Thursday, March 13, 2008
Assessment in AP Lit
Reading these chapters on assessment made me think a lot about my field class. I am in Mr. Stover's Senior AP Literature class, and it is intense. He is preparing the students to take the AP Exam in May, and they have been working hard all year. Mr. Stover has graded the AP Exams before, so he has first hand experience on what the testers are looking for. He definitely teaches to the test as well. However, this is not a completely horrible thing. Every student has a AP scoring guide, which ranges from 1-9, one low, nine high. Every time they do an essay, it has to be written as if they are taking the AP Exam. On their homework, he even wants them to time themselves and make sure they don't go over 40 minutes! It's amazing. However, what I find most interesting is that he doesn't assign grades according to their essays. Instead, he has them rate their essays and write justifications for their ratings. He then rates their essays and looks over their justifications. Their grade on the assignment depends upon how close their ratings lined up with his. He is always using the same language found on the scoring guide and essay prompts to describe the pieces of work they analyze, a suggestion B&B make with regards to the six-trait model. It is very interesting...
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2 comments:
I agree with you that it is very interesting. I'd encourage anyone to help score AP if he/she is teaching an AP class, or score the MAP or the ACT/SAT tests. By participating in a scoring session, my concept of how to assess writing rises; I firm my understanding of good writing and expose myself to wider ranges of writers than I would in my little rural school. It's all good.
Yes! Reusing the same standards in rubrics, just what we talked about the other day! Very exciting. Anyway, I have never heard of a teacher grading in this manner or prepping students in every assignment. Perhaps this gives them a purpose in reading or in writing (as we've talked about in TDP). I wonder if the students do well in the class because there is so much time spent on working on one particular format. I think teachers would see improvements in most students' writing if they all followed this teacher's example. The question I have though, is this confining them too much to one way of writing? Sure it is standardizing the expectations of students, but is it conforming them to only one aspect of writing...hmm.
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