Assessing Assessments

 I went to Ebsco with the intention of reading literary criticism about Americanah, but I got distracted when my interest in Americanah converged with the topic I'm considering for my doctoral dissertation. While I'm in the early stages of my EdD program, I am pretty sure I will explore how a school's assessment and grading practices either support or undermine its character education.

The article "Beyond Intuition: Fostering Competencies for School and Life" from Independent School was written by a senior-level English teacher who asks her students to blog in response to their reading of Americanah. Sound familiar?

The teacher, Indu C. Singh, assigned her students blog writing instead of a traditional essay out of a desire to help the development of twenty-first century skills--creativity, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking--through giving them real-time and authentic audiences. However, she was disappointed to see her students falling back to their old habits of formal essay writing within the context of their blogs. The problem, she discovered, is that educators often assume that students know how to do these things, and so we don't actively teach and assess these skills even though we believe they are important.

We are all operating under an inherited educational system that was designed to meet the needs of a industrial system. While educators are aware today that a student's success depends upon much more than content knowledge, these considerations are often not reflected in the limited skills we teach and assess.

Although this article was not really about Americanah, the articles, such as Angela Duckworth's review of performance assessments, will be very useful for my own research going forward. More than anything, I want assessment to truly reflect what a school values as important for student success and clearly communicates a student's progress toward those goals. The problem is that redesigning and implementing (as opposed to just researching best practices) how grades work is kind of like trying to fix a car while you're driving it. I'm assuming. I'm not very mechanically minded.