Student Evaluation

Having completed Teacher Evaluations, my thoughts have turned to student evaluation. Turns out, "student assessment" is a huge topic but a few general principles seem to show up in education journals and websites with some regularity. These include:

1) Grades with no explanatory feedback are of little value, but explicit corrective comments are powerful teaching tools.
2) Feedback is optimized when students are given opportunities to try again and get it right.
3) Feedback delivers the most value when it is prompt. The longer students have to wait, the less they get out of whatever comments we provide.
4) Rubrics help students focus their efforts and gauge their own success.
5) Involving students in the evaluation process increases its value.

I have to say, I think we're doing a lot of things right at Northwest. We've got principles # 1 and 2 covered and we're working on #3.

In terms of #4, I know I don't use formal rubrics very often. Heather and Suzanne developed one for analytic essays, which I sometimes use to show my students what distinguishes an "A" from a "B" paper. Grade 11 uses a kind of rubric with the research paper. Benji has developed an invaluable "Illustrated Guide" to essay writing and Daren just created an excellent primer on text analysis. None of these are exactly rubrics, but they all offer explicit criteria and some models for students to follow. And of course, there is the Essay Checklist! (All these can be downloaded from my Teacher Page, thanks to our colleagues who agreed to share them.)

I guess I am least sure of #5. Of course, conference offers a prime opportunity for informal self-assessment. Once in a while, I have my students submit a narrative self-evaluation on the back of their essay checklist: they assess the strengths and weaknesses of their papers and share any challenges that came up in writing them. This is a valuable exercise, but I think it might be the only opportunity for formal self-assessment that I offer my students. I am thinking about turning over part of my Quint II evaluations to the students' own comments, but I find myself hesitating--which is interesting. Why am I so reluctant to share this responsibility with the people it most concerns? Am I afraid they'll do a bad job?