Jo Richards's List: Assessment

• This attempt to deny the subjectivity of human judgment is  objectionable in its own right.
•  But it’s  also harmful in a very practical sense.   In an important article published in 1999, Linda Mabry, now at  Washington State University, pointed out that rubrics “are designed to  function as scoring guidelines, but they also serve as arbiters of quality  and agents of control” over what is taught and valued.  Because “agreement among scorers is more  easily achieved with regard to such matters as spelling and organization,” these  are the characteristics that will likely find favor in a rubricized classroom.  Mabry cites research showing that  “compliance with the rubric tended to yield higher scores but produced ‘vacuous’  writing.”[3]
• Studies have shown that too much attention  to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial  thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the  face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability  and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.[7]
• Any form  of assessment that encourages students to keep asking, “How am I doing?” is  likely to change how they look at themselves and at what they’re learning,  usually for the worse.
• “stripped of the complexity that breathes  life into good writing.”
•  High scores  on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the  essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized  parts. 
• “we need to look to the piece of writing itself to suggest its own  evaluative criteria” – a truly radical and provocative suggestion.
• Thus, the  dilemma:  Either our instruction and  our assessment remain “out of synch” or the instruction gets worse in order  that students’ writing can be easily judged with the help of rubrics.
• In fact, when the how’s of  assessment preoccupy us, they tend to chase the why’s back into the  shadows.
• We have to reassess  the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it’s consistent  with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.

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