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Creating Assessments
Creating Assessments
"Evaluation requires us to make a judgment about student knowledge, student behavior or performance, or student attitude. Assessment is strategy for measuring that knowledge, behavior or performance, or attitude." (Freiberg, 2000)
Diagnostic Assessments
Diagnostic Assessments
These are the kinds of assessments teachers give at the start of the year in an effort to understand where each individual student is in relation to the subject (Freiberg, 2005). If we as teachers start to grade them based off of their past experiences, or their most recently sunbathing brains from summer vacation, we are skipping a crucial connection with our students. We must recognize where they are coming from in an effort to help them get to where they can go.
Formative Assessments
Formative Assessments
It takes a series of small and consistent activities in order for one to gain proficiency with a task. This goes for sports, arts, and even walking if you think back on our ambulatory excursions as babies. Formative assessments evaluate and contribute to student understanding of the content (Freiberg, 2005). This is one way to track how students are keeping up with the course material and actually help them understand it bet.
Summative Assessments
Summative Assessments
By the end of a curriculum, students should have learned the core content of the unit well enough to prove their understanding through this style of assessment (Freiberg, 2005). Though not always cumulative, it does aim to test the proficiency that a student has by the end of a term (Stiggins, 2005).
As previously mentioned in the Instructional Strategies section, it took time, focus, and guidance for me to get a firm understanding of how to create assessments and lesson plans that resulted in enduring understandings for the students.
Rubrics
Rubrics
Though my mentor did not have a written-out rubric, she has her specific parameters for what she looks for in student writing. She understood that at the start of my teaching, I should make a rubric for myself. It would help me assess and create assignments if I knew what I wanted the students to achieve by the end of the assignment. I knew exactly where to look for inspiration.
At the Urban School of San Francisco, the English department gives feedback through rubrics instead of grades, which are reserved until the end of the trimester. This standard rubric on the left was made by the Urban English faculty. It was molded and adapted to whatever the assignment was focusing on, but for the most part, the core remains the same.
Since I am till expected to grade my students at Trinity, I decided to change the layout of this rubric for myself, then share it with my students. This way, students avoid trying to align their given grade with their placement on a chart. Still, they are better guided by expectations and they have an idea of what their analytical essays should consistently include.
Urban School of San Francisco Mentor's Standard Rubric
Feedback Quantity and Quality
Feedback Quantity and Quality
Focus versus Breadth
Focus versus Breadth
At the beginning of the year, I was selective about my markings and mostly relied on the summative comment at the end of the paper to give my feedback. The year before, I was practicing concise feedback so as not to flood children with feedback. But the seesaw continues because I find myself having this same goal now.
At the beginning of the year, I also was not handing back my feedback to children because I was still in an observational setting and I was practicing grading. The main piece of advice I continued to try and follow was to be more granular with my comments and pick up on more intricate components of the students' writing. Below is an example of my grading at the start of this fellowship.
Scroll through this image or press the button above for my reflection on this assignment.
class pictures graded.pdfHere is the link to my feedback from the Athena link.
Yet, in an effort to prove myself to the powers that be, I started to increase the amount of feedback per square inch on the page. Though I had the right intentions in mind, helping the students, I was overwhelming them with bloody papers. I picked at everything and anything that could be improved upon. And yes, it took a long time to complete every single essay, to the point that my paper turn around needed major improvement. All of this granular work may have actually detracted from the students' understanding of their own writing.
Let's take a step back though. What is the point of feedback?
Where would we be if it were not for feedback? If no one ever coached us or advised us as we were progressing along with our work?
There are so many things I changed about my style of grading in the last three years of teaching. I continue to go back to some of the core concepts of grading, some of which Dr. Zachary Herrmann listed as the following:
"Feedback is information about how we are doing in our efforts to reach a goal." (Herrmann, presentation)
There are seven keys to effective feedback...
1. Goal-referenced
”Effective feedback requires that a person has a goal, takes action to achieve the goal, and receives goal-related information about his or her actions.”
2. Tangible and Transparent
“Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal
3. Actionable
"Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus “Good job!” and “you did that wrong” and b+ are not feedback at all”
4. User-friendly
"Expert coaches uniformly avoid overloading performers with too much or too technical information. They tell the performers one important thing they noticed that, if changed, will likely yield immediate and noticeable improvement”
5. Timely
As educators, we should work overtime to figure out ways to ensure that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it while the attempt and effects are still fresh in their mind”
6. Ongoing
”What makes any assessment in education formative is... that the performer has opportunities, if results are less than optimal, to reshape the performance to better achieve the goal…”
7. Consistent
”Clearly, performers can only adjust their performance successfully if the information fed back to them is stable, accurate, and trustworthy”
Feedback Loop...
Feedback Loop...
Have you ever tried to make spin art a carnival? The kind where there is a spinning canvas that you squirt different color paints into and hope to make something artistic in the end? Whatever picture you create by the end is a result of whatever you put into it. Feedback works in a similar way, except you never stop spinning the canvas as the coloration within the frame continues to evolve.
Iterative Feedback
Iterative Feedback
Since feedback is intended to inform someone about their progress, we as graders must encourage them to work off of their strengths rather than their weaknesses. This is not to say that we will ignore these points of improvement. It is to say that we must frame their assignments as always works in progress.
Reflection
After receiving feedback, students should understand and reflect upon the markings. A writing log is one way for student to keep track of their work.
Revision
Though our department does not allow for graded revisions, students workshop old assignments to learn from them.
Production
Regardless of the kind of assessment it is -- essay, quiz, presentation, etc. -- a student submits something for further feedback.
Feedback
Comments, grades, or rubrics, are a hand-full of ways that one may draw attention to points of improvement.
To go back to my spin art metaphor...
Consider every step in this iterative process a different color to contribute into the spint art. One's involvement effects all the other color palettes in the mix and create a tone for this process of improvement. Therefore, it is important to be encouraging throughout the feedback if we expect the process to be positive and bright. If we muddy up our feedback with multiple criticisms, we muddy up the art and create an overwhelming picture of production, feedback, reflection, and revision for our students.
Fall Feedback on an Analytical Paper
Fall Feedback on an Analytical Paper
Fall Feedback - Of Mice and Men Essay.pdfTMI: Too Many Inscriptions
TMI: Too Many Inscriptions
In this diagnostic assessment, I left multiple, long comments in the margins pointing out issues... and a faint (at best) compliment towards the end. This is not a terrible essay. But optics, and reading through all these comments can certainly bog down a reader.
I must expose myself in such a manner with the hope of consistently moving forward from this moment.
Though technically thorough, this is not the constructive feedback that a student could healthily ingest and work from.
Fall Feedback on an Analytical Paper
Fall Feedback on an Analytical Paper
Spring Feedback - Julius Caesar Essay.pdfProgress
Progress
After multiple conversations in my virtual round and subject methods group meetings, I worked towards minimizing my comments and aiming for one specific writing technique that the students may practice in their next piece.
In this essay, I mostly tried to focus on the structure of the argument and the paragraph progression. Though I marked up multiple other things, I tried to minimize the amount of words in the margins.
Student Motivation: External vs. Internal
Student Motivation: External vs. Internal
An implicit component within the feedback-loop has to do with increasing the morale within students and creating intrinsic motivations for them. Many students are motivated by grades, but in order for them to get the most out of their education and retain new information, they must care about it.
“[A] student devote[s] more energy to one activity over others not because that activity is easy or because it guarantees success, but because they believe it has value and they understand their performance as a growth opportunity rather than an indication of their worth” (Nakkula & Toshalis, p 11, 2006)
"External motivators are provided by important people in students’ lives. Their beliefs and values and the quality of those relationships shape the importance of those motivators. The more deeply students can connect with the people and larger contexts (e.g., schools) providing external motivation, the more likely it is that they gradually will internalize those motivators as their own" (Nakkula & Toshalis, p 9, 2006).
As an English teacher, I am the person students write papers for and I am the purpose whom they cater their arguments for no matter how often I say that they should consider a wider range of readers for the writings they produce.
Zone of Proximal Development
Zone of Proximal Development
As Vygotsky's term asserts, this concept has to do with a person's progression, or development with a specific topic. The zone of proximal development refers to the optimal variables when a learner can enthusiastically and eventually independently approach a challenging lesson (Chaiklin, 2003). This is a multilayered scenario that involves the individual's interest in a subject, their dependency level on external help, and the arduousness of the task itself. When someone is able to tap into their ZPD, they can fluidly consume and retain knowledge for practice. Toshalis and Nakkula may liken this to the flow state, when one is engaged and getting the most of their learning experience. Dweck might liken this to Growth Mindset where learners see their potential for growth.
Nevertheless, all of these speak to a level of potential that a student believes in and a motivation to pursue this goal. In order for the students to believe in themselves, they must perceive their mistakes as invaluable steps towards mastery instead of dead ends.
"Students who are encouraged to take risks, to view mistakes as opportunities for learning, and to understand the need for help as an indicator of a growing mind will likely experience school as opportunity rather than threat, in an environment in which they consistently feel protected from others' judgments and prepared to overcome their own insecurities, the motivation to achieve has the opportunity to flourish" (Toshalis & Nakkula, p 14, 2012).
Reflection: Students Tracking Their Own Progress
Reflection: Students Tracking Their Own Progress
In my first year, my mentor introduced the concept for a Writing Log to the freshmen. The Writing Log is a place where students ought to translate feedback from written essays onto an ongoing Google Document where they can keep track of their improvement. This is a great opportunity for the students to reflect upon their feedback and consolidate it so that they may pick up on any patterns in their writing.
In an effort to be able to explain this assignment to students using my own voice, I made this punny handout along with an example from a student who successfully tracked her own writing. Note, I do wish she had written out more on the right-most column!
Revision: Workshopping Sentences as a Class
Revision: Workshopping Sentences as a Class
To follow up on this reflective self-assessment, I also have my students revisit their weakest sentences from previous essays and collectively revise them in-class. I refer to these workshops as "Sentential ER's" because everyone is there to improve this ailing sentence. I also have my students do peer-editing on their essays (following a set of guidelines I gave them) but more often than not, they prefer this in-class activity.
These classes are especially fun because everyone is on the same boat; everyone has a sentence on the board (anonymously), and everyone has the potential to be the topic of discussion. I have had a number of students look forward to these sessions because they can all laugh and improve upon their writing together.
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