The impact of assessment has affected all of us at some point whether as a student or as a teacher. I am still scarred from my senior year of English. I never understood how in my first semester of senior English with Mrs. Carmony I made "A's" and "B's" on my writing assignments and during my second semester of senior English I became a "D" writer in Mr. Dickens's class. For quite some time after I graduated high school I hated to write because I felt I was a poor writer. Of course this happened before rubrics became a new buzzword in the educational field. At that time, as a student, you only had the brief comments in the margins to try and come up with expectations of the teacher in hopes that that would prepare you for the next writing assignment. How teachers assess student work can be very ambiguous. I always give my students the rubric for a project before they begin. I feel that they should know up front what is expected of them and how they will be graded. A rubric also holds me accountable as a teacher. I have to abide by the rubric. Anything not stipulated within that rubric cannot influence how individual student projects will be assessed.

In using daily teaching strategies one also has to consider an assessment model that could be generalized for a school district. If school districts would spend professional development time on helping teachers create assessments that could be used across departments or even across the curriculum, then I believe that it would be beneficial to teachers, students, and administrators. Teachers would have a well-structured model that they could adjust for individual assignments. Students would have a consistent feedback and administrators would have assessment data that was more uniform. Teachers in our school have created a writing handbook along with a rubric to be used when grading writing assignments. Every nine weeks we have to give our first hour class a topic to write about. It is usually specific to whatever is going on in class. The rubric is based on a 20-point system. At first teachers had problems deciding what, for example, constituted a "3" in the organization section of the rubric. After a professional development day going over writing samples and placing them in categories it made easier to work with. From what the administrators have stated, it made overall assessment more consistent as well. If you would like to take a look at the rubric here is the link to our writing handbook. The actual rubric is on page nine.

When assessment models are made it is important for everyone in the local educational community to understand those models. Parents and students need to understand how the assessments are being used and how to become more involved in the assessment process. Students can have more control over their own assessments by creating portfolios, maintaining grade sheets, having access to view class grades, and by becoming an active participant. Administrators need to allot more professional development time towards helping teachers create affect assessments. When assessments are used the data should then be used to along with standardized test score to establish individual student achievement. Once individual student knowledge has been determined that information should then be shared and explained to teachers, students, and parents. If we are to make progress then everyone needs to become part of the process.

Resources:
Ed Roeber's paper on school assessment systems
The challenge of knowing what students know, by James Pellegrino [online]
New Assessment Beliefs for a New School Mission
Knowing What Students Know: The Science and Design of Educational Assessment by Committee on the Foundations of Assessment, James W. Pellegrino, Naomi Chudowsky, and Robert Glaser (Eds.). Use the online chapters, linked to the citation above.
Executive Summary (14 pages)