UNC Asheville
What questions does Changing the Way We Grade Student Performance answer and for whom? I asked to review this book because especially at the end of a semester, I get focused on assessment, as do most of my colleagues. I have been teaching for more than twenty years and I am interested in how to make evaluations of student performance better, more accurate. But even more than that I am interested in how to communicate my expectations to students and how to elicit their expectations, so that we all share and understand the standards applied to their particular performances. This has been especially confusing and difficult for me in regard to grading areas which seem to me "fuzzy" by definition, like classroom participation and oral assignments, while designing writing assignments and responding to and grading those seems much clearer to me because I am a writing teacher. I was intrigued by this text because it broke the tasks of grading student performance into distinct chapters on different types of performance. That invited me to read carefully in those areas in which I was most in need of help. That is the first strength of this text.
Its second strength is that, for the most part, it is teacher friendly--aimed toward working, classroom teachers in predominately undergraduate settings. Often the material seems especially useful for teachers of general education courses where students are not expected to have developed professional expertise and may indeed be studying outside their chosen field. The book provides several detailed examples of assessment tools and good discussions of how to arrive at these ideas. Furthermore, it demonstrates how teachers might apply these tools differently or how teachers with similar goals might derive different techniques for assessment.
The weakest part of this generally useful text is in its initial description of academic assessment. The editors describe the problems of assessment in a "good guy" "bad guy" paradigm that makes it difficult to take their analysis seriously. They seem to be struggling to provide an overall conceptual context for the more pragmatic discussions that follow. My advice is to skim these sections quickly and then dive into the meatier, much more satisfying considerations of specific types of assessment.
For me the best part of reading the text was the way it stirred my own thinking about exactly what it was I wanted to assess and why. The "how" becomes much easier when these issues are settled. This book invites you into a thoughtful but not overdone consideration of these practical and fundamental issues.
Deborah (Dee) James
UNC Asheville