Assessment: Literacy Make or Break

"Good assessment results in information that is useful to both students and teachers.  Students need to know how they are doing, what they are doing right, and what they can do to improve."

-Content Area Reading and Literacy  127-128

Alvermann, Phelps, and Gillis

This semester I have to opportunity to attend clinicals, and so visit two different high school English classes twice a week.

The first  classroom around assessment that is as predictable as it is stale.  Seconds before class begins, the teachers finishes a multiple choice or short answer reading quiz that covers the homework from the day before.  Students enter the classroom, pull out their laptops (the class has a mac lab.....basically used as a babysitter.....but that is a different paper), take the sterile, dry quiz, and then complete an assignment online about the book.  There is rarely discussion.  In fact, during one class period, a group of confused 11th graders approached the teacher for a discussion about sections of the novel that were unclear (the quiz was done) and he  flatly refused.  As I observe and discuss with students, I find that many of them are confused and bored with the book.  Basically the only direct literacy instruction I have ever witnessed in that class was the teacher advising students who were struggling with the complicated syntax to read sentences as far as the commas, then stop.  Can you make coherent sense of a long-winded text (nearly every sentence has two or three commas in the opening of The Scarlet Letter) by excluding all information after a comma?  I doubt it.  There is no summative assessment in sight, and no thread tying the assignments together. In this classroom, the teacher may know who comprehended the assigned chapter (or at least could answer the few questions asked), but students have no feedback, no guidance, and no support for accessing the book.

The second class I attend also has reading quizzes.  These are either assigned as homework, or given closed-book in class the next day.  After students take the quiz, the teacher goes over the answers with the class, asking for input, willing to listen to debate, and clarifying confusion. From what I have observed, almost all students complete the quizzes, and many score well.  More importantly, they know why they scored well, and why they missed certain questions because they can (and often do) ask for clarification.  In addition to the quizzes, students provide a variety of formative feedback, such as drafting new endings to the stories, taking surveys to find connections in their own lives with the book, and  writing letters to characters in the book.  There is creativity, there is expression, questioning, and exploration.  The teacher often alters assignments based on the needs of the class.  Most importantly, there is learning. 


Now why would I spend so much time thinking about assessment in these English classrooms, especially as I write a blog about literacy?  It is becoming clear to me that the way assessment is used in a classroom invevitably affects the literacy atmosphere of that classroom.  In my discipline, it is not enough to simply hand back a score on a reading quiz.  This form of assessment, with no clear picture of where their headed, why it matters, or why an answer is right or wrong does nothing but allow the teacher to enter points in the grade books.  How can students be expected to improve critical thinking, analysis, vocabulary, and reading techniques why all they ever see are points from a arbitrarily created system?  On the other hand, when assessment is used as a jumping-off point for discussion, connection, and insight, it suddenly becomes a valuable tool for students to understand and analyze texts and learn valuable skills, as well as allow the teacher to gauge class understanding and sentiment towards the materials.