Week 5: Making the Grade

Our topic for this week is “Assessment.”

I hope we will watch one of the Dan Pink videos posted on the Schedule this evening, but since we have guest speakers coming it may not happen. In any case, you will definitely want to familiarize yourself with Pink’s perspective before proceeding further. (Choose between the 11 minute animated version and the 18′ 30″ TED Talk). …..Then read “The Case Against Grades” (Alfie Kohn) and “Imagination First” (Liu and Noppe-Brandon). If you get to Lombardi’s piece on “The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning,” and /or Peter Elbow’s “Ranking, Evaluating and Liking,” that would be great.

You may post about whatever issue (or set of issues) raised in these materials resonates with you the most. Assessment is a complicated topic and we have complicated (and sometimes contradictory) ideas about how it works and how it should work (in general and in our particular field.) This should be an interesting session, and I am eager to read what you have to say.

For those interested in annotating via Hypothes.is, there’s a good public thread available for the Kohn reading and I’ve started one for Lombardi’s text here (for the GEDIVT) group.

Image: By State Library of Queensland, Australia [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons