Assessment Article Review

The article I read was called The Role of Classroom Assessment in Teaching and Learning by Lorrie A. Shepard. I will discuss the sections I found most useful in her article. She used many references and case studies to support her article.

One of the main topics she discussed was allowing the students to assess themselves. I really like this section because I believe that students should be assessing themselves. Not only will they have too and should do it when they live on their own but it will increase their learning. I think some of the problems among adults is that they never were held accountable or were taught to assess what they were doing and analyze the good from the bad and the outcomes/consequences of either one. On that note, a great chunk of learning comes from assessing yourself. When you look at what you have done or what you should do then you realize things that you may have not seen before.

One way to help students assess themselves is by giving them a rubric. Not only does the rubric help us but it helps the students see what they need to accomplish and if they did accomplish the criteria. A rubric is only one example. According to Frederiksen and Collins “the features of excellent performance should be so transparent that students can learn to evaluate their own work in the same way that their teachers would.” I really like this quote and the way they used transparent to describe what it should be like.

On the other hand, making students think about what you expect of them is another way to get them metacognitively thinking and analyzing. The article mention that “the more important reasons for helping students develop an understanding of standards in each of the disciplines are to directly improve learning and to develop metacognitive knowledge for monitoring one’s own efforts…they provide students with the opportunity to get good at what it is that the standards require.” If the students are actively engaged in grading their own work then they have a more in depth understanding of the standards required.

As a final note, I found this quote that wraps up what assessment should be. “Wolf and Reardon (1996)…talk about ‘making thinking visible,’ and ‘making excellence attainable.”