This is tough

I believe that I have seen my students learn. I believe I have seen “a-ha” moments. The struggle I have is that this is my perception. I also think agreement with Dr. Tuck’s first statement depends on the context of the classroom. When I worked in a 6:1:1 with nonverbal students on the Autism Spectrum in grades K-2, it was very difficult for me to know what they were learning. They did not speak the same language I did and often times, it would appear that they were catching onto something we tried to teach them, and then all the sudden, the evidence of understanding would disappear. Some days one of my students could match his colors and some days, he couldn’t. Now were these instances where he matched colors just coincidences? Did he always know how to match colors and just didn’t concentrate on me enough to demonstrate it? Did he know a lot more that I couldn’t find a way to bring out? Was I even teaching him colors or did he already know them? The learning of these students was harder to know about than say, the setting in Poughkeepsie Day School that I observed where eight grade students were highly skilled at verbalizing and articulating what they learned and how they learned it.
In terms of assessment, no, I don’t think assessment as we see it today is a clear indicator of what our students learn. I do not believe that state standardized tests are any indicator of what students have learned in school or how much they know. I agree with Carini when she says, “Describing requires that I not rush to judgment or conclude before I have looked” (2001, p. 163). I believe that all standardized testing does is squeeze children and their abilities into little boxes so that we can put a stamp on it and quickly judge it “before [we] have looked.” The same is true for curriculum and purchased tests. I remember having to administer tests out of a science book purchased in the 1980s in a classroom I student taught in. More than half my class got the same question wrong and I remember thinking, something is not right with that question if more than half my students got it wrong. I ended up giving everyone a point for it.
Luna (2002) points out, “unless we change the fundamental elements of our approach to assessment, such as the grading system, we cannot truly change our classroom practices to include a wider range of learning styles” (p. 603). I agree with this statement but I am flabbergasted at how to achieve such a huge change in the system that has been operating for so long. My immediate reaction is to think about portfolio assessment. That seems to be a different approach, but at the end of the day, teachers have to fill out little boxes on report cards that give a standard grade. It’s still smashing students learning into little boxes. Can we do what Carini suggests and describe student learning. Take time to mull it over, keep looking back at it and then coming up with descriptions rather than codes, numbers, and letters to assign meaning to it? How can we standardize a way to “transcribe what [we] have seen…reenact the gestures, seeking for words sufficiently apt to translate them, words that do not flatten meaning and intensity, but call them forth” (Carini, 2001, p. 164)? The bottom line is that the government will want and need to standardize whatever new form of assessment we come up with. Part of the idea of standards is to make sure that all students are being pushed to excel, that no student exists in a school that does not ask them to achieve of their ability. The government does not trust local communities and teachers to set the standards for their own children. How can this be rectified?
Personally, I tend to swing toward portfolio assessment, because then at least students are being viewed more wholly than as separate grades. Students also have choice when it comes to what they put in their portfolio for grading. They have more ownership over the process. In addition, I think students need choices about how they represent the knowledge they have learned. This is reflected in the case Luna (2002) describes about how Cary made a “three-dimensional ‘map’…of an essay she was writing about James Joyce’s The Dubliners” (p. 601). I plan on allowing my students creative options for reflection of and response to course topics so that they are not limited in the ways they share their learning and knowledge.