Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

                I actually looked forward to reading this particular article because assessing student learning is something that I struggle with. I haven’t come up with what I feel is an effective, fair system for assessing how a broad range of students with equally broad ranges of life experience and ability can be fairly assessed as to whether they are meeting certain standards without somehow making those who are failing, by no fault of their own, to meet those standards feel as if they are failures. The assessment tools and strategies in this article certainly provide many different ways in which to assess student learning and many, if not all of them, seem that they would be very effective in assessing traditional scholastic abilities, however, they still seem to marginalize those who do not thrive in a traditional scholastic environment.

                While I am aware that there is likely no perfecting assessment strategy, I think it important that we constantly attempt to improve our strategies to help those who maybe do not fit the norm set out in classroom-style education. The strategies most effective in this regard are likely those that focus on assessing students based on their own improvement in relation to their own achievements, as opposed to assessing them based on the achievement of their peers who may, or may not, have had similar life experiences and challenges as themselves. The problem with this, however, is that there are specific standards to which the education system holds all students, and standards while difficult to create fairly, must exist in order for evaluation of learning to take place.

                Obviously, I do not have the answers to my concerns and the chapter does not really address these issues, other than the bit on standardized, high-stakes testing, but I still find much in the chapter that is helpful. It does provide several examples of grading rubrics and how to establish these rubrics in a fairly formulaic and easy to follow format. Also, I find the example of a rubric for grading class discussion to be a pretty good example of how I would like to assess discussion in my own classroom. For the most part, I found the chapter informative, but not very helpful in addressing the big issues of student assessment.