Smagorinsky Chapter 4; Final Assessments

The academic final assessment is often regarded as every student's all-encompassing expression of the knowledge acquired during the school year.   Based on my reading of Smagorinsky's chapter, I was definitely persuaded that if you plan your assessment before teaching rather than after, you will reduce the likelihood of disjunctures between what your students learn and what you grade. Additionally, the author states that the ultimate goal is for the reader to learn how to produce a particular kind of text: a unit of instruction designed according to a set of principles. I do not have much experience creating a unit of instruction or a final assessment for students, so I found the author’s pages discussing overarching concepts and assessments, as well as assessing students for a whole course, to be particularly interesting and useful. I am certainly excited to learn more about creating an effective, and comprehensive culminating assessment, and I look forward to getting started on my first draft of next week’s assignment.  I think it is normal that I am feeling a bit nervous as well, but I am hoping that the recent experiences I do have with similar assignments will be helpful in completing this task.

I believe that the analytic essay fits with my teaching style best.  I identified with the author’s statement regarding the need to apply some kind of evaluative criteria to the essays, likely involving a complex set of factors: “the detail of the reviews of the protagonists’ experiences, the faithfulness to some kind of language standard, the insight of the synthesis at the end, and so on.”  (P. 103)  These forms of evaluative criteria are very similar to the standard rubric assigned to any hypothetical problem on a typical law school exam.  This past semester I was fortunate to have the opportunity to grade student’s written responses to what are commonly referred to as “hypos”—fictional scenarios involving potential legal issues, requiring the student to understand the complexity of legal concepts and the application of such concepts to a new set of factual circumstances.  Furthermore, because a notable amount of my time teaching is spent discussing how to craft this form of legal, analytic essay, I think this final assessment approach fits my teaching style best.  Just as the author explains how extended writing gives students the opportunity to develop their writing skills and synthesize textual knowledge, I consistently remind my current criminal procedure students that the repetition of the writing process is key to success on exam day, as well as the fact that practicing exam writing is one of the most common means by which to study for an analytical law school exam. Nevertheless, the final assessment for a secondary English class is not something I have drafted before, and I am interested to learn more about how to assess students on the projects in which they synthesize their knowledge for the whole course. 

Whitney Kouvaris