Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

I found this article to be very useful in coming up with ideas for assessment when it comes to the English subject. In most other disciplines, assessment is done through written tests, either short answer or multiple choice. However, this type of assessment doesn't work quite as well with English in my opinion. Some of the alternatives the article talks about are evaluating journal/blog responses, and evaluating formal essay writing. The journal/blog responses are an interesting mode of assessment to me because they provide a constant method of assessment of student improvement as the course goes on rather than just at the end of a unit. The formal essay is useful because it gives students a chance to write more, which is always good, and it tests students' abilities in whatever area you are assessing at the same time. The article uses the example of asking students to infer a story's thematic meaning, and in their essays they have to think deeper than just writing a summary of the story. This forces the student to examine the text thoroughly and come up with their response based upon their own interpretation and then use the text to prove their interpretation. I also found the "reader based" descriptive responses to be an interesting concept. They provide the student with the reader's feelings about their writing, and using that they can infer what they need to work on or what they need to change in order to properly convey what they were trying to get across.