Measuring Assessment
Every Monday my 3rd grader brings home a folder containing all of his schoolwork from the previous week. Being something of a pack rat, I have kept these papers in a cupboard since the first day of school. This weekend marked the half-way point of the academic year, and in a fit of organization, I decided it was time to sort through the mess and prune the pile.
As I assembled his work on the kitchen table, I was struck with the enormity of the task before me: four and half months of school added up to an eight inch stack of papers! Not wanting to discard anything important and needing a sorting method, I decided to create two piles: formative assessments and summative assessments. When I finished my task quite some time later, the results were rather disconcerting; approximately three-fourths of his papers were summative in nature.
While I must admit that my “research methods” were somewhat less than precise, the clear emphasis on summative assessment left me wondering what type of balance is appropriate in the classroom. How should the formative and summative piles compare? How many inches of formative feedback does it take to ensure that the summative stack is meaningful? How do your classroom assessments “measure up”?
