Affective Assessments

I appreciate that early on in my teaching career, I was introduced to Carol Dweck's idea of growth mindset. Growing up, I know that I had a fixed mindset about what I was and was not good at. I would say things like "I'm not a chemistry person" or "I'm not an art person." Dweck's book really changed my mind about what a student can and cannot do. In Dweck's opinion, students, teachers, and parents need to change their thinking from "I can't do it" to "I can't do it right now." When I was in high school, I loved art. In my sophomore year, I decided to take a photography class. At first, I was really interested in it, but once we moved to actual, old-school cameras, I had no idea what I was doing. My film was always over-exposed and I eventually gave up because photography was not something that I was naturally good at. However, I believe that if I took the time to properly study photography, I could take better photographs. Photography is a skill that I could easily master.

However, my time in the classroom this year has made me more of a realist. I like the growth mindset theory, but that's exactly what it is, a theory. While I know that students are capable of learning much more than they think they are, there is still a limit to what they can learn. This is where I take cues from Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. There are certain things that students can already do without help, and there are things that students can do with help. However, there are some things that students just cannot do, and they should not be expected to do.

I use affective assessments from time to time in my classroom to get student feedback. At the beginning of the programming unit in Computer Science Principles, I gave students an affective assessment to gauge their programming skills and opinions about pair programming. I administered this assessment periodically throughout the programming unit to check in with students and adjust my instruction as necessary. During this uncertain time of digital learning, I plan to check in with my students using similar assessments as often as possible.