Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning

Assessing and evaluating students can be tricky territory for a new teacher. We first have to know what we value, so we know what to evaluate. I like the idea that we can determine what is best suited for us to evaluate based on what we are reading and what our goals and objectives are. It’s a little intimidating thinking we evaluate our students really based on our opinions. I don’t really know much about evaluating students so most of this article is new to me. So far, most of it seems pretty common sense. An example is if a student is supposed to retell story events, I would need to evaluate their details given and the inferences made on a character’s beliefs and attitudes. Part of the evaluation, of course, would depend on me communicating to my students what’s expected of them in the first place. I really liked the section of the article about teaching students for to peer review. I know I personally was never taught how to give my peers feedback in school. I think peer review is a great group activity to help students along with their papers before it reaches me. It makes sense that we would teach kids to talk about the good and bad, praise others writing, what questions to ask, and how to use technology in peer editing.

In the standards based grading article I liked the idea of grading everything, but not including it in the final grade. I think grades should reflect progress. Sometimes students do poor on an assignment; that should not bog them down if they show improvement. I don’t think there’s a problem with helping students get better grades if they show initiative. Better grades show reflect improvement so the two go hand in hand. Ultimately, I think we should encourage our students to always want to do better and improve themselves and their grades.