I'm really interested in looking at assessments in the way that they affect student's future work. Even though I was an honor student in high-school and ultimately got good grades, I had assignments that I didn't do well on. Unfortunately, this was often a set back for me. Even if I had been on a "winning streak", one bad grade would kill my mojo and I would often stop trying. Not until my parents caught me slacking or a bad grade report came out did I get my act together and remember that I was fully capable of achieving top marks.
I like the suggestion from the article that assessments are at least as valuable to students as they are to adults. I completely agree. Students need to know when they can improve and how. I don't believe that they should be baby-ed, but I think it is vitally important for students to hear that they can recover from a bad assignment and encouraged to do so. It's so easy for kids to write themselves off as unable, when really they just need to try something different. In history, I feel that a lot of my most official assessments will be tests and papers. This can include the idea from the article that suggests allowing students to assess an good and bad example of the final product of an assessment, so that they can see how to produce good work. plan to give as much feedback as I can, meaning asking students to think about topics in a different way or from a different point of view. It's hard to know how this all will work, but a lot of what I've learned in this class is the importance of feedback to students, so I know I'm going to spend as much time as it takes to develop an effective system.
purrrrrra.
The one thing that really stuck out to me in your post was the baby-ed comment. I think you can really run the risk of being seen as a teacher who is just going to let you re-do it even if you do bad. This might not motivate your students to work as hard as they should on the first product. Although I do completely believe in assessment based learning I think you have to be careful in how you go about it. Some options you could chose is only letting them earn back half credit or making them go through and explain to you why they got it wrong and how they could fix a certain problem instead of just letting them change answers. Just something I thought about as I was reading your post.
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