ABSTRACT
This chapter describes strategies for assessing students learning based on collecting student work to then evaluate the extent to which they have achieved certain goals or objectives. For employing formative assessment, teachers engage students in “feed-up” reflections (Fisher & Frey, 2014) regarding the goals or objectives operating within a course as well as determining students’ learning needs. In “feedback” assessment, teachers provide reader-based, descriptive feedback to foster students’ self-reflection on their responses leading to their revising their writing. Students can also reflect on their writing through engage in think-alouds with peers about specific aspects of their writing. Teachers also employ a range of digital tools to provide feedback, train peers to engage in peer feedback, and provide students with criteria to foster students’ self-reflection. For evaluating students’ work, teachers create rubrics to rate the quality of students’ work. For engaging in “feed-forward” assessments about achieving certain goals in a course, students could collect their work in e-portfolios. The chapter also addresses issues of validity and reliability associated with uses of standardized assessments employed to determine the quality of schools, districts, or states, for example, the issue of the lack of items in these assessments based on students’ multimodal/digital responses to literature.
