Chapter 8

This was a longer chapter, and deservedly so considering the title of the chapter is "Assessing Student Learning". There has been a lot of focus in the public and in the media about trying to increase student learning by holding them to higher standards through a standardized test. The focus has also led some to believe teachers and administrators should be judged by how well a student performs on this one-time assessment. I believe this constant attention to what's wrong with the American education system has led people to believe that our system is dysfunctional at best. Speaking with a fellow colleague who attended an exchange program for principals in Japan, this is not the case. The Japanese educational system has some of the same issues we deal with here in America. It should also be noted that we educate and test all of our students including those with mild to severe cognitive disabilities. From what I am told this practice is the exception and not the rule when comparing our educational system to other countries.

Looking back in the chapter I made some notes next to the descriptions of central tendency and standard deviation on page 276. When reading the definitions of mean, median and mode I noted that the median might be the best measure when a teacher uses scores to determine a grade for a student. If you want to take it one step further, you would take the last score for a specific skill or concept assessment as this would reflect the student's most current understanding of what they have learned. These are interesting ideas suggested by assessment experts such as Thomas Guskey and Rick Wormeli. I appreciate Guskey's remarks at one conference when he compared a teacher's traditional grading system of using the mean to giving a karate student who has completed all of the appropriate levels a "gray" belt. That would not happen in this martial art, and Guskey's argument is it shouldn't happen in student assessment either.

I appreciated the analogy on page 299, comparing authentic assessment in the classroom with how coaches and directors assess their performers in sports and in the arts. There are complaints by educators that because the stakes are high with the WKCE, they are forced to teach to the test and ignore some important classroom instruction. As the authors state, coaches and fine arts instructors gladly teach to the test because the test is the students' performances on the field and in the auditorium. It helps that most performances in the encore and extracurricular areas are visible for all of the community to see. If a couple thousand people showed up to watch students take a reading test like they do to watch a concert or a football game, I am pretty sure the language arts department would adjust their current practices and beliefs to better correlate what they teach to what they assess.