Traditional vs. alternative assessment

Name: Oscar Cristóbal Colunga Zamudio Reading report #1
Subject: Educative assessment methods

Assessment at a distance: Traditional vs. alternative assessment

The articleintroduces the topic first by giving a series of definitions regarding what assessment and testing means. What I was able to understand is that assessment is carried on continuously and it involves allthose activities in which students apply knowledge, on the other hand, testing is a one-time event and tends to evaluate certain specific skill and it is not continuous, though it can be applied indifferent stages. Testing involves traditional assessment: There are different types of tests: Multiple choice, true or false, short answers and even essays, but this last can also belong to the categoryof alternative assessment.
The article mentions three approaches to alternative assessment: Authentic assessment, performance –based assessment, constructivist assessment. Researchers and educatorsuse the terms performance –based, alternative and authentic interchangeably . Performance- based assessment has two main characteristics. (1)Performance: Student’s active response through thegeneration of a product(2)Authentic: The student delivers a certain task in a real world oriented context. Alternative assessment strategies include: open-ended questions, exhibits, demonstrations, executionof experiments, simulations and portfolios.
There are some arguments against traditional assessment that state that it is a decontextualized procedure and that it cannot completely tell about thewhole performance of a particular student since tests are standardized models not giving a chance to reflect on learning, moreover, they only measure what a student can do in a particular time. On theother hand, alternative assessment is more flexible allowing students a second chance to perform a task if they happen to fail as they are being assessed. It involves reflective thinking and it...