Short week!

After the three day weekend for Memorial Day, it was difficult to come back to school, but it happened anyway! We only had class Wednesday and Friday.

Wednesday we discussed assessments and ways to evaluate students. The biggest thing I learned was about formal and informal assessments. There are different kinds of assessments that fall all over the spectrum from formal to informal.

Formal assessments are structured, contrived, and standardized. A few examples of this is ACT or SAT tests. There are more formal tests that aren't quite as strict like spelling tests or ISAT or SBAC. These are standard tests from the state.

Informal assessments are more observation, authentic, and are not standardize. These are things like just observing the behavior of a child, asking for a thumbs up or thumbs down if they understand, having them write answers on white boards and things similar to that.

Of course, there are many other ways to assess like homework, book reports, papers, and other smaller school work things, but these usually fall somewhere in the middle. All kinds of assessments are necessary to really understand where a student is in their learning. Students need all kinds to be able to show what they really know.

Friday we learned about ADHD. I really appreciated this section because I have a cousin with ADHD and I learned a lot of things I didn't know. Most of the time when we think ADHD we think moving and distracted and hyper, but this isn't always the case.

The first thing we did in class was do a color and word simulation. The names of the colors were in different colors than the words said and we took turns reading the word and just having to say what color the word was in. If you have ever done this then you know it is difficult. This is a little bit of what people with ADHD struggle with because their executive functions are not working correctly.

One of the presenters in our class actually has ADHD and shared her experience. They didn't diagnose her with ADHD until recently, but it has been helpful to her to take medicine to be able to focus on one task. She discussed what school was like for her and how difficult it was for her to stay caught up with her peers. In younger grades she got in trouble a lot because she had a difficult time following directions. Her experience was eye opening.

We learned a few different things, but we watched a video of someone interviewing two children, one with ADHD and one without. Some of the things I noticed were that the child with ADHD took a little longer to answer the questions and many of her answers were I don't know. She had low self-esteem and seemed to have difficulty answering all the questions.

ADHD is diagnosed over time by a physician. It is not an easy thing to diagnose, but it can have a tremendous affect on the education process.

I enjoyed learning about ADHD and hope I will be able to help my cousin better and others with ADHD more now that I have learned more about it!