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Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning: How Do You Know What They Have Learned? By Beach, Appleman, Hynds, and Wilhelm

Chapter thirteen “Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning”, by Richard Beach, Deborah Appleman, Susan Hynds, and Jeffrey Wilhelm is the teacher's friend when being introduced to grading. I lack the background with grading because I have just received my placement at Freeman High school, but this article calmed a lot of fears I’ve had when approaching the topic. Throughout this article, it discusses the different ways that teachers can grade students and how to determine what assignments actually receive a grade. Similar to my interest, the article takes the writing approach when discussing student assessment. Through writing the teacher can gauge what is going on in their students head when juggling questions. This can lead to a deeper understanding of why students may not be grasping the information presented in class.
Furthermore, the article discusses the various kinds of assessments and their meaning to the student: Group discussions, written feedback, teacher responses, peer feedback, feedback through revisions, and a lot more. My personal favorite is the portfolio section of the text. In a previous class, we learned the importance of portfolios in the classroom. Crafting a portfolio is fun and shows the student personal achievement with the curriculum. For instance, crafting a portfolio over the course of a year can provide a student with many tools useful later in life. If your class writes a narrative piece, informative piece, and an argument piece, combining each document in a portfolio shows a student they can write in a variety of different ways. Crafting portfolios can be valuable to the student’s motivation, fueling their future learning.

Overall this article has provided many different points of view when discussing literature in the classroom. Reading this article has given me a brief overview of the different ways to teach literature, evaluate students’ knowledge of literature, and assess students’ knowledge for a grade. This article has sparked an interest in the many more techniques for assessing student knowledge. I believe it is extremely important to evaluate students in a way that isn’t degrading to their educational motivation. 

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