curriculum and assessment

why assess students' work at all?

Before proceeding any further it is salient to pose this fundamental question: Why assess students’ work? The obvious answer to this question is that it is crucial for English teachers to arrive at a judgement about their students’ language and literacy skills. Parents and the larger community expect this. However, it is also important to recognise that assessment serves other purposes than simply judging the abilities of individual students.

Below are some reflections by pre-service teachers about their experiences of assessing students’ writing while they were on teaching rounds. These excerpts are taken from larger pieces of writing, and so some explanatory detail is missing, but you should still be able to identify what these student teachers have each learnt by assessing their students’ work.

What kinds of challenges have these student teachers encountered when assessing their students’ work? How do they propose to meet these challenges? What do you think about the kinds of strategies they appear to be devising? What strategies would you suggest to meet these challenges? What have these student teachers learnt from assessing their students’ work?

Excerpt from Narelle Wood

‘Lisa was an extraordinary student, but certainly not in her literacy abilities … When I began marking Lisa’s work, I started by correcting the spelling mistakes, of which there were plenty, and where possible re-structuring her sentences to read fluidly. I realised that after the third line this was futile. I doubted whether Lisa would pay attention to the corrections and I certainly doubted whether she would learn anything from them….’

Excerpt from Maree Helm

‘First half of class goes well. I explain to students what I want them to do and brainstorm the main events of the story…. First student approaches my desk, draft in hand. I begin reading…. Hmmm. I know that this is not good writing. But how do I know this and what would make it good writing?

Excerpt from Caitlin Darcy

‘Despite my efforts appearing to make a difference to the students’ abilities to persuasively respond to text, I had mixed feelings about my experience. The students I worked with were fantastic, and my supervising teacher was quite supportive, but I felt limited by the topic I had to work with, and in a way by the expectations of my supervising teacher. It appeared that in a lot of cases, the teachers I worked with were teaching to the lowest ability level in the class, deciding that students would not be able to handle particular activities simply due to the way they had responded to previous tasks….

This secondary school, due to its multicultural nature, and the number of ESL students it contains, could be classified as a disadvantaged school. Many of the students come from a low socioeconomic background, and many of them do not complete their secondary schooling and go on to take a place at university…’



	"The teaching of Writing is an adventure. It is a journey into the unknown. As such it is an exploration – one that I intend to undertake with my students…." Matt Cullen Monash pre-service teacher (2005)