Blog Post #4: “Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning: How Do You Know What They Have Learned?” and "Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook"

This chapter had some very innovative teaching methods that I will probably utilize in my classroom. There was a lot of good information on how and when to assess students. One of the sections that I thought posed some really great insight was the limitations section. The author talked about a very serious problem that teachers are bound to see sometime in their career. The problem is that students have been groomed their entire schooling life to thinking that knowing information is the main focus of learning. The author spoke about how a student can know the difference between first person and third person, but they may not know how to apply that knowledge to texts. What is the point of knowing information if they don’t know how to apply it to anything? That’s like having a person know everything about Michael Jordan’s free throw shot technique, yet they can’t even go out and shoot a basket for themselves. Students need to learn how to apply knowledge to actual texts. This idea of just knowing information also puts students at risk to aim to get the right answer in every situation rather than to learn about underlying meanings, themes, messages, and other important contextual information.

            I’m always looking for alternatives to traditional testing. I’m not really sure if it’s because of how much I was drilled in high school with multiple-choice tests, traditional essays, and formal assessments, but I look to stray away from those types of testing as much as I can. So naturally the section about alternative testing methods was one of the first areas that sparked my interest. The ones that intrigued me the most were journals/blogs, student centered formal written essays, and classroom discussion. Recently I’ve noticed how productive and insightful journals can be. Giving students the chance to voice their opinion, as an assessment can be extremely fruitful. Students will see the purpose in the writing because it’s something that they can engage themselves in. You can utilize journals as a formative assessment throughout the entire year. This will help their writing skills and it connects standards at the same time. The student-centered formal written assignments can play off of the journals. I think having an open ended topic for students to choose from can lead to some of the students best writing. I also thought having classroom discussion as an assessment was interesting. I like the idea of students being assessed based on their conversation in class.

            The Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook also provided some great insight to a newly developed way of grading students. I thought that the author made some really valid points when he went through each principle. Principle 1 and 2 talked about being graded on specified goals and how evidence used for grading should be valid. I think that telling our students about our clear expectations and goals that we for them is going to provide students with an end goal in mind and motivation to learn the material better. I also agree that grading needs to have valid evidence. This keeps us as teachers in check to help students fix their mistakes and learn what needs to be learned. Principle 4 was also something that I really enjoyed reading into. Not everything should be included in grades. We can’t scrutinize students for every piece of homework that they turn in. If we are writing a paper and we ask for a first draft, we shouldn’t expect it to be anywhere near perfect. Why would we grade something that we expected would have mistakes?  I think that we have to look at what should be graded and what shouldn’t be graded based on what will help the student increase their knowledge and ability to apply that knowledge to other texts the most. The last thing that I found interesting was the idea of not having zeros in your grading system. I’m not sure how I feel about this concept and would love to hear others opinions on this method.