Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

                One thing that stood out to me in the “Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook” handout was how much a zero grade can stand out. The student can be doing just fine in a class, miss an assignment, and then have their overall grade destroyed. This doesn’t give an accurate representation of what the student actually knows. While it would be helpful to the student’s grade and confidence, I think not including zero-grades should be implemented in a specific way: the student should be informed of the zero grade, and if it isn’t made up they will be told how it affects their overall grade. I had one class a few years ago where I had a few zero grades. They weren’t factored into my grade until the course was over. Suddenly my grade in the class dropped form an A- to a C. If I had known I had zero grades, I could have corrected this. Zero grades can be omitted from a gradebook, but the student should be informed so as not to have it affect their grade later.

                The other article, “Assessing and Evaluating Student’s Learning” discusses what types of assessment are beneficial to which types of teachers/students. Multiple choice tests focus more on recall and finding “right answer” while open-ended tests assess more understood concepts. In the classroom, I plan to use a mix of these. I will have a short part of a test be multiple choice comprehension tests, just to make sure that students have read the text and were paying attention to it. The bulk of the test will comprise of more discussion-based questions. Questions like these will “encourage students to formulate their won response, rather than recalling ‘correct answers.’” This will show how students understand a concept of the text and show that they can translate it and put it in their own words, demonstrating understanding.