Assessing Creative Thinking: Assessment as Scaffolding for Metacognition

The longer I teach, the more I appreciate the difference good rubrics can make in making expectations transparent and accessible to students and myself. In this essay, I reveal how my conception of what rubrics can do expanded significantly. Providing students space for collaborating with one another and myself to create criteria they will be evaluated by offers students a level of ownership in how their own learning is assessed. I include this essay under Close & Critical Reading because writing falls under this domain and rubrics play a central role in how I assess student growth in reading and writing. This essay demonstrates my capacity in formulating rubrics that will authentically measure student growth.

Teaching Close & Critical Reading to Students with Deficits in Working Memory

Students with deficits in working memory experience significant challenges when it comes to mastering skills in close and critical reading. Exploring digital tools that may help such students was one of the goals I pursued in CEP 812 as I tried to find possible solutions to this "wicked problem." The result was figuring out how an add-on for Google Docs could help such students through automating the organization of certain portions of text based on a highlight color in Google Doc. Watch my demonstration video. I include this work because it is an example of my ability to evaluate the usefulness and potential of new technologies for instructional purposes.

In CEP 813: Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning, we explored the possibilities with game based assessments. I quickly realized the potential in this approach when thinking about how a game based assessment could serve as a powerful formative assessment that could provide students instant feedback on the choices they make while analyzing primary source documents. Below is a formative assessment in which students determine whether a primary source document could be used to argue for or against the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. I am particularly proud of this game based assessment. I feature this game based assessment in my showcase because it demonstrates my skill in integrating new technologies to create content and in instruction.