FIAE Chapter 4

Chapter 4 had a lot of examples of the three different types of assessments, portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessments.  Portfolios are good because they show progress and improvement over a period of time, but they can be difficult to maintain sometimes.  Rubrics, if structured well, can serve as good tools not only to guide student work, but to assess it as well.  With rubrics, it is important to remember that parallelism is necessary for students to understand what the rubric is asking for.  If the rubric isn’t clear than it is hard for the students to know what it is they were supposed to be doing, especially if the rubric was passed out at the beginning of the assignment.  Student self-assessments are a tricky method of assessing students, but if they are crafted appropriately then they can be really beneficial to both teachers and students.  You just have to keep an eye out for the students who will say that they did everything just the way it was supposed to be done instead of accurately assessing their work.  I would really like to use portfolios in my classroom, and will probably attempt a variation on them at the very least, and I know I will be using rubrics and self-assessments, so the examples for both from this chapter will be helpful.