Assessment in my Classroom

After learning about the different types of assessment, I feel that using either portfolio assessment or performance will work best in my classroom. Since I want to teach special education, it may be difficult to give students selected and constructed response tests. While I will be teaching various subjects to my students, I will also have to focus a lot on life skills. The main goal of special education is to teach the students skills that will enable them to be independent and hopefully live on their own someday. It is difficult to assess students on how to tie their shoes or hygiene by using true/false questions. It can be done, but it is better to have students practice what they are learning and assess them on how well they can complete the task.  The most important part of assessing students based on performance is their ability to show how they can apply the material.I feel that would be much more beneficial than typical assessments that all of us are used to. These types of tests can be done, but if I used them, I'd use them as more of a check point to make sure while I'm teaching a week long lesson that students are following along and I will be able to see if I need to go back and go over another topic again. Portfolio assessment can be used throughout the course and used at parent conferences or at the end of the year to see how well they are did overall.

There are a few types of issues I could see myself running into with these types of assessments. They may not be very reliable, depending on what I'm testing. I'd have to be able to recognize when they are and aren't appropriate. They can also be too situational. It also puts a lot of pressure on students as they may feel they only have one chance to prove what they know. Whereas selected/constructed response gives them a little more flexibility. It also takes a lot of time to assess every student's performance. So I'd have to spend more time assessing and less time teaching other topics which I think can be put into lesson plans before hand.