Thoughts on Assessment

       

            With its focus on assessment, last week’s class and assignment was a real eye opener to the realities of making an objective test.  I personally have never made a multiple choice test before this assignment, and now I clearly understand the difficulty involved in making a good one.  Last year in my Ed Psych course there was a segment on assessment and some students made up very poorly written multiple choice tests.  I say that because I have always believed a test is unfair when given choices that hinge on one word.  After spending hours trying to come up with good, solid, fair questions; I understand why the students simply used very similar choices.  However, this is beside the point of the larger issue.  Is an objective test fair?  I believe they can be and sometimes they are necessary to check student reading.  I have always believed that a reading quiz should be easy for a student who has read the material.  Since experiencing the time involved in making a good objective test, I do think that time would be better spent on planning assessments that are not based on “shallow” learning and simply memorizing soon-to-be-forgotten facts.

            This brings me to authentic assessment.  On hindsight, I think I went about it all wrong.  I drew up a persuasive essay assignment based on student’s interpretations of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” first.  Then I did the rubric.  It was drawing up the rubric that forced me to go back to the essay assignment and clarify my directions.   At least I hope I was clarifying, by that point, I was starting to feel like everything was a muddle.  Finishing the rubric was a satisfying feeling because if I would choose to use the same assignment, I can return to it.  But much more importantly, it can be used to give to students ahead of the test.   In that way they know exactly what they are going to be graded on.   

            Overall, I think Smagorinsky hits the nail on the head when he writes about “extended definition” (78).  I like his focus on learning as a process that develops and how focusing on a theme allows for students to learn through writing both reflectively and through various genres.  This is where the rubric becomes very important for providing the format for clarity and what we expect of the students and then how we teach it.  Learning complex and abstract concepts happens as a process and I think we as teachers need to be clear in a rubric in what our expectations are and clearly demonstrate to the students how we plan to get there.  Writing a rubric feels painful, but is really useful for bringing out weaknesses in directions for an assessment and/or when expectations aren’t clear to the students.  And finally, I think well thought out assessment practices provide the means to have a class that does not focus on grades, and that ultimately is the basis of a good class where true learning can take place.