In the previous chapter and blog, I realized assessment was not just tests and that it was unfair to assess students just this way. There are many ways to assess a student (projects, tests, papers, observations, rubrics, etc.). In my personal opinion, I believe fairness in assessment is having guidelines readily available to the students. Before reading this chapter, (and having Dr. Luongo discuss rubrics in her teaching reading class), I was not a big fan of them but my feelings have since changed. I now realize that rubrics lay everything out on the line. A student cannot claim they did not know how they were being graded if you give the rubric with guidelines to them. I think this is a great way to show fairness when dealing with assessment.
It is very easy for a teacher to grade a student based on a rubric and have documentation showing what was expected. However, I still have realized there is still room to change a grade based on personal feelings, sterotypes, etc. After I was thinking about it, I seached the web(simply went to google and typed fairness in assessment) and found this site- http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~smx/PGCHE/fairness.html
In that site it discusses fairness in assessment and how ideally assessment should not discriminate. In the last paragraph of the site it talks about how a native English speaking student will be punished for grammatical errors when writing but a non-native English speaker will not because we are interested in the material the essay is based rather than their ability to write good English. This is where I ask you, is this fair?
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It is not fair, but can be true.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many biases in educational testing, it is scary. In fact, you can basically find a flaw in most assessment measures. However, as a professional educator, you can only try your best to be fair in all you do. Being aware of bias is the first step.
Great post!
I think it really is important to give guidlines to students so that they have an understanding of what is expected and how you look at and grade their work.
ReplyDeleteI do not think it is fair, but I could understand. Maybe students that have english as a second language should have a diffrent rubric and maybe even a diffrent class that will better help them understand.
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