FIAE+Chapter+4+Block+2

[|Synthesis - FIAE C4 B2]

Chapter four in //Fair Isn’t Always Equal// revolved around the three most important types of assessments: portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessment. Portfolios are a great method to keep track of your students’ success and development in your own class as well as in other classes, and are usually kept and added to over a span of time. This allows the collection to grow. Portfolios also offer the student, teachers, and parents the ability to reflect on the work done. The next assessment tool was rubrics which may be one of the most important assessment tool‘s because it is very popular. Rubrics may sometimes be one of the more challenging assessments to create because there are a lot of criteria that students need to meet. There are two different kinds of rubrics: holistic and analytic. With holistic rubrics, grammar and content is graded as a whole whereas analytic breaks down each component. The book also mentioned keeping the scoring for your rubrics away from a five level system because many people automatically associate it with letter grades. The final assessment type was the student self-assessment. One method that was proposed was the idea of using the same pre-assessment given at the beginning of the unit for the end of the semester. This way, students could analyze how they have developed and progressed. Journals, writing prompts, and interactive notebooks are also used by students to monitor their success This reading was great to read because keeping track of students’ progress is extremely important to all teachers. Having portfolios creates and easy and efficient way of doing this. In high school, we used to be required to keep a portfolio, but no one kept up on them and they were never filled with anything that was too important to us. I want to have all the students keep one for my class so that they can document all of their work to show their development. I would also have them create some student self-assessments to place in the portfolio. In the end, I would really like them to be proud of the work they had done. The section on the rubrics was also really great because it gave you a step by step guide to creating them. It was interesting to me to learn that there were different styles of rubrics which is good to know because it will make it easier to create them in the long run. Chapter four of FIAE covered “three iportant types of assessment,” portfolio, rubric and student self-assessment. Wormeli explains that portfolios offer students the chance to look back at their work and reflect on what they learned, especially if they are asked to write explanations for the pieces they choose to present in the portfolio. Portfolios are also extremely flexible and can be used for any subject. Wormeli also provides the basic information for creating an effective rubric, providing examples of appropriate rubric language and ways to test the quality of your rubric. He explains that teachers need to “examine their rubrics in terms of: content, clarity, practicality, and technical quality/fairness,” (pg. 45). Lastly, Wormeli wrote about student self-assessment. He explains that self-assessment is vastly important in a differentiated classroom. He offers ideas for student self-assessment such as, journals, learning logs and interactive notebooks. I found this chapter immensely useful. When assessing students you’ll want to keep everything fair, understandable and effective, which can be extremely difficult to do. Before reading this chapter I was exited about formative assessment; helping students progress through instruction and advice without dishing out harsh grades on unfinished products. After reading this chapter I feel a little more comfortable with these forms of summative assessment. I feel like there is more pressure when it comes to summative assessments. The grades you hand out are final and if you make a big mistake in grading someone’s work it could end with discouraged students and angry parents. Both of which are never any fun. This chapter is helpful in the matters of assessment because it shows two very familiar ways of following student progress. I feel that the idea of a portfolio is not new to any of us, but it is refreshing to be on the other end of a portfolio assignment and truly understand why we as students created these. It seems all too obvious now that portfolios are an ongoing assessment of student achievement, rather than a collection of worksheets, grades, and bulky backpack-filling material. The idea of a rubric is also changed in my mind. I had always viewed them as a set of guidelines to meet, but now I see that they are constructed in a way so that if a student does have mastery of the material, they should be able to understand a well constructed rubric and accomplish the tasks at hand. I also enjoyed the part of this chapter that talks about not allowing students to settle for a lower score on the rubric in order to avoid work. Too often myself have I seen a rubric and decided “Hey, I could save myself an hour on this project and receive ‘good’ as apposed to ‘excellent’”. The idea of mainly focusing on the highest achievement on the rubric will help to ensure that students to do settle for a lower score in order to save on work. Also adding that students should be allowed to contribute to the rubric is helpful in a differentiating classroom because it allows the students to focus on what is important to them, while still accomplishing the original goals at hand. This chapter again deals with assessment and its importance. The chapter opens with an introduction to portfolios and how they are a good form of assessment because they are an ongoing record of student work and progress within the classroom. The chapter states that because of the portfolios ongoing nature they provide an accurate depiction of the student’s progress, and the big picture of their learning. This goes to say that the student’s display of mastery is quit valid through a portfolio. The chapter gives us educators the good point that portfolios are not just a good reference for us, but they can also be viewed by the students and their parents in order to determine the student’s mastery of a topic, unit, semester, and year. Next the chapter touches upon rubrics and explains how rubric are very powerful tools that help students to understand what is expected of them. The chapter says that rubrics should be constructed in a way that it helps to focus learning for the student. Rubrics should be a display of what we plan to assess. We are to understand that they are a powerful tool in differentiating instruction. The chapter goes into further detail by exploring both holistic and analytic rubrics. The chapter says that holistic rubrics are the easiest to construct, but they may not always offer the feedback necessary for student accomplishment. The chapter shows us how a holistic rubric will cover a large area, while an analytic rubric is like having several smaller rubrics within the larger one to show more specific levels of accomplishment and skill. The chapter provides us with many specific examples of how a holistic rubric and an analytic rubric may vary for the same content areas. The chapter tells us that two very important ideas to keep in mind are to one, write details for each level of the unit keeping in mind what you are going to accept as mastery and two, focus mainly on the highest level of achievement, leaving less description for the lower scoring options of the rubric. Also, to end the section or rubrics the chapter tells us to create rubrics, and also allow student input on how the rubric should be constructed.
 * **Names** || **Abstract** || **Reflection** ||
 * Barnes Mckell || Chapter four of Fair Isn’t Always Equal talks once again about different assessment ideas; however, this chapter focuses on examples of specific assessments rather than types of assessments. The chapter focuses on three main examples: portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessment. Portfolios allow teachers to collect and examine work of students. Portfolios set up an organized learning tool which helps teachers examine evidence of students learning. A rubric is the second example the book provided. Rubrics provide different levels of tasks and it then assesses how well they are met. Lastly, a student’s self-assessment offers essential feedback that can help students learn much better from their mistakes. Types of examples of this kind of assessment are self-checking lists/rubrics, videotaping performances and analyzing them etc. || I really like how this chapter pulls the assessment information together. Previous chapters explained different types of assessment; however, they did not provide examples of these assessments. Chapter four provides great examples of various ways to assess evidence of learning. I really think rubrics are a great way to assess. They provide an organized outlook of how the project will be graded and they give students a guideline to follow. I will definitely incorporate these assessments into my curriculum, especially rubrics. ||
 * Brennick Christopher || The first part of chapter five talks about the use of portfolios as an assessment in the classroom. The first big statement made in favor of portfolios is that the portfolio gives more of an overview of a students work rather then just a snapshot given by a test or a quiz and this gives more information to the teacher to judge about students mastery. The students also get a chance to pick what work he or she wants to put into the portfolio and this gives student a chance to reflect on the work they have done and track progress. The portfolios can also come in many different types weather it be a digital or hard copy. The next section of the chapter goes into detail about the rubrics and how to use them in the differentiated classroom. The chapter gives us good guiding questions that we can use as a guide in coming up with our rubrics. The book then goes on to list seven steps in designing a rubric. The steps are: identify essential and enduring content and skills, identify what is acceptable evidence, what a description on the highest performance, make a decision between holistic or analytic, determine label for each level, write a descriptor for each level, and test drive the rubric. Student self assessment is the last piece of the chapter and this tells us to let students put where they think they are out in front of us as teachers so we as teachers and them as students can set goals and track progress. || I really enjoyed this chapter because I am personally a big fan of portfolios and will differentially use them in my classroom. I think the biggest reason that I favor portfolios is that they show growth over time and lets us actually show learning instead of just recalling facts. I also like portfolios because each student has to do their own work and that way they cannot just copy the answer off from another paper. I do think that portfolios can bring in the other two elements of rubrics as a way to assess what is in the portfolios and student self assessment by having them pick what they want in the portfolio and having them state what this shows about their learning and why they picked it. ||
 * Columbia Laura || Chapter four of //Fair Isn't Always Equal,// Rick Wormeli discusses the three different types of assessment. The first assessment is portfolios. Portfolios are a great way to demonstrate the progress of the students learning. They can be a collection of students work, either a hard copy or digital. Another form of assessing are rubrics. Rubrics state what the tasks are and what meets the appropriate levels of mastery. It is important for the rubrics to be clear. Also, it is important to encourage students to do their best, not just aim for the average score. The last assessment mentioned was student self-assessment. These assessments can incorporate fill-in-the-blank responses, rubrics, checklists and many other forms of self-assessment. Very good examples of how to do each assessment. Overall, it was very helpful. || I really liked the idea of having portfolios as a way of assessment. I think it is a great way to evaluate the students work and learning. I have portfolios from some of my classes that I am very proud of. It also makes it very easy to share with others the student's learning, such as parents, other teachers, and principals. I have never really like rubrics, but I do realize and appreciate the value they have. It is important to have clear expectations of what the student should be learning and able to do. The last assessment discussed was self-assessment. I feel that it is very important for the student to understand why they got the grade they did. It is important that students can recognize where they did well, or where they struggled. ||
 * Coombs Kayla || Chapter four was about three important types of assessment: portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessments. Portfolios are a great way to assess students in differentiated classrooms because they give students the chance to reflect on their own work and development as learners as they choose which pieces to include in their portfolios. There is a lot of flexibility in using portfolios because they can come in various forms, like electronic or hard copies of papers, and all teachers of various subject areas can use them. Rubrics are good for assessing and reporting on the achievements of the students. To ensure that one has made an appropriate and efficient rubric, one must look into their rubrics and examine if they assess the important material and exclude the less significant material, if they can be easily understood and comprehended by the students, if they are easy to use for the teacher and the students, and if they are reliable and provide equal opportunities for all students. When one is making a rubric, they have to decide whether he or she wants it to be holistic, in that he or she wants to keep everything as a whole, and leave out specific details, or if she or she would prefer an analytic rubric, which would be assessing content and skills within the larger topic. Teachers have to decide how to label each level of their rubric; do they want three or four levels, which would make it more flexible than the standard five levels, which are easily equated to the five letter grades? The third important type of assessment is student self-assessment which provides important feedback and helps students work with their teachers to set individual goals. One of the most efficient ways for students to self-assess is to make the first and last task or assessment of the unit the same, and have to students analyze their responses to each one, making sure to note where specifically they have grown over the course of the unit. In addition, teachers can also use such strategies as: self-checking rubrics, self-checking checklists, videotaping performances and analyzing them, fill-in-the-blank or responding to self-reflection prompts, having students to review and critique their previous work, and performing in front of the mirror. A teacher could also ask his or her students to do journals, learning logs or interactive notebooks to self-assess. || From this chapter I gained a better sense of the best ways to assess my students. I think using portfolios would be a great way for students to reflect on their progress and it gives them more control in what pieces they would like to include to best exemplify their development and understanding of the content. I like the flexibility of portfolios and I think they would be helpful for all types of learners. I hope to make good use of rubrics in my classroom so all students can clearly identify what is expected of them and what they can do to become achieve the goals of the rubric. From the text I realize that I will need to put in a lot of effort when creating my first rubrics. Student self-assessments also seem like a good idea because of all the feedback that will come out as a result. These would benefit students because they can review the areas where they have grown and from there create new individual goals. ||
 * Cummons Michael || Chapter four of FIAE is about three different types of assessment of students. The first one is portfolios. Portfolios are a good way to help determine accurate grades for students in differentiated classes. Teachers can collect and examine work. This is a longitude study of students’ progress in the classroom. Some portfolios are a student’s work over one year, while some are used to look at a student over many years. Some portfolios are in hard copy, while some are done electronically. Portfolios can help a teacher see how an individual student learns, which can be helpful for the teacher in the classroom. Another way of assessment is Rubrics. This approach is good for focusing learning and for assessing and porting a student’s personal achievement. This chapter looks at how to great a successful rubric, that is effective for student assessment. The third way of student assessment is student self-assessment. A student’s self assessment is an important aspect of successful differentiated classroom. There are many different ways for a student to self assess. Students can answer yes or no questions, or open ended questions, or I agree or disagree questions. || This chapter is very helpful because it gives great examples on how to assess students. I really liked the portfolio assessment. It seems like it could be very useful for teacher to look at a multi-year portfolio of a student before a class even begins. By doing this, a teacher can learn maybe how to approach a student, and how to properly approach a student in the classroom. Portfolios can give a lot of information, because a student can show all of there learning in a detailed manner. Student self assessment was also interesting. Looking at what a student says about how they learned and what they learned can be very useful for teacher. Looking at what a student says sometimes helps teachers see something that they missed. ||
 * Damboise Kelley || The three important types of assessments are portfolios, rubrics, and self assessment. Portfolios are a unique way of assessing a child’s learning because it can either be done over a long or short period of time, and students can take part in developing their own learning process. Portfolios offer a way for students to take part in their learning by setting goals for themselves, assessing how far they have come, and developing ways to help them reach the goal they have set for themselves. Long term portfolios show students how they have progressed over the years, and short term portfolios help students reflect on the work they have done that year. There are a number of ways portfolios can be set up such as collection a students work and putting it into a folder or creating a binder that has work from previous years. Rubrics are another essential form of assessments; however, rubrics are a little more extensive than the portfolios. Rubrics require four areas to be covered in order for students to benefit from this form of assessment. Rubrics must incorporate a context, clarity, practicality, and technical quality/fairness. Context requires that the important information be showcased on a rubric. Clarity entails that the material is understood by the students, and they are clear as to what is being asked of them. Practicality refers to how easy is this rubric to use, can both the student and teacher understand the guidelines. Technical quality/fairness pertains to how reliable the rubric is. Lastly, student self-assessment is where a student takes charge of his or her learning with guidelines from the teacher. Students are able to assess their learning and compare it to where other students are and where they would like to be. Some examples of student self-assessment include: self-checking rubrics, self-checking checklists, analyzing work against standards, having students review and critique their own work, and performing in front of a mirror. || After reading this chapter it has made me more aware of how hard it is to create a good rubric that follows all the guidelines and is easily understood. Surprisingly, when I think back to my younger years in junior high and high school I realize that on almost every project, paper, or visual display, I did, there was always a rubric attached. I never stopped to think who created the rubric, why the teacher required the work that he or she did, who created the grading scale, and why this was a great way to assess whether learning had occurred or not. Every rubric is different; some use a six point scale, while others use a three point scale. It is all based upon what the teacher decides will better assess the students learning process and mastery level. Now that I have read the chapter I feel a little nervous about creating a rubric. What happens if the rubric is awful and doesn’t truly assess the information in a correct, detailed manner. How will I know if I have created a rubric that is assessing the wrong information, and will I know how to change it so that it can assess the student correctly? ||
 * Kelley Kathleen ||  ||
 * Knowles Christina || The chapter begins by telling us about portfolios and how they can be very useful in the classroom. We are told that they can be used for a variety of subjects and are used in differentiated classrooms. Next the chapter explained the importance of creating a good rubric to assess your students. We learn step by step how to make a rubric. We have to think about what qualities we need to include in the assessment. The last thing the chapter went over was student self-assessment. Self-assessment allows the students to think more in-depth about what they are being taught. We also get a chance to see the problems and the success the students felt occurred of the unit period. || I really liked this chapter because I agreed with it. I think portfolios are a great tool to use in the classroom because it allows both the students and the teachers to see how much progress they made in the classroom. I also think that a good rubric is very important in the classroom so students can refer to it constantly while they are working on their assignments. Good rubrics tell what is expected out of the students. I also like the idea of self-assessment because it allows students to reflect on their work. It also allows them to realize if they forgot a part of their assignment. ||
 * Mourkas Margaret || Chapter 4 talks about assessment of students when you use differentiated teaching skills. “Portfolios are an excellent way to determine accurate grades for students in differentiated classes . . . as a result, interpretations of students’ mastery are more valid, and subsequent decisions we make are more effective” pg. 43. Portfolios are the main idea of the first section of this chapter. The chapter mentions that reviewing portfolios are a good way to give a final grade in a class too because this way you are physically looking back over all the work the student has done in the year instead of looking at all the number grades they have received. This chapter also gave a detailed outline as to how a good rubric should be set up and created. It gave a great chart to visualize the written words. Student self-assessment was another big topic in the chapter. A lot of examples were given as to how a student can self-assess themselves but some of the examples were, self-checking rubrics, video taping a presentation and then analyzing it, or using a journal or learning log. Having the students self-assess themselves allows the student and the teacher to understand what the student thinks of their work and it provides insight to the teacher as to how hard the student thinks they worked. || I think that including the really detailed outline of how to create a rubric was really helpful. I already had a basic idea but this explanation is really detailed and helpful. I think giving the students the rubric you are going to be using before you grade them and having them self-assess is a good idea. Doing this allows the teacher to get an idea of how well the student thinks they did and how hard they may have worked. This chapter really gave me an insight as to how much work is involved into making a productive rubric. It’s a little nerve racking as to how much work is involved, but it’s another teaching skill where practice makes perfect, almost. I always enjoyed as a student getting a portfolio back at the end of the school year. It allowed myself to see how I had grown as a student and how I can also improve on similar projects in the future. I know as a teacher I am going to have portfolios available to my students. In my eighth grade classroom there was a box on the counter with our file folders in them and all of our papers and major homework assignments were there. We had access to the box whenever we needed. I think that portfolios are an excellent idea for every subject matter in every grade. ||
 * O'Neil Christopher || Chapter four discusses the three important types of assessment; portfolios, rubrics, and self-assessment. Portfolios are important because they gather information about a student’s learning progress over a long period of time. These can be used to accurately determine a student’s mastery of different units. Portfolios are much more accurate than a single test or quiz. Rubrics are important because they map out exactly what is expected of the student. By using a rubric, students get a much better understanding of what the teacher expects of them for an assignment. This will then lead to the student having a better performance with the assignment and possibly learning more from it. Self-Assessment is important because it helps students and teachers set individual goals. Students will be more likely to learn a lot more from self-assessment because they are analyzing their own work. || This chapter provided helpful information on how to best assess students in the classroom. I really like the idea of portfolios over the other two types discussed. To me, a portfolio would provide the best information in regards to if a student mastered the material or not. I would have my students create their own portfolio. Inside this portfolio, they would place different evidence of learning they have accumulated during the unit and then discuss why they placed that evidence in there. This would show me that they truly mastered the material because they were able to pick and choose the evidence and then go into more depth and explain why they chose that one. ||
 * Richardson Cassandra || This chapter covered, in great detail, the three top assessment types; portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessment. Portfolios are likeable because of their ability to be flexible and accommodate each individual learner in their progress over the course of the given time period. They also allow the student to look back over the period and reflect on their work. Rubrics went incredibly in-depth, describing the different types of rubric; holistic and analytical. It suggested that each was more proficient in some areas than the other, depending on the task. Student self-assessment was the last section; the chapter gave multiple ways of achieving a student-assessment, from interactive notebooks to the ‘on a scale of one-to-ten’ Likert scale. Additional resources were also provided. || This chapter scared me a little bit, because all of these assessment types seemed equally as important to use in the classroom, and the section on rubrics was even moreso, because of the vastness of degrees of rubric to use. However, this section also included a blank grid to simulate setting up an original rubric. Because of the culmination of information on this particular assessment type, I will most likely refer back to this section, as evaluation in different forms, especially rubric format, is incredibly essential to teachers and their development of idea of effectiveness in the classroom. ||
 * Trundy Monique ||  ||
 * Webb Christopher || This chapter in FIAE begins by discussing three main types of assessment which it says are; Portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessment. Portfolios are good because they provide a view of the students work over time, like the photo album analogy earlier, rather than just looking at one piece of the students work. Students, teacher, and parents can all look at the students gathered works and the student can reflect upon how a particular piece was or provide rationales for why certain pieces were included. Rubrics are good it says because they focus the learning for student achievement. With rubrics teachers need to be clear and the quality of a rubric, as assessed by Stiggens, depends upon whether or not it has; content, clarity, practicality, technical quality, and fairness. The seven steps for fashioning a rubric are laid out quite clearly from pages 46-50 in the chapter as well. The chapter ends with discussing student self-assessment and what a good tool it is because it also helps students and teachers set individual goals for the student. || This chapter was very helpful because it laid out many of the important ways in which we need to assess our student’s progress and it gave many examples of how to do so. It laid out many of the things we can do in a step by step manner and made it easy to understand as well. Because of this chapter I will certainly have no problems creating a rubric and I will be able to better understand how to track my student’s mastery of a topic. I think that the student self-assessment portion was the best part of the chapter because I personally never had to do anything like that in high school so I would want my students to experience what they like and see if it as helpful s the book says it is. ||
 * West Simon ||  ||