Tovani Chapter 8

I found this chapter to be somewhat interesting.  Initially the chapter discusses what the meaning of assessment is and then the chapter discusses methods for gaining student engagement, trust, and feedback.

The discussion about assessment is a topic that I think needs to be discussed more often.  I noticed that the author assigned grades to about everything, which may be necessary to obtain student work, but I tend to think that many assessments should not be graded and should just be used as feedback.  The grading should be used when a trend begins to form with students not turning in their work.  In many cases, the tone from the beginning of the year will establish how students learn.

I was fairly skeptical of the calendar method.  As I read the chapter I kept thinking to myself of the time burden that method would present and the potential problems with providing feedback in a timely manner.  I was glad that at the end of the section, those concerns were brought up.  I'm still not very sure if the calendar method would work well; I have a difficult time envisioning how it would help science literacy.  It may be a good way to encourage engagement but I'm not sure about how helpful it is for content.

I believe that I would provide a mix of assessments.  Some of the assessments would not be collected, some assessments would only have spot checks, some would only have specific questions cheycked, and other assignments would have everything graded.  The one aspect of grading that is not mentioned but should be established is that if a student does something correct then you should give them points.  For example, if the student does a math problem and it requires 4 steps then the student should get points for reach step.  This would make it so a student could do part of the problem incorrectly, but still receive the majority of the points.  The one part to the chapter that I would consider was the reading response logs because it aided the students in developing summarizing skills.