When they are asked to select, polish, arrange, and analyze their own work, they have a chance co see that learning is not haphazard or incidental co any efforts of their own.
Giving students opportunities to refine their very best work feels very rewarding for both students and teachers. A strength of portfolios is that they are project-based assessments that look very much like the expectations of work produced in the post-school working world.
Simmons (1990) reports that for middle-grade students, "self-selected portfolios of their best work are significantly better than timed tests in estimating students' writing abilities" (p. 28).
This makes so much sense -- virtually nobody writes their best when given an anxiety-inducing time limit. I remember during timed writing in school my hands would get so sweaty from the pressure that I couldn't grip the pencil. And that's also not how writing works in the real world -- everywhere else we teach that revision is a necessary step in the writing process.
In such cases. teachers will frequently ask their students to put the language of the standards in their own words and then devise criteria for a rubric that will take those standards into account. When this kind of student involvement and buy-in is achieved, the task of completing a rubric and grading student work based on it becomes much easier for the teacher, student responses to the tasks assigned are of higher quality, and the process of involving students in creating the rubric or scoring guide becomes a learning experience for the students and, thus, assessment as learning.
Following up on my earlier comment on rubrics: I think this is such a fantastic idea. What a great way to incorporate student voice and choice.
Good assessment draws on multiple sources of information.
Reminds me of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Danger of a Single Story"
No photo, not even a portrait by a talented photographer, is the real you.
I think this picture metaphor is useful. Any single snapshot of student performance should never let us assume we have an accurate view or know the whole story.
The development and dissemination of rubrics make assessment public; all stakeholders, including parents, teachers, and students, have access to the criteria for successful performance.
Rubrics are very important, especially to share with students so that they are aware of the learning/performance targets. But I also wonder about the limitations of rubrics -- they are surely useful, but creating a "good" rubric can be quite difficult.
However, for state boards of education, college admissions officers, and employers, assessment may provide a gatekeeping function, determining whether an individual can graduate from high school, enter college, engage in certain professions, or hold a particular job.
This reminds me of what the authors discuss on page 53 about empowering education versus domesticating education.
Are we ensuring that education enables students to attain positions of power and authority and become active in civic life? Or are we acting as gatekeepers, ensuring that they become functional and productive but ultimately docile and inactive? The first leads to social reform, but the second ensures the reproduction of inequities.
know and tell the full story of her students' reading development.
The holistic picture, rather than one snapshot.
These routines have mixed effects. He avoids embarrassment, but he misses opportunities that could contribute to his reading development (Stanovich, 1986).
Failure becomes humiliating and stigmatizing, further discouraging students from taking academic risks.
Reading is something worth doing: it rewards, enriches, informs, and transforms.
YES. If all of my future students could experience reading in this way, I would be so thrilled. But this is something that must be experienced and felt, not simply something for me to preach about.
student readers' development in relation to motivation, self-concept and self-efficacy, interests, and attitudes.
These are the measures that would be really important for teachers to begin assessing right at the beginning of the year so they can help students choose interesting texts and identify ways to pique enjoyment and increase motivation.
We might assume that motivation, engagement, self-efficacy, and metacognition are operating in support of students who "read, read, read."
The drive to "read, read, read" reminds me of the issue with trying to cover oodles of content in short periods of time. Students are more often asked to quickly regurgitate surface memorizations than they are asked to slowly and deeply engage with interesting texts. When the only goal is generating "correct answers," we loose the joy of reading and ignore so many other aspects that separate the readers from the non-readers.