If you think like Kohn, you may believe that grades for assessment are, at their core, a detriment to student success (Kohn, 2011). Or perhaps you believe that data is the key to determining student success, and see the benefit to rewarding schools for student success in standardized test (Klein, 2023). Either way, whether you view assessment as the ultimate form of demonstrating understanding or as a burden placed on students by over-zealous educators and politicians, assessment is pervasive in our society, and assessment philosophy is as unique as one’s fingerprint.

Throughout our CEP 813 course, we have been asked to create assessments in a sandbox, using ideas and prompts generated for us by a program to create unique and challenging assessments. I suppose the idea was to get us out of our comfort zone and make assessments in a way we have not before, truly challenging how we made and thought about assessment. As a final hurrah for this course, I decided to dive back into the sandbox one final time. 

I created this assessment based on a number of factors that affect the 11th grade ELA students at my school. First, it will be a constructed response based on the main novella they read in class, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King. This constructed response will follow a similar model that they have been taught throughout the semester, including a topic sentence, context, evidence, explanation of what the evidence means, and relate the evidence back to the topic sentence. This assessment, of course, will align with the lesson taught that day on “Unreliable Narrators”. The assessment will be asking students to debate whether Red, the narrator of the novella, is an unreliable narrator or not, and then use evidence from the book to support their response. The assessment itself will not be especially unique, as they will have practice working with this type of constructed response throughout the year and, at this point in the semester, should only take them roughly 15-20 minutes. This will be extremely manageable within the block period and leave plenty of time for the second portion of the assessment. 

The second part of the assessment will be the most interesting, as it has students partnering up to provide peer feedback on their classmates' responses. This portion will likely be the most meaningful as it will require the students to provide constructive and actionable feedback to their peers, an activity which will put them in the assessor chair themselves. Trusting students to do this will take a lot of practice and set up but, as they are 11th graders and this activity will take place mid-semester, there will be plenty of time to make sure this activity runs smoothly. 

Now, as a reading and writing specialist, I would be remiss to not take time to analyze the responses from my students who have lower reading/writing levels. These students would specifically be paired up with students who have higher reading/writing levels than them. After almost 3 years of ELA intervention, one thing that I have learned is that students can both resent a teacher telling them they are not at their peers' levels, and that sometimes the best advice a student can get is from their peers. As an ELA interventionist, I plan on looking at the responses my lower students give and the advice they receive from their peers, and looking at how they can implement it going forward. 

Over the past few months, I would say my ideas about assessment have changed very little. I still believe that assessment should have a clear goal, should be based on in class materials, and that it should have student friendly language and not be vague. Now, I just have more tools at my disposal to make sure my assessments are meaningful and useful for my students.

References:

Klein, A. (2023, June 21). No child left behind: An overview. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/no-child-left-behind-an-overview/2015/04 

Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Alfie Kohn. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/

NightCafe Studios (2023). Leaving the sandbox. by NightCafe Studios, 2023 (https://creator.nightcafe.studio/)