Assessing & Evaluating Students' Learning

 This article presents the idea of assessing in more than one way in within ELA classrooms. During my high school English experience my teachers worked to make sure that there was a variety of assessment types throughout units. We would often have vocab quizzes, comprehension quizzes, journal entries, essays questions, discussions, and/or full essays on the pieces from the unit. This variety of testing on the stories that we read in class built on each other as well, we would have vocab tests before a unit introducing words that my teacher thought would be important throughout the unit. Comprehension quizzes would occur throughout the reading, normally when a novel was the key text, in order to make sure that all of the students are understanding and up to date on reading and understood the literary elements that were being study with the novel. Journal entries would also be held throughout the reading as well in order to increase comprehension and allow the students to recognize that their thoughts, opinions, are also an important aspect to comprehending and reading pieces of text. Essay questions were typically the end of reading assessments to check complete comprehension and to combine the informal writing that occurred within the journals with a formal assessment within essay questions. Discussions would also be held at the end or near the end of the unit as the story was closing or big revelations would be about to happen within the story and discussions would allow the class to make predictions together or discuss the effects of the story on us as a class and individuals. Full essays would occur at the end of the unit in order to apply writing standards and the reading and comprehension standards.

This is a model of assessment that I would like to emulate because literature is more than just vocabulary and literary elements. Making sure that students understand that their thoughts while reading a piece of text are just as important, if not more so, than the vocab and literary elements but making sure that students know the story is also important. Including all kinds of assessment in relation to literature allow students to see how all kinds of thinking and comprehension go into reading literature and how all of their thinking and understanding can appear in a number of different formats. Assessment doesn’t have to be simply multiple choice quizzes, but they can be writing tasks as well.