3 things I liked about the article by Rebecca S. Anderson

First thing that I liked about this article is about the issue of the need to shift from traditional assessment to alternative assessment. The traditional assessment emphasises on the teacher-centered concept as the overuse of lecture as a primary teaching method. The assessment conducted is probably based on the objective questions or true false questions that only test students’ basic or general knowledge. Therefore, students perhaps cant perform well in that assessment but cannot apply it in real-life situation. Therefore, alternative assessment is used to replace the traditional one in which it tests the students’ ability to use what they’ve learnt in real context.

The second interesting issue is the comparison of philosophical beliefs and theoretical assumptions of traditional and alternative assessment.  In Anderson’s article, there are 9 aspects that she has mentioned in order to compare the traditional and alternative assessment: knowledge, learning, process, focus, purpose, abilities, assessment, power and control, and individual vs collaborative process.

The third thing that I liked about this article is about the rubrics in assessment. Rubrics is important to provide students the guidelines or criteria for them to follow in order to grade their work. Teachers will use the criteria provided by using the rubrics and grade students’ work. At the same time, students will know on how the teacher marks their work because they have already know the criteria that they must be fulfilled in order to achieve the grade that they want.