Reading Reflection #5

The first thing I wanted to pull from this chapter was the quote on page 96, "When the cook tastes the soup, that's formative. When the guests taste the soup, that's summative." This was very interesting to me and really outline the meanings of each type of assessment. A different way to look at assessment was "Authentic Assessment," I did not actually understand what Darling-Hammond meant by this? I appreciated that the chapter had a lot of information and ideas to offer to future teachers. It's important to keep our assessment creative and exciting! There are more ways to assess than just a written exam. (That stresses us all out) The section on Selecting Project Assignments and Performance Tasks was very important because it game a lot of examples of project based learning and gave pointers on how to keep the project on task and educational. But also have that fun and exciting side to learning! Jerome Burg had his students create a comic book out of scenes, quotes and visual symbols from Steinbeck's novel, Of Mice and Men. He let them take complete control of the characters and elements of the book. This allowed them to understand the content of the book rather than just facts about what they had read. Burg decided to do this rather than take the test that was sent with the book, which was multiple choice and only assessed them on facts. They would not actually need to understand the novel.