Assessment Vs Evaluation

First of all extremely important and helpful chapter, not only for the teacher but also for a student who would like to have a better understanding of how he or she is being assessed. And what tools are being taken to assess the quality of a paper.

The definition of assessment is very well defined in this book. Deciding what to measure and the instruments used in measuring and using these instruments properly is what assessment should really be about.

I liked the Holistic Scoring approach that Williams talks about. The best part is that you would not really necessarily need a workshop to implement this approach. I think the hard part could be creating a general rubric, rubrics tend to be quite subjective and a rubric by a teacher may not be quite easy to follow by a student. But I guess a general basic rubric could be a start. I Still feel students should be asked to make their own rubrics just as Dr. Kearney asked us to make for our I search peer review. I think it is important that students learn to assess them at some point which can help them understanding how much they are deviating from their own set standards.

However the portfolio grading sounds more feasible and fun. Having the capability to choose the best papers and being evaluated on them. From a teacher's point of view not only does it save time and energy but I think it makes more sense because then the teacher will not have to spend tens of hours reading bad papers over and over again by hundreds of students. This approach may have several draw backs such as failure on the part of teachers to follow the portfolio protocols but between the two approaches, the portfolio approach seems more helpful.

But I am not quite sure about letting other students grade their peers in my class if I were ever to teach. But I would definitely have them write comments in the papers. I do not think that it is the student's job to grade another student. I think what truly helps is honest insights from different students to make a better paper. So I truly do not know if I would use the Holistic approach as promising as it may sound.

The suggestions on pg 316 on how to make written comments more useful were good ones.

It says to read a paper twice, actually depending on the depth and complexity of the paper, that number changes. But definitely any paper should be read more than once. Then another bullet point emphasizes on keeping comments short. Even if teachers find it hard to resist long comments for a good reason of course, but that may confuse the students more.

Finally the chapter ends with Sample papers and rubric which was interesting to read and extremely helpful.