Blog Post #4

I really enjoyed the article "Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning," there were lots of things I thought were interesting to read, but there were some things I did not quite agree with. A few things I liked were how they found that students did better with being tested on the details of the novel rather than being told to write a paper. I think writing papers are effective because the students learn the writing process, the "do's" and "don't's" with grammar and punctuation and all that jazz. However, when students are writing papers, it seems that those things are what they are taught to pay more attention to rather than what the novel was actually about. So when it comes to how students should be evaluated after reading a novel, I think they should be given a test rather than have them write a paper. Maybe not every time, because there are many different possibilities with how you can go about writing a paper depending on what you want the students to write about, and you can make it fun for them because although writing should be taken seriously, it should be fun to write about a novel, because everyone has their own opinions and it's fun to be able to see the student's minds at work that way. Another thing I liked from this article was that our own definition of what it means to learn literature will influence how we assess our students and how they will, in turn, learn literature. It leaves things up in the air with how we want to do things, and I really liked that. With today's technology, I like how one of the ways to assess was by an online responses with blogs, chats or journals. Everyone loves being online in one way, shape, or form, so who wouldn't like for their homework to be that way? The only downside I see to this is that if a student is not actually passionate or interested in what they are writing about or responding to in their post, they could easily just talk to their peers about whatever they wrote, and they could base their responses off of someone else and "BS" their posts. There were so many good things in this article, although there were a few things I disagreed with, they were small, I thoroughly enjoyed this article.