Checklist as a Form of Informal Assessment

Checklist as a Form of Informal Assessment

Informal methods of assessment basically refer to as the forms of assessments which are incorporated by teachers in classroom activities to gauge the students’ progress, performance and also their level of understanding. This type of assessment includes the use of observations, rate scaling, event sampling, portfolio among others. Basing the area of assessment as the preschool, it is understood that the brain of these students’ are still young and they are learning how to read, write and count.  A student who has poor performance in reading and communication can be selected in order to assess their skills in reading grammatical sentences.

The checklist was highly recommended as an assessment tool where the student’s skills are put in a test to evaluate their knowledge in reading and communicating with their friends. The decision of using a checklist was because it exhibits a lot of merits which overweighed its demerits in this particular instructional area. This mode of assessment was able to break down the complex instances of mastering where the student has difficulties in conversing fluently and reading to more consistent and efficient sampling. Moreover, it helped the teacher to take control to be able to notice any slight mistake the student made. This would eventually aid the teacher in removing the barriers that made the student to have problems in reading and communicating.

In addition, checklists assisted the teacher to become more keen on following how the student read different nouns, adverbs, verbs, homophones and all parts of speech. In the same context, this type of informal assessment helped the teacher to communicate the goals of his assignment to the student’s parents. To sum it all, checklists would be useful since they are based on specific traits such as spelling, pronunciation, rhyming, intonations among others which all affected the student’s way of reading.

The most difficult area was how to implement this type of assessment but since the teacher spend a lot of time with the students he or she was able to detect the student’s behavior in general. The school’s environment was the best setting to exercise and put the checklist into action. This is because the student was able to interact with their classmates during class sessions, outside in the playground, in the mess when taking meals and also during their free time. Furthermore, the teacher was able to monitor the student’s speech when asking questions or when trying to express his urges. Consequently, the teacher had the ability to implement the checklist during the reading lessons where every student was asked to read sentences or paragraphs on their own. The teacher was always conversant on the student’s behavior on the basis of interaction since communication is an important element to keep conversations going on.

The student’s performance on the checklist was averagely poor because he didn’t meet the objectives of the teacher. It was observed that most of the time the student would spend alone since he could not interact with the other students at ease. He behaved more of an introvert if not a nerd. He had a shy character that made him avoid his classmates. During the break sessions, he would isolate himself and spend almost the whole session inside the classroom or with the teacher trying to learn some new pronunciation in order to improve his grammar. He was too young but behaved like a mature young man. Additionally, during the reading classes, a lot of tension and fear would be seen when his turn to read approached. This made him paranoid but he would eventually gain courage and read even if he made mistakes. This helped the teacher to notice where he had problems like pronouncing words putting the correct intonations and stresses. The student scored 30 percent of the whole checklist behaviors which was worrying because he had failed.

To conduct the research on the performance of the student in communicating and reading was not easy as it was accompanied by several limitations. Firstly, checklist always lacked comprehensive details. This is due to the fact that it only allowed the teacher to mark the assessment list where appropriate rather than leaving a space for the teacher to make some comments and clarifications. Pursuing this further, it was also tiresome because the teacher had to keep the track of every word that the students spoke in both the classroom and outside. Furthermore, the teacher had to be updated on how the student behaved with the other students and his behavior with interactions so as to monitor his communication skills. This made the process time consuming too as the teacher was following the student to monitor his moves.

Moreover, it required a skilled assessor who was conversant with the behavior of the student and had the ability to come up with a genuine and well-organized checklist which was inclusive of all aspects of grammar and communication skills.

To make checklist more effective in monitoring the reading skills of the student, the teacher should have had different checklists for different objectives. This means that every checklist should have been specific and aimed a certain goal. For example, the teacher should have had a checklist of rhyming words, identifying initial sounds, blending words, phoneme segmentation, phoneme deletions and phoneme manipulation. Moreover, on the side of communication, the teacher should have had a checklist for each of the following: verbal communication, and non-verbal communication like the use gestures, facial expressions among others.

The information taught from this scenario is that every instance a teacher wants to make a checklist for monitoring the student’s behavior is that it should be precise and objective- oriented.

Below is some of the checklists used.

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Table 1: A checklist on pronunciation.

Table 2: A checklist on silent letters

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Table 3: A checklist on non-verbal communication