Evaluation+Plan

Throughout our unit, diagnostic, formative and summative forms of assessment were used to accurately gauge students’ abilities prior to learning, during their learning and as their learning. From the unit’s outset, we used a KWL chart to assess student’s prior knowledge on the topic, looking for learning opportunities while attempting to avoid excessive repetition of familiar material. We used formative assessments, which provide teachers and students with information during learning in order to refine students’ skills, primarily through class discussions and somewhat through the presentation tasks. The presentations were also somewhat summative, however, in that they would be “counted towards the student’s final marks” (Course Profile 15). But while assessment is “the systematic process of collecting information or evidence about student learning”, evaluation is solely a teacher’s “judgment […] of student learning based on established criteria” (15). Evaluations, therefore, once submitted provide little opportunity for students to revise their work as seen in our quizzes. As evaluations are concerned with products of learning, teachers still need to scaffold student’s learning towards evaluations as we tried to do.

Not only did our evaluation and assessment plan to gauge and guide student learning processes, we also attempted to gather assessment information from a number of sources, namely self, peer and teacher sources, as seen through the KWL chart, peer evaluation of presentations, co-constructed assignment criteria and the quizzes. The use of rubrics and discussions around rubrics helped clarify assignment’s “aims and expectations” to students (Planning 23). In this sense, we used rubrics to begin and open the student-teacher assessment dialogue rather than giving rubrics fait accompli to students from on high. Rubrics, therefore, should be used to help students recognize their level of achievement and to provide guidance on how to achieve the next level (Virtual). Rubrics also made the aims and expectations clear to us as the assessor and evaluator. This clarity not only benefits teachers in the consistent marking of tests, assignments and presentations, but it also allows assessment to drive our instructional methods which are the validity and reliability benefits of Backward Design. By having different forms of assessments and expectations in mind, we also attempted to build a unit that allowed students to demonstrate many of their media literacy, oral communication, reading and writing skills. Clearly assessment and evaluation is about giving students opportunity to demonstrate their learning in the best way they can (Virtual). Our job as educators is not to judge how ‘smart’ students are but to assess ‘how’ students are smart.

Assessment and evaluation is also about teaching and judging different forms of knowing as indicated in the Knowledge, Inquiry, Communication and Application categories. Upon reflection, it seems Lewison et al.’s critical literacy elements intuitively demand students move beyond the content base of knowledge, through to authentic inquiry, communication of that learning and application of those skills in the social action mandate. While the connection between critical literacy and KICA is revelationary to us, it should not be so given that the KICA categories are based on Blooms’ Taxonomy of cognitive skills. Bloom in turn emphasizes scaffolding student’s skills towards critical thinking which sounds quite familiar to critical literacy’s scrutiny of ‘commonplace’ knowledge through authentic inquiry, and application of new knowledge in meaningful, contextual ways. So while we very much liked //The Rez Sisters// as a play//,// this tentative evaluation and assessment plan attempts to teach through the text rather than merely the text itself.