Chapter 9: Making Assessment Meaningful

      Students come from a variety of learning backgrounds, with varying degrees of experiences with learning and being taught. In order to delve into students prior understanding of a subject, the KWL (Asking students what they Know, what they Wonder about, and what they want to Learn) approach is very beneficial. This will establish an idea of where students are at in their learning careers and what they can gain from a project. From this point, anchors can be established based on student needs and potential progress in the project. This gives each student a pace that he or she can be comfortable with and still yield the benefits of project-based learning.
     When assessing a student's work and progress, some tool of measurement needs to be established, whether it's a guide for the whole class or based on an individual student (as in an instance of a student with an IEP). A very simple yet effective assessment is asking students: "what did you learn?" This can be asked in a formative assessment, or on a day-to-day basis in a student journal or whole-group discussion as class winds down for the day.
      When projects cross multiple subjects, multiple assessments and grading scales will inevitably need to be part of the overall rubric of the project. This is why a rubric, discussed with the class, is a great way to both assess students and help them assess themselves. Giving students the rubric at the beginning of a project gives them a tool to gauge their own progress, stay on-task, and help them become self sufficient (for example, finding answers to questions on their own). One detail to consider adding to a rubric is dates for assessments throughout the project; this way students have deadlines for certain portions of their projects, and are prepared to focus on what they're learning, what they have done, and what still remains to be completed.
     This chapter relates to our own project primarily because it reiterates the need for regular assessment, both of ourselves and of one another as peers and as students. Tools like formative assessment are becoming more mainstream that summative forms of assessing students, and it's important to practice these tools now so that we can implement them in our future classrooms, and practice being good models of self-sufficiency.