Writing and Assessment

I was pleasantly surprised by Dornan’s chapter on assessment, evaluating, grading, and responding to writing, starting with the clear distinctions the authors make among each of those terms. Trying to figure out how to “grade” writing has been something I’ve been pondering for awhile, and I have never felt to confident about the ideas I have. This chapter helped me out a lot by offering specific and realistic suggestions. It seems like, as is the case with most everything education-related, every teacher will have to figure out his or her own way to handle assessment and grading, but Dornan didn’t use that as a cop-out answer. After reading their suggestions about portfolios and rubrics and different styles and methods of grading, I don’t feel like assessing writing will be a breeze, but I at least feel like I have ideas about where to start—which is a lot better than where I used to be.

One quote that really jumped out at me was a comment made by Alfie Kohn, who said, “Broadly speaking, it is easier to measure efficiency than effectiveness, easier to rate how well we’re doing something than to ask whether what we’re doing makes sense” (p. 206). How true this is in regards to high-stakes, standardized testing, but it also occurs to me that it applies to many other aspects of teaching--and of life-- as well. It's easy for me to get so caught up in mastering or perfecting whatever it is I’m doing that I don’t stop to think about whether I care about what I’m doing, or if it really makes sense. So often, people take the easy way out—some days, it almost seems like it’s human nature. Standardized testing relies on multiple-choice for convenience’s sake, not because it makes sense to do it that way. Makes me stop and think…. What am I doing just because it’s convenient? I don't want to be like a standardized test.

But back to the reading—another interesting point that jumped out at me in this chapter was the assertion that students should be doing two to three times as much writing as what the teacher actually reads and grades. That was eye-opening. It seems like an excellent rule of thumb, and once again it makes me reflect on my own experience in writing classes, because I don’t think I’ve ever written nearly twice as much as what the instructor actually graded. The one thing that worries me about asking the students to write so much, though, is that I don’t want students to adopt the mentality of “I’m not gonna write this because no one’s even going to read it.” It seems like that attitude could be avoided with the right introduction and sense of community in the class, but it’s still scary. Once a student starts thinking that way, I’d imagine it’d be pretty hard to convince him otherwise.

My resource link for the week (http://www.uni-due.de/SVE/VARS_Varieties.htm) is a site that briefly describes several varieties of English. I think it’s important to know about all the different varieties that exist—for teachers, but also for all students. This site doesn’t go into great detail, and it doesn’t include many varieties-- but it’s an accessible introduction to the ones it does mention, and it serves to give readers an understanding that hey, there’s more than just standard English, and they’re just as important.