Metaphors We Teach By: How Metaphors Shape What We Do in Classrooms by Ken Badley & Harro van Brummelen

Author:Ken Badley & Harro van Brummelen
Language: eng
Format: azw
ISBN: 9781621893530
Publisher: Wipf & Stock, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2012-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

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Student Assessment: Hitting the Mark or Lighting the Candle?

Harro Van Brummelen

MY CAREER AS EDUCATOR has spanned more than four decades. During this time, little has been as difficult or as painful as assessing students. On my latest (university) student course evaluations my scores for “value of feedback” and “return time of feedback on assignments” were very close to the “perfect” 4.0 mark. I gave formative feedback on several drafts that “didn’t count.” And students had to use my summative feedback as well as in-class peer assessment on their major projects to submit a take-home final examination question as to how they could improve their projects. The same day I discussed assignment expectations in class, I also posted the assessment rubric on my course website.

However, at the end of the course I still asked myself: Had I incorporated enough self- and peer-assessment for optimal learning? Was my extensive evening and weekend time worth the benefit for students? Was I being totally fair when I gave all students in a cluster whose total scores were between 78.9% and 80.9% a B+ even though our official cut-off is 80.0%? More importantly, how did my assessment affect how these future teachers view assessment? I want them to think of it in terms of assessment for and as learning. But they are very much aware that they need a B- average grade to be accepted into the last year of our teacher education program. So do they still see assessment mainly as a way to sort the sheep from the goats? Certainly one student thought so: she regularly came to see me when a mark was not quite what she had hoped. And I had to admit several times that my response—even when I used a detailed rubric—was defensible but nevertheless subjective. Another instructor (or myself at a different time or under different circumstances) might well have come up with a somewhat different score. Nor could I avoid that my final grade was a judgment. In essence I told students with 69% (C+) or lower that they would not make suitable teachers. Yet a grade of 70% (B-) or higher affirmed them as future teachers. I can tell my students that I’m assessing their work, and not them. But their perception often still is, “This is what you think I am worth.” I am not the only one who struggles with the issues swirling around student assessment: Lorna Earl reports that during her thirty years of working with teachers, they routinely told her that “assessment is the hardest part” (2003, p. ix).

Perhaps assessment is so difficult because it can and does have negative consequences, and therefore elicits negative student response. Chris McKillop (2006) asked 86 undergraduate and postgraduate university students to represent visually how they felt about assessment, without the term being discussed with them. The common themes that emerged were frustration, being judged, feeling uncomfortable, and perplexity. They thought of assessment as a formal, summative process. Half the students drew negative emotions such as discomfort and pain.

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