We often overlook the pertinence of assessment in a learning environment. We take into consideration what the students give us to assess but not what we give to them (or teach them) through our assessment. In this paper I would like to discuss the role assessment plays as an occasion for learning and how a teacher must be careful that their assessments are teaching the right things.
The Sommers article is a perfect example of how important assessment is in what students learn. After reading the article I conclude that there are a few things the teacher must consider when assessing a student's work, especially in writing. Most importantly, the teachers objective must match the way the teacher assesses the work, otherwise the students are going to be confused about what they are to have learned. Also, the teacher must consider the student's objective in the work, in the case of the Sommers article, to help the student achieve what she wants to say rather than what the teacher imposes on her writing. I can relate this to Nicholls' ideas about task-involved work, in that if a teacher imposes his comments on the text, the student finds herself doing what the teacher wants her to do instead of considering how to better express what the she wants to say. This does not provide for task-involved learning; it would instead create an extrinsic (Nicholls) learning environment in that the student would only be concerned with giving the teacher what he wanted to hear.
Another aspect of what our students learn through assessment is inequality (Nicholls). Most obviously, it is seen in a situation where the teacher assesses the students publicly. This can be very common in a foreign language classroom because so much of the work is spoken. Students are often given a sense of competition in a foreign language classroom through games and activities. These could be between individual students, or groups of students. What they learn is not only the subject matter, but an academic class system and a social class system within their classroom (eg. who is "smartest" or "dumbest" and does that make them more or less popular among their peers) also providing for an ego-involved learning environment (Gatto).
Before reading these articles I considered assessment as a form of observing and judging the students and their ability. I now realize that there is more to it. As Nicholls writes, we must consider ability in relation to effort, and what kind of message we are sending to the students about it. This is difficult for me because I see two sides to it. I think that encouraging effort is important, but a student's effort does not mean they have mastered the subject matter. Yet a student having ability does not necessarily mean they put forth any effort. What is more important to enforce in our assessment, and how you deal with students that put forth a lot of effort but don't show understanding, without discouraging them? I am still struggling with the answer to this question, but I think that there must be a happy medium amongst the two, that encourage both.
I found it very interesting how the Gatto article echoes a lot of what I have been talking about in this paper, and I quote, "IThrough report cards, grades and tests, children learn not to trust themselves or their parents but to rely on the evaluation of certified officials." Gatto talks about all of the lessons he teaches and I see how many of these lessons are being taught through assessment. The Wolf article mentions the many underlying messages that assessment gives. These can be just as important, if not more, to consider as those of the subject matter because they can also have an effect on how well the subject matter is learned or understood.
I can remember a college English class which exemplifies the theme in this whole paper. We had to critique American Literature. Part of the critique was presenting a thorough understanding of the author's reasoning behind writing the book, what statement the author was trying to make, and our opinion of it. I wrote what I thought was a great essay, I gave a good interpretation of the book (A Good Man Is Hard To Find), related it to my life and stated my opinion of it. The instructor gave me a C because he said that my essay did not 'flow". That would have been fine, if that was the purpose of the paper. He contradicted his objective. From then on, I lost interest in the class because I was made to feel unimportant in it, and I began writing for a grade. Needless to say, my understanding of and interest in American Literature was stunted by this instructor's lack of consideration in evaluating my paper. Instead I learned how unfair my instructor was, how effort wasn~t important, and how to make my essay "flow."
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