Grading for Dummies, or A Confederacy of Rubrics
Dressed in a three-piece, charcoal gray pinstriped suit, Rex Kane squirmed in his chair at the head of the table. He fidgeted […]
Issue: December 2013
Assessment Practices: Encouraging or Damaging?
Our discussion for this month began with the following prompt from John Walcott: Assessment and evaluation practices are an everyday part of […]
A Little Box of Leadership
This semester, our students, funded by a state grant, have been asked to focus on the knotty term “leadership,” as in “teacher […]
Assessment, Evaluation, and Gardens
“I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing. . . . Suddenly all […]
Effective Assessment Practices: Tools that Lead to Learning
As long as there have been schools, teachers have been in the business of assessing student work. Do we have a common […]
Developing Self-Assessment through Project-Based Learning
Well-developed self-assessment skills are not only a vital tool for improving student learning, but also a lifelong tool for growth beyond the […]
Shifting from the “Bucket-o-Points” to “Big Ideas” Assessment
The idea of assigning a letter as a way to measure student learning is kind of bizarre if you really think about […]
Assessment Obsession and Evaluation Idolization
When educational policy makers first caught assessment fever from the business world some twenty years ago, like many teachers, I assumed it […]
Restoring Peer and Self-Assessment
In 2007, Elaine Brouwer unpacked some important ideas on assessment in the pages of the Christian Educators Journal. It was a remarkable […]
Eight Big Ideas about Assessment and Grading: Putting the Focus Back on Learning
I first became aware of the power of big ideas in an educational context during an early ’90s visit with colleagues to […]