When I was in the sixth or seventh grade, I had a teacher who, no matter what you turned in for your essay, would give you an “A” as long as it had five paragraphs and the correct heading. How do I know this? My friend tested it out by handing in an essay about Brian Dawkins was the best Eagles player ever when the essay was supposed to be on the main themes of Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. 

Looking back at this practice, while also reflecting on what assessment means to me during this past week has definitely helped shape my philosophy on assessment. I personally believe that assessment should be meaningful and purposeful. That when educators assess their students, it should be for the purpose of evaluating their growth in a particular subject area so that the student can see how they’ve grown and where they still need work, not just in order to give them an arbitrary grade. 

To break my ideas about assessment down further, we must first reflect on what “assessment” looks like at the high school level. Each year, I hear administrators talk about how we, as a school, must focus on mastery and student understanding over grades. This is all well and good and aligns well with what I believe about assessment, but in reality, I see little support and follow through from admin on these ideas. Instead, they tell teachers to assign an arbitrary number of formative and summative assessments. To me, this speaks to a desire from schools to focus on “learning” rather than “understanding”, asking teachers to teach new skills (learning) without the students reaching a level of mastery on those skills (understanding) (Selwyn, 2011).  

Assessments' sole focus should be determining the growth of a student's understanding of a subject, not just the percentage of the subject that they have learned. If a student understood about 15% of a subject at the beginning of the semester but now understands 60%, to me, that is huge growth! But schools look at that 60% and still label it a failure. This is a huge failure on the behalf of the education system, as it puts a stranglehold on student motivation, as the student who goes from 15% to 60% can see all the hard work they put in and is still labeled a failure and the will feel burned and unmotivated to even try or work hard in class (Shepard, 2000). That is why I am a huge fan of the MAET “ungrading” practice, something that I did not know about until starting the program but now wish was used in schools nationwide. 

Ideas about assessment are about as unique as fingerprints. Every teacher has one and they are rarely, if ever, the same. However, at the core of all the various beliefs is the idea that students are growing and becoming more proficient at what they are learning and understanding. Or at least, it should be. 

Reference: 

NightCafe Studios (2023).Student Taking an Assessment. by NightCafe Studios, 2023 (https://creator.nightcafe.studio/) 

Selwyn, N. (2011). Education and technology : Key issues and debates. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4-14.