Playing around with assessment

I have got to admit that I found the readings for this week to very interesting (nothing against the other weeks readings, but these were so immensely practical while still being very thought provoking that I could not help but be impressed).

But enough with the value judgements: to the content!

Community-based assessment policy was certainly the most radical of the bunch. The idea that the student should be given power to construct the grading rubric seemed like quite an impractical idea, but I can understand why Inoue would advocate it. I am all for students taking charge of their own learning and being responsible for improving their own writing, but at the end of the day I am not quite comfortable removing the professor from the equation. I am all for student centered learning and think that it is one of the most effective strategies in learning, but to completely abdicate responsibility for assessment seems counter-intuitive. Not only that, it sounds like a very time consuming process. The idea of formulating and reformulating rubrics collectively and fashioning single paragraphs over and over seems quite impractical. When I am teaching I like to focus my attention on the writing process and I find myself running out of time already before even trying to create rubrics as a class and so on. I could see a limited application of this idea at the beginning of the semester to demonstrate the importance of understanding and dissecting a rubric in order to formulate an appropriate paper, but to do this process throughout the entire class seems highly impractical. Not only that, but when the student enters into other classes in collage (let us not forget that composition class rooms are far from the norm) a professor will never give students agency in creating a rubric or even prompt. I think it is important to not lose sight of the composition classroom's role in preparing students for future collegial writing assignments, and I feel community-based assessment is so far afield from the norm that it becomes impractical to build a course around.

Moving on to Jane's article on contract grading, I must say I was very intrigued by this concept and honestly believe it would work brilliantly in a composition classroom (particularly in the basic writing classroom). For the common student, the idea that he or she could achieve a coveted 'B' simply by working hard seems like quite a revelation. Of course, I believe that for most any student if he or she accomplished what the contract lays out as a requirement, s/he would end up getting a 'B' anyway. In essence, I feel that grade contracts almost trick students into accomplishing what you want them to do anyway without trying to coerce them with the infamous 'C-'. I am all for tricking students into wanting to do the work that I know will benefit them anyway, and I think the grade contract is a great tool to do this. I definitely want to play around with this idea, and I might be implementing it in my current writing course, perhaps in unit 2 or maybe (if I want to be crazy) the final paper. Who knows.

"Good Enough Evaluation" I thought made a lot of sense, and I was actually surprised taht I have naturally evolved a lot of my evaluation towards this method. I am a big fan of grading to a rubric, because my first semester of teaching I definitely saw that I would sometimes "forget" to look for certain aspects in papers that were especially good or bad in one area. This drove me crazy to the point that I started using a grading grid in order to make myself look for each aspect in the paper, creating a more "multidimensional" assessment. Of course, I never thought about it in those terms until reading this article, but I am glad to see I was moving in a good direction.

Looking ahead, I definitely will be trying grading contracts and will probably also continue to utilize grading grids, and I might even try synthesizing the too. I am always looking for new ways to streamline the grading process and increase my awareness while assessing, and these articles definitely did a good job alerting me to some new ideas I had not wrestled with yet.