Journal #5: Assessing Critical Thinking and Hiding Zeroes

Student growth is important, but how we assess that growth when working with teaching literature is a bit tough. It isn’t like math and science, where concepts are relatively concrete and either you know how to apply them or you don’t. Learning literature is about reading and comprehension, and assessing it is done by observing how students apply what they’ve read in various different ways. In Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning: How Do You Know What They Have Learned?, we’re confronted with different ways of assessing students’ learning of literature, and the most obvious take-away is that tests that assess critical thinking are better for students than simply memorizing facts for a summative test in the written work.

This made me feel particularly good, because I carried my experience with discussions/essay tests over into my Three Week Lesson Plan. From personal experience, I always learned literature the best through class discussion and being assured that no wrong answers exist if you can find support for your claim in the text. It helps students maintain their uniqueness, it allows students to apply critical thinking and their own experiences to the text. After all, any one book can be read thousands of different ways based on who’s reading it. Expecting students to think there’s only one right answer is unfair to them and literature as a whole.

I was also greatly struck by the Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook. Primarily the way it talked about motivating students by lifting out zeroes in cumulative scores. Zeroes are devastating to grades, and morale if those zeroes are left in when showing students their progress. Missed tests and assignments do still keep their zeroes, but letting students know where they’d be without them is a good way to let them get a sense of their actual grades and progress. Demotivation leads to students dropping out, and not being conscious of zeroes could inadvertently make students feel like they aren’t smart or good enough to keep working hard in academics.

It seemed like they were proposing ungraded homework to potentially help with the zeroes issue, which I think could prove to be a double-edged sword. On one hand students who struggle getting homework done and turned in (I forgot homework often in High School) would have better grades without all the zeroes. On the other hand, we can’t guarantee that students will do the homework that’s given to them if they aren’t given incentive to through grading. I’m still not sure how a teacher would motivate students to do something they don’t have to do when most kids in secondary school are more concerned with extra-curricular activities or spending time with friends.