Follow-up Seminar-Workshop on Assessment Practices for School Administrators and Test Formulators in Mathematics and Science

NISMED conducted a follow-up seminar-workshop on assessment practices for fourteen (14) elementary school principals of the Department of Education – Division of Limay, Bataan on July 22-23, 2009. This seminar-workshop was organized by Alstom Philippines Inc.

The seminar-workshop was designed specifically for school administrators and test formulators in mathematics and science. The content of the course was focused on student assessment to enable these instructional leaders to appreciate the crucial role of appropriate and effective assessment in raising student achievement. In addition, this seminar-workshop was meant to make it possible for the schools to have mutually supportive coherent and consistent assessment practices that can significantly improve student learning.

The two-day seminar-workshop consisted of a plenary session, parallel lectures, and workshops in science and mathematics. The plenary session on Assessing Student Learning Effectively provided the framework on which the workshops were anchored. It emphasized that assessment is the most powerful tool for influencing the learning process, since tests and measures of learning given by teachers define for students what they should learn.

A NISMED facilitator gives suggestions on how to transform
a multiple-choice item to a constructed-response item.

During the parallel lectures on developing constructed response and multiple-choice items, the participants were assisted by the facilitators in giving substantial comments and suggestions as they revise existing test items. They were likewise exposed to the process of developing assessment items that enable students to demonstrate higher-order thinking skills when challenged with problems using real-life situations.

Each pair of participants were tasked to formulate one multiple-choice item with accompanying explanations of the options and one constructed-response item with the corresponding rubrics during the parallel workshops. One of the challenging aspects of the workshops was revising directions and questions to make these clear and understandable to the target students. Another challenge faced by the participants was the preparation of the scoring criteria (rubrics) for the constructed-response items. The items prepared by each pair of participants were then presented to the other participants and UP NISMED trainers for critiquing and giving of feedback in order to hone their pedagogical content knowledge.