English 1006
Prompt #33
7 November 2013

Assessment, reflection, further steps

Assessment continued

As I've said often, part of my aim as a teacher is to help students become more confident and competent at assessing their own work, at knowing whether or not they've done a good job at something. Obviously, in a situation like a class, it's pretty difficult to be sure other than by comparison with the work of others, because the job you're assessing has only its social context as a way to evaluate it: if you build a chair, and someone sits on it and it collapses, practical reality tells you that obviously you've done a bad job -- but if you write a report and you can't tell whether it was informative because no one responds, it's much harder; if you don't know what other examples of the same sort of work might look like, you don't really have much of a basis for assessment. That's part of the reason so much of the writing in my classes is "public" -- either accessible to everyone else in the class, or sometimes accessible to audiences beyond the class.

Of course, it's never really the case that your own self-evaluation is the final word, and often we're wrong (as with most things, we get better as we get more experienced). The same applies to the preliminary learning reflections most people in the course have just written. You may or may not have read the reflections by other people in the class; I urge you to do so. Read at least a dozen. There are lots of reasons to do this; one is that others may have described kinds of learning that you'd never thought of; another is to get a sense of what the range of the documents is, and where yours might fit in. It's important to remember that it's quite possible for all of them to be excellent (or for none of them to be); that's a larger judgement, and one that can be better made by someone with lots of experience of such documents (like me, for example). To help you understand that, I've posted a description of how I read learning reflections; it's here. It will probably help to read this before you read other people's reflections, and before you read your own.

Evaluation

 Once you've engaged in this reflection and evaluation process, you should be able to come to a fairly clear idea of how your work compares to others, and to my criteria as I've tried to explain them. If you'd like me to offer my evaluation of your midterm learning reflection, here's what you need to do: email me with a short analysis (make the subject line "my learning reflection") of what you think are the strongest pieces of evidence of learning in your reflection, and a grade, or range of grades, that you think it would be worth. Tell me how you might improve it on the basis of your reading of the reflections of other and of my explanation of how I read them. I'll respond with my own reading and evaluation. We'll also set up a time to meet and talk about it (and whatever else you might want to discuss). If you do this, email me before next Monday so we can arrange a time.

Where you can talk about how the course is working

There's a strong tendency for examinations of what people have learned to become examinations of the situation they're learning in (or not). That's why I've said I cross out statements about the course itself when I read learning reflections -- it's not that I'm not interested, it's that that's not helpful in evaluating what's been learned.  It is valuable for other things, and that's why there is now a survey form up which will allow you, anonymously, to make comments or suggestions on, or ask questions about, the conduct of the course so far. One reason for doing this is to make as clear a distinction as I can between what goes into a learning reflection and what goes into a course evaluation; another is to give me a clearer idea of what people think is working and what's not. What will happen to all the responses to this survey is that I'll put them up on the Web site, with my comments where it seems useful, so that everyone in the course can compare their experience and views with those of others.

This form will only be available through the weekend (through Sunday night) because it's the kind of thing that spammers find. So if you're going to participate, do it before then.
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