Assessing and Evaluating/Standards-Based Grading

The more I've thought about assessment, the more I’ve come to notice that it kind of scares me. I don’t think that it’s the act of taking an assessment, making an assessment, or administering an assessment that worries me though. I’m worried that I won’t know how to correctly assess and evaluate how my students are doing, or that I’ll give them an assessment expecting one thing and end up getting slapped in the face by the results (I suppose that could be good or bad depending on the situation and my expectations). I think that those worries, among others, all amount to the fear of failing my kids as their teacher, but I digress.

I think that assessments can be tricky things to deal with as English teachers. In English, we want to be able to assess and evaluate our students’ comprehension of a text, how well they can formulate and articulate their own opinions of a text, how well they can look at a text critically and analyze it, etc. When it comes to literature, “correct answer” tests just don’t cut it. That’s why I love the “Alternatives to ‘Correct Answer’ Tests” section that this chapter goes over. The section offers three incredibly useful assessment strategies that I would definitely use in my future classroom, and that I wish my teachers had used more of when I was in high school.

As for Standards-Based Grading, I think that it may give us a bit of an advantage when it comes to assessing and evaluating our students. I think that having a cohesive set of standards that we base our curriculum off of and that we grade by, may ultimately help us as teachers come to find ways in which we can effectively assess and evaluate how our students are doing within our classrooms, and in turn assess how we are doing within our classrooms.