Making Assessment Meaningful
Chapter # 9

Once the students have completed all phases of the project what is the next step is to discover if the students learned something from Project Base Learning using an assessment. The teacher wants to find out if the students have learned anything from the project or did they not understand anything about the project. There were some key ideas on how assessments can help encompass on the students learning. One of the concepts in assessment is active learning. Active learning is a concept in which students can benefit from being involved in their project, and they can measure their growth from the assessment. "Assessing your students project work requires deliberate strategies to take stock not only of what they have created, but also the teamwork, effort and creativity that went into the project". (pg. 139) This gives the teacher an insight in which the students were able to comprehend from the project rather than having a multiple choice test at the end of the project. There are alternatives in assessing the students comprehension of the project rather than having a multiple choice exam to see if the students were able to understand PBL. Another concept that helps with assessment is introducing the KWL chart in the beginning of the project and have the students fill it out with ideas they want to figure out from their project. Then the teacher can reintroduced it when the students finished the project by going back and have the students fill out what they were able to grasp anything from the project by filling out the rest of the KWL chart as part of an assessment. Finally another part of assessing the students learning abilities of the PBL is by applying their concept to a real world problem and figuring out. Many projects requires for students to use different types of technology disciplines in which gives the student a hands on experience in learning through ideas.It then becomes factual given the students effort in creating something responsive from their project is how you find out if the students captured something from their hard work and effort from PBL through assessment.