Thursday, March 13, 2008
Assessing Individuals
I've been thinking a lot about assessment lately, even before we started talking about it in class, and I think one of the best things for me has been to see how my field teacher grades and assesses the students in his class. It's a career communications class, so it's geared towards students who probably aren't going to go to college. Currently, the students are working on position papers on a controversial issue--one that they care about and hopefully will want to write about (that is the goal, at least). Every time I get to work one-on-one with the students, I'm amazed at how many different levels they are at. Some of the students are writing pretty decent papers, while some of them still don't know how to come up with a topic sentence. Their teacher is grading them mostly on an individual basis--he told me which students he wanted to be at certain places in their essay and which students he just wanted to have an outline of their points by the end of class. As teachers, we are going to have to have different standards for different students, because all of the them are going to be at different places as writers. But I know that there still has to be a balance in the grading between what is expected of everyone corporately instead of individually, and I don't feel like I know what that balance is. How do we recognize the needs of individual students and their abilities while still basing grades on some sort of rubric or spectrum??
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2 comments:
This is exactly what I am struggling with! I want to write my position paper on assessment and how I believe we need to have the same standard for all students. It does not seem fair that a strong writer and a weak writer get the same grade in a class just because the teacher thinks they have both improved the same. It does NOT work like that in any other class. Plus, it is true, we are going to have over 100 students, how are we definately going to be able to know for sure who is where? Our goal as teachers is to teach, and a specific class needs to have certain goals and expectations met. Maybe a student has just been sliding by their whole life because there is not more expected of them? I bet there really are students like this. If a student can not meet the expectations they should not pass the class. It has bothered me since high school how easy it was to pass basic English classes at my school. All my friends that took them told me how they were such a joke! They barely had to do anything and they were not challenged...students NEED to be challenged. If they are not, how will they learn!?
I like this Colleen. I think this is the way that most education should be. If we had in account every students personal history, struggles, family life, and really the truth of who they are, then we'd realize that expecting the same thing out of everyone is just ridiculous. There's just no way that ever student has had the same level of instruction! So I think this is great. It's unfortunate that state testing doesn't implement this same thing...
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