This is a page for thoughts on assessment. Generally, my view of assessment fits into the backward-planning model. That is, assessments should be planned as opportunities to gather evidence that students have achieved the desired knowledge and skills. Then, lessons should be planned such that students will succeed in the assessment. The assessment should then provide formative data for the next set of lessons. While this might seem like an obvious starting point, it actually has the potential to be disruptive of the status quo. For example:

• It doesn't always make sense to express results as percent scores. A percentage might be a meaningful measure when there are many discrete facts and we want to know how many of them a student can recall, but it is not a very meaningful way to express performance of a skill. A single percentage is even less appropriate for projects or papers where there are several dimensions of skills being assessed.
• Penalties for tardiness distort assessment data. When a student loses 20% on a paper for turning it in two days late, scores on the paper no longer reflect levels of content mastery. Perhaps timeliness of submission should be a separate grade.
• The purpose of assessments must be explicit and aligned with the learning targets and what has been taught. Giving a grade for creativity doesn't make sense to me unless creativity has been explicitly taught.

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Concurrent with an increased focus on audience and genre during my first unit next year, I'd like to establish genre baselines for work submission. Work not meeting these baselines will not be accepted as on-time.