Assessment and Evaluation

Assessment and grading can be a tricky and difficult to figure out as a teacher. You want your grades to be useful to both measure student performance and to show their growth over the period. The articles we read for this week present a perspective on grading that feels very different from what I'm familiar with. Both of these articles focus on how to assess and grade in ways that are very different from my experiences in high school, and even in my time in the education program.

One of the more interesting ideas the document from Spokane Public Schools presented was how grades should reflect material learned, rather than assignments completed. Often times grades reflect the cumulative bulk of everything turned in, or not turned in. The method of grading they use seems to drop zeros almost entirely. One of the most convincing, and most practical, is that is doesn’t accurately reflect student progress towards learning goals. By using zeros in grading, they can distort a grade so it doesn’t accurately measure student performance. Additionally, this inaccurate measure can hinder or otherwise negatively influence the student’s motivation to improve academically. The idea of removing these zeros from grades is to measure by the patterns of how the students perform, rather than looking at what the students complete.

The other article focuses on assessment and how to measure student performance in learning literature. One of the ideas from this article that struck me was to use journals or blogs and discussions as a way to measure student performance, as well as methods to evaluate and guide instruction through feedback. In the case of using journals, students need to be notified that the instructor is using journals in this manner. Additionally, the instructor needs to develop a writing criteria for these journals. This seems like an interesting way to approach assessment. Journals allow students to demonstrate their skills with fluency and to develop other skills necessary, while also giving a potential means of formative assessment for instructors to develop their lesson plans.