Assessment

Of all the things in education that I am the most apathetic about, I would say that assessment probably bores me the most.  There is nothing less interesting to me than grades and, while its sometimes interesting to compare what one student got to another, I would much rather have my grades count little and be based on my subjective sense of how they are doing and how much they are trying rather than spending these last few weeks being forced to obssess over some state test, the content of which seems to correlate very little to what I consider to be the meaningful aspects of algebra.  Of course the assessments in the video seemed like something that might be far more interesting and I can see myself giving something like them a try in some ways before I finish teaching, but the video seems to ignore the reality that in any class in any school, not just the North Panolas of the world, there will be a good number of students who do not buy in to the mentality of an alternative assessment and their grade will be significantly lower even though they might have comparable math skills.  Of course, they could be punished for that, but it seems that so many of the alternative assessments reward so many other things besides the primary subject being taught that those things that make them alternative might make them weaker as the assessment of the material that matters.  Now, I have no problem with that as I do not care about objective assessments in the first place, but I cannot imagine these kinds of assessments ever taking the place of the standardized tests for that reason.

In my classroom now, the primary form of assessments are tests and quizzes.  I have done a couple "projects", which are really just an extended graphing assignment rather than anyhting like we saw in the video and a few poster sessions that encourage problem sovling and presentation, which are graded by a rubric, but I struggle to see myself going far beyond that this year.  There are just too many students who do not understand the meaning of the word "project", which to our students most commonly means finding something to copy and paste from Wikipedia (or, slightly more progressively, writing by hand after reading it on wikipedia), and putting it on a poster board.  Over the summer, there might be some more room for those kind of assessments, as the students seemed to be more motivated, or at least are a more captive audience than the students during the regular year.  On the other hand, the fact that many of the classes will be being led by first years might make it less than ideal to have them practicing doing something they may not get a chance to do during the year.  I would like to take the time to model some of the poster sessions we did this year that were modeled by us for the institute for mathematics innovation at Ole Miss.  Hopefully that will allow me to perfect the rubric and the procedures for that kind of activity, as I plan on using them more frequently during the year.  Going into next year, I have decided that my only real objective for next year should be using math to teach kids how to think critically.  I will be doing that in the blind faith that it will help my test scores for next year, as students will be more able to reason through word problems, but I wouldn't be bothered if it did cause our scores to drop.  As some of us at the school discussed, things are so backwards in eduation that the best thing we could do for next year would be to lower our test scores, miss AYP, and continue to get extra funding and   assistance from being under conservatorship.  If standardized tests were meaningful and had real incentives for performing on, rather than disincentives, I might care about them as a form of assessment.  As it is, I will try to take part in as many of these kinds of alternative assessments as possible insofar as they actually provide a meaningful benefit to students.  According to a book by W. James Popham called Transformative assessment that I will be using as a reference for next year, formative assessments, which as far as I can tell alternative assessments tend to be, "can have a positive effect on both students' in-class learning and students' subsequent performance on accountability tests"  (Popham 2).  If he is right, then everyone will go home happy.  If he is wrong, however, and these assessments promote learning but don't prepare them for the high-stakes test, then only I will go home happy.