they can do with their learning.
I'm not sure exactly which direction I want to take this in Inquiry 2. Considering my biggest focus on formative assessment was only found through research, perhaps more research will shine a light on some new angle. But also, I think I'd like to investigate different strategies of turning assessment into grades in a way that's consistant across teachers. More discussion with teachers and possibly running more 'experiments' like my activity in my presentation with different strategies would help.
I think another area I would want to focus on is ideology of assessment and diversity and equity. How do our designs for assessment privilege or benefit different groups? How do they disadvantage different groups? What are our policies for re-tests or extensions? What are our policies for workbooks and the cost? What's the context of the problems and assessments we present? This is such an important area of assessment design that I haven't had any focused education on, so this may be an area to study further in Inquiry 2.
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