Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning: How Do You Know What They Have Learned?

This article has been my favorite read so far!  I loved how detailed it was about many different types of assessment and about how each assessment is designed to assess students.  One of the biggest things I took away from the reading was that the way you wish to assess your students is influenced by your classroom philosophy.  In my practicum, Central Valley High School is 80% assessment so teachers believe in using as many different types of assessments, which I also believe.  This helps keep students engaged and try to avoid them getting bored or discouraged from taking a lot of objective tests.  Assessments can be anything from a short in-class writing assignment where students are graded on their ability to correctly writing a “chunk” paragraph (topic sentence, lead-in, quote and citation, and link/transition) to 10 multiple-choice questions to unit tests to unit essays.  Therefore, we have a variety of different assessments we use to determine what our students are able to do and have learned.  One thing that stood out to me was how sometimes students might develop negative views about themselves because they aren’t doing well on tests that require remembering specific facts.  “[Students] may then develop negative self-images as students, believing they are ‘poor readers’ or ‘poor writers’ – negative self-images that undermine their confidence in their ability to respond” (225).  I feel that assessing students on their ability to respond to a text rather than regurgitate “right-answers.”   I tell my students there are no such thing as a wrong answer and there is no definitive right answer because the majority of the time, their answers are telling me what they are thinking about when they read the text or answer a prompt. 

My favorite tidbit from the article was the mention of “track changes” (230) in programs like Microsoft Word.  We live in a technologically advanced society so technology is a heavy presence in a lot of schools and classrooms.  In my classroom, everything is done on Google Classroom and students use Chromebooks virtually every day.  When students write their papers, they use Google Docs.  I like the ability to make comments directly on the Doc when grading rough drafts, revisions, and final drafts.  When making revisions, students are instructed to highlight changes they make so I can easily see what they’ve added in order to help boost their scores.  I’ve noticed my students are more responsive when using the computers to type essays than when they have to hand write, such as in-class assignments.

I can easily see myself pulling this article out when planning assessments in my practicum and future classroom because I don’t want to just give my students the same assessments repeatedly.  I want to have a variety of assessments: quizzes, essays, projects, tests, blogs/journals, and maybe even a portfolio.  Like the article stated, this is my philosophy on how I wish to assess my students’ abilities and how I want to determine what they have learned.