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On Assessment and Standards-Based Grading


Assessment is one of those topics that appears to be daunting to me at first, but the more I think about it, and the more I read about it, the more I feel comfortable with it. I don’t think it’s really as tricky as topic as some people like to make it out to be. The handout provided offered some really good in depth looks at the different ways teachers can assess their students’ knowledge and understanding. It took a very neutral stance, investigating the pros and cons of all kinds of approaches. There wasn’t any tactics of assessment that I found particularly abhorrent. They all work in their own ways. I just think in order to have good assessment there needs to be a common, solid ground to base the assessment on. That’s where the debate comes to. This leads to the article about standards based grading.

I think standards based grading, on a philosophical level, is a sound way to approach assessment. The issue arises when we talk about what specifically the standards are, and whether the standards we are grading are proper or beneficial to the student. The assessment article does a good job of describing the issue with “knowledge-based” assessment (which asserts that the testing of students should be on how much they know, ‘knowledge is learning’). I think that viewpoint in fundamentally flawed because a student can remember and know a lot without understanding it or applying it to their lives. This has been a common criticism with the idea of state standards. When they first became a prominent political/pedagogical discussion, the fear was that the standards aren’t testing students on relevant skills and knowledge that can benefit themselves economically and socially. And to some extent, I do agree with that sentiment. There are aspects of assessment and standards I don’t agree. More recently, the way in which we test students at the state level.

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