Rebecca McKay Senior Literacy Fellow, Cornerstone

 

Excerpt from The Big Box, Toni Morrison with Slade Morrison: ... Patty used to live with a two-way door in a little white house near us. But she had too much fun in school all day and made the grownups nervous. ... So the teachers who loved her had a meeting one-day to try to find a cure. They thought and talked and thought some more till finally they were sure. "Oh, Patty, they said, "you're an awfully sweet girl with a lot of potential inside you. "but you have to know how far

Assessment is the hot topic even in children's picture books such as The Big Box by Toni Morrison. I am convinced that children's picture books are really written for adults. This one is especially poignant as it depicts possibilities when children do not fit the expectations of adults...they are labeled, separated from others, and dished up a remedy that often impedes their freedom to learn and really just be children!

In preparation for writing this introductory assessment article, I have read extensively. It seems as though everything I pick up including the local newspaper has a twist that points toward assessment! Sunday's local paper was entitled, NCLB. The article's subtitle bemoaned the labeling of one area school as failing because of high stakes testing and assessment.

For many years, I had the honor of teaching first-grade. Quite often, the majority of the children would be sent to my class labeled as strugglers. Contrary to the negatives that are in the media about testing and assessment, I found that my teacher-designed assessments were effective in moving the children quickly past their old labels. This contradiction spurred my desire to explain fully and support what I had experienced by defining and naming the type of assessment that I found so useful. I was on a mission!

Reading a Peter Johnston text, Knowing literacy: Constructive literacy assessment, I discovered a reference to assessment terminology dating to Latin derivations. Assessment as a term has its origins in the Latin word testa meaning " a piece of burned clay or skull." The word test gradually became more common and described a process for testing metals by burning them in a clay skull-shaped container. A fifth-grader I interviewed recently gave a similar description! Amazingly, accurate in his interpretation, this wiry fifth grader spouted out his feelings about standardized testing, "Aw, it's just a way to make us look dumb. I'm bad you know. I'm not very good at school and reading!" That comment put a lump in my throat!

Interviewing students really provides a startling and heart wrenching view of the massive standardized testing that our children endure in the name of teacher accountability. These tests, summative in nature, seem to do little to help teachers or the children they serve to improve student learning or instructional practice. On the other hand, recently I observed second-grade students clamoring to sit alongside Dianne Nicholson, a Stemley teacher. They wanted to show off their reading.

As Dianne marked in a clever little book emblazoned with a student's name, the small boy leaned over and whispered as he rubbed the book like a magic lamp, "I love this...I'm getting better...right?" She smiled as she placed a sticky note on the page that recorded his oral reading fluency and her comment: "Keep practicing. Your retell was excellent. Work on your sequencing with a partner. I'll read with you again tomorrow!" It was clear that Dianne loved this process of taking a running record as much as the small boy had loved sitting alongside her!

This second-grade version of formative assessment actually impacts student learning and the practice of teaching. This scene truly fits the word assessment as a derivative of the Latin term, assidere, meaning to sit alongside. Dianne was accurately evaluating her student's reading, making suggestions, and forming her next teaching moves. He knew and she knew how they both could become better. Isn't this what we should really be striving toward in our schools? This seems fitting since the word evaluation has the root word value and the prefix 'e' to build its meaning: from strength, worth, or value.

In summary, assessment that makes a positive difference refers to all those actions undertaken by teachers—and by their students in assessing themselves. These activities supply a wealth of information to be used as feedback to modify, change, and improve teaching and learning. Such assessment thus moves into another realm becoming a dynamic living part of teaching that is often referred to as formative assessment. In this type of assessment, evidence gathered is actually used to adapt teaching to meet student needs (Black and Wiliam, 1998). This was the definition I needed to name what I had experienced in my years as a first-grade teacher as well as what I observed in Dianne's classroom. Her use of formative assessment as an evaluation tool has certainly painted a vivid, unforgettable picture in my mind of what happens when teachers pull alongside a child to look for strengths, to value, and to share the worth of a child's best efforts!

 

REFERENCES

Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment [online] http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/kbla9810.htm.

Crafton, L. K. (1996). Narrative writing: Toward a "real kid" report card. Standards in practice: Grades K-2. Urbana: IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Hewitt, G. (1995). A portfolio primer: Teaching, collecting, and assessing student writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Johnston, P. H. (1997). Knowing literacy: Constructive literacy assessment. York, MN: Stenhouse.

For further reading, a bibliography taken from the International Reading Association's website: [http://www.reading.org/]

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