Bruner Scheets RR 9

Making Assessment Meaningful 

In a well-designed project, students should be actively engaged in all parts. Even the assessment. By letting them know what success looks like in the project, they can be more accountable for their progress and the end product. Your assessment should not only be about the end product, but also the teamwork, creativity, and effort that they placed in the project.

By establishing anchors and grading what matters you make the assessment more valuable and attainable for students. Because all students start at different places in their knowledge of a project, they will most likely end at different places as well. By making anchors or checkpoints, you see how far each student is getting, based on their starting point and their pace of learning. By grading what matters (there is no positivity in taking a B+ project down to a C- because it was late, that's not grading their actual work) you give students a chance to show their best work to you and to the other people you invite in to your classroom.

At the end of the project, ask the students what they learned and to create something new from the project they just completed. By asking them what they learned, this will give you new insight on topics or ideas that you might not have thought of at the beginning of the project planning. Furthering the project even more, the students can decide to create something new to use in context of the project. For example, the students are doing weather monitoring in our project and becoming mini meteorologists. We are having them put on their own news crew station about the weather. Once this is over, our students can take it one step further, doing something fun, and create a song or a rap about all the things they have learned about weather. Or they could try to put on a weather segment in a different language (Australia for example) and use the language that might be seen there to describe the weather. This incorporates science and culture!

Students can also be encouraged to take their best work and enter it into a contest or submit it for publication. As a teacher, we need to be encouraging our students to take their work the extra step and help them see that they are worthwhile and do great work and are learning things that are relevant in the real world.