Assessment Part One

Diane and I are close to wrapping up our unit. As we are finishing we have realized that we may have to modify our initial plans for assessment. Diane and I created a rubric to evaluate the work students have done for their creative writing assignment. I wrote the rubric criteria for the information standards we hope students will reflect at the end of the unit. Diane created the portion that assesses the students writing skills. The students received these guidelines before they started writing their pieces.

As the students have progressed, Diane is hoping to give a little more leniency in the grading process. She has expressed that the rubric seems a little wordy and more difficult to use. She has also reasoned that she may be hesitant to use the rubric because it is simply different from what she is used to. I am willing to change the type of assessment form we use because it is important that both collaborating participants feel like they have ownership over the project. However, we must be certain that we are still evaluating the students on the same skills we expressed to them at the beginning of the assignment. We will continue to work on an assessment form that satisfies all the standards we hope the students have achieved.

In order to communicate progress to other stakeholders, like the principal or the current librarian, we will have the students complete a post-teaching checklist. This checklist will be identical to the pre-teaching checklist the students completed at the beginning of the unit. This will give us data about our students abilities before and after the assignment. We will use this to demonstrate the progress of our students throughout this unit. The evaluation of the final creative writing assignment will be used to confirm the students' perceptions of achievement. We will display the information in a one page document that will give a summary of the unit and will graphically display the before and after data.