There is More than One Way to Demonstrate Mastery

Daniel Pink has helped me to realize that students today need to be intrinsically motivated to learn.  One way to increase intrinsic motivation is to allow for student autonomy in education.  We as educators should be empowering our students to have voice and choice over how they learn, and how they demonstrate their learning.

In this post, I have included multiple types of creative assessments that allow students to demonstrate mastery not only in content, but also in workplace readiness skills such as critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration.  Just about all of these creative assessments can both accommodate to an individual learner, or a group of learners to help encourage communication and collaboration.  Moreover, having students "present" their demonstrations allow them to work on their communication skills such as "public speaking" and "listening" from participating as audience members and asking insightful, meaningful questions after the demonstrations have been presented.

Furthermore, there are multiple mediums to which students can create any one of these demonstrations.  To create these demonstrations, students can use anything from paper and pencil, to the latest and best technology apps and tools.  In addition, these assessments provide natural differentiated learning opportunities for students by empowering them to choose their preferred learning style, interest and strengths in order to demonstrate mastery. Even better is the fact that a lot of these assessments directly align to the multiple intelligences.

Below is a list of creative assessments that might be used for students to demonstrate mastery.

• Create a story from a picture
• Create a story from a title
• Create a title from a picture
• Create a title from a story
• Create a sculpture
• Create an image of a concept or theme
• Respond to a real world writing prompt
• Design a webpage
• Write a poem or song
• Create a skit
• Create a video
• Create a photo voice by taking pictures
• Ask complex questions rather than answering them
• Create a graphic organizer
• Write a newspaper article
• Write a journal entry
• Create a comic
• Create a digital story
• Create a photo story
• Create a "Fakebook" page
• Create a blog from the perspective of a historical figure
• Analyze a primary source photo or document
• Argue a position and defend it
• Conduct an experiment
• Solve a problem
• Design a product
• Engineer a product
• Mix and match any of these assessments

And this list just scratches the surface.  What else might you add to this list?

Your comments are welcomed and encouraged!


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