Four things are essential for effective teaching learning process-methods, materials, teachers and assessment.
The methods of teaching change as a result of change in the approach which inevitably leads to the revision and the change of text books or Readers. When these change the mind set of teachers must change. Otherwise, all other things will surely fail. The teachers have to adopt themselves to the changing times and the changing teaching learning processes. Here comes the important teaching learning tool assessment. Assessment can be taken up to measure many things –assessment of learning, for learning, assessment of teaching. If the assessment is not proper, the teaching learning will be a total failure.
Assessment helps the teacher to know how far he/she has succeeded in getting the students achieve their academic standards-namely, listening, speaking, reading, grammar, vocabulary and creative expressions(writing).The national council of educational research and training(NCERT) has made it compulsory to go in for continuous and comprehensive evaluation(CCE).In view of this, all most all the states in the country have implemented CCE both at the secondary and the primary level
The burden of a teacher has increased enormously. They have to assess too many things and maintain too many records and post marks in different registers. So he/she has to encourage self and peer assessment though both of them are always reliable I would like to say how I make use of self and peer assessment in my class room. As per CCE A teacher must not explain or teach everything. Instead he or she must help the students to form their own concepts. So the importance of reading comprehension in enhancing the critical thinking skills among the learners in incalculable.
When I want to test my students’ reading comprehension, I write different types of questions-inferential, referential, global etc on the black board. The students read the passages both individually and in groups and discuss among themselves so as to write the answers. I assess the answers in the order of priority, naturally. It is impossible to correct each and every student’s responses. So I write the correct or the possible answers on the black board or say orally .My students correct their answers on their own saving a lot of our precious time.
Sometimes, I go in for peer assessment. There are stars or highly efficient learners in each group who usually write much faster than others and I make use of their services for peer assessment. There are obvious disadvantages of depending on the students for their own evaluation. They have a tendency to cheat themselves and teachers. So we have to remind themselves of the futility of cheating themselves and the teachers and the adverse effects on their personal academic growth.
On the whole , self assessment or peer assessment infuses the students with a sense of achievement and peer assessment paves the way for educational leadership provided the opportunities are not misused.