Fairness in Assessment

I'm starting to stress about just how broad these post topics are! There are so many ways you can respond to discussing what's fair when it comes to assessing students. Clearly, after our first post, we all understand that assessing a student IS necessary, but that the valid ways of doing it are diverse (much to the old school teachers disbelief). Personally, I think a big factor in being fair while assessing students is having guidelines. Prior to Dr. Luongo's discussions (and really cool rubric websites -which I totally passed onto to all teachers I know!) I always thought rubrics were just a waste. I was more of a "just give me my grade and as long as it's an A, I really don't care." But as a future teacher, I realize now that, in plain English, we need to cover our butts! By creating these rubrics, students have a flat out description of what is expected. There really are no ifs, ands or buts. It comes down to - did the student do what the teacher expected? A rubric is a great way to show fairness when it comes to assessment.

On a totally different note, I started thinking about students on different levels of learning in the same classroom. As much as we teachers like to think that our classes will always be on the same level, reality is, it's not going to happen. There's going to be that one outstanding student and there's going to be that student who drags behind everyone else. So how on earth are we supposed to assess students who vary so greatly? I know we don't like to admit it, but we WILL categorize students. Favorites, bullies, slackers, overachievers- we'll have them all. I guess the only thing that will help fairly assess these students is to get to know them one at a time and getting a good grasp at their strong and weak points and working with them. The good thing about it is that a teacher is never alone. There's always someone else to help out! By working with students and getting them to that level, assessing a student fairly will become just a little bit easier.