Quotes I like...

...about writing assessment from the NCTE

Quality assessment is a process of inquiry.

It is not enough for assessment to serve the well-being of students “on average”; we must aim for assessment to serve, not harm, each and every student.

First and foremost, assessment must encourage students to become engaged in literacy learning, to reflect on their own reading and writing in productive ways, and to set respective literacy goals.

Thus, assessment should emphasize what students can do rather than what they cannot do.

Information about students’ confusions, counterproductive strategies, and limitations, too, can help students and teachers reflect on and learn about students’ reading and writing, as long as it is provided in the context of clear descriptions of what they can do.

Unless teachers can recognize the significance of aspects of a student’s performance—a particular kind of error or behavior, for example—they will be unable to adjust instruction accordingly. They must know what signs to attend to in children’s literate behavior. This requires a deep knowledge of the skills and processes of reading and writing and a sound understanding of their own literacy practices. Therefore, it is important that teachers themselves be readers and writers who understand these processes from the inside out.

Because of the need for this level of expertise and because the quality of formative assessment has a strong effect on the quality of instruction, improving teachers’ assessment expertise requires ongoing professional development, coaching, and access to professional learning communities. Nurturing such communities must be a priority for improving assessment.

In reality, our understanding of language asserts that it is not possible to construct an unbiased test of literacy.

A teacher who knows a great deal about the range of techniques readers and writers use will be able to provide students and other audiences with specific, focused feedback about learning. Indeed, students learn things about themselves and about literacy from teachers’ feedback that no standardized test can supply

We must depend less on one-shot assessment practices and place more value on assessments of ongoing classroom performance, assuming that classroom curricula develop the full complexity of literate learning.

Given the complexity of the tasks involved, reducing reading and writing performance to a letter or number grade is unacceptable.