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Assessing Student Performance: Exploring the Purpose and Limits of Testing By Grant P. Wiggins ( Jossey-Bass )
Release Date: 1999-09
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Product Description
Now in paperback! "The most comprehensive and exhaustive treatise available on the imperative to change the ways we test and assess student performance...it will become a major reference work for supporters of student-centered assessment." --Educational Leadership "A 'must' book for the on-going debate on American school reform." --Theodore R. Sizer, chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools What is assessment and how does testing differ from it? Why are performance tests, by themselves, not an adequate system of student assessment? How might we better "test our tests" beyond current technical standards? And why won't increased national testing offer the accountability of schools we so sorely need? In Assessing Student Performance, Grant P. Wiggins explores these questions and clarifies the limits of testing in an assessment system. He analyzes problematic practices in test design and formats that prevent students from explaining their answers. By showing us that assessment is more than testing and intellectual performance is more than right answers, Wiggins leads us to new systems of assessment that more closely examine students' habits of mind and provide teachers and policy makers with more useful and credible feedback.
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 Tremendously Thought-Provoking... ( gradstudentbooks )
(also a teacher...) This book is a provocative critique of the way that testing and assessment are currently handled in schools. Wiggins excels at teasing out the inherent, often invisible, contradictions between our stated goals as educators and what it is that we're really teaching and reinforcing in the way we go about testing. This book is best at provoking the reader to think more carefully about the place of assessment in the curriculum; for me, it's made me rethink how I plan my tests, what I could do differently to encourage students to learn and to allow them to display their strengths, and to question "the system" from a more informed standpoint. This is a book of advocacy, however, and as such it has flaws. Wiggins is better at attacking what we have now than suggesting how it might be changed *considering the conditions under which most of us teach.* He places the entire burden on teachers (he is extremely disparaging of teachers who talk about students as responsible for some part of their education; it's up to the teacher to motivate them) and his focus on constant reiteration fails to consider the top-performing students, I think, who actually do well with current assessments. You don't have to buy the whole package, however, to find new concepts, techniques and perspectives in this book that will provoke you to rethink some of the aspects of testing most of us take for granted, while giving you inspiration for applying some of these new ideas in the classroom in practical ways.
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 A lot of opinions and generalizations
I had higher hopes for this book. The author fairly eloquently advances a bunch of opinions, but (1) how about backing it up with research about what testing methodologies "work" or what the impact of these methodologies are and (2) how about some sense of how a teacher could actually implement these methodologies that are more "free-form"? His examples of a Harvard University exam are nice, but perhaps a little daunting.
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Addiction
