Everyone's had the experience: You did the homework, perhaps to read a few chapters in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations or some other worthy classic, and you even took a few notes. You come to class feeling pretty confident that you understood the plot and knew the characters.
The teacher announces a pop quiz. You take out your pencil and look at the questions. Your mind races. Was this really in the chapters assigned for today? The level of detail the teacher expects you to recall seems absurd, and you know you'll be lucky to get 60% correct. You hand in your paper feeling defeated.
The Trouble with "Objective" Reading Check Quizzes
When the quizzes come back and you see that indeed 60% was optimistic, you start to conclude that it would be easier not to try, not to do the homework. After all, you just tried and failed. You think you might not bother with the homework tonight. Then you see the score on the paper of the kid next to you. 95%. What gives? He sees you looking, winks, and says, "Spark Notes."
High school English teachers see scenarios like this unfold all the time. A student really tries but struggles nonetheless on reading quizzes. After a while the student gives up, sometimes turning to some type of book notes rather than reading the original text, but often tuning out all together.
Maybe the teacher decides to give open note quizzes. Theoretically that will reward students for the work they've done. Except as she circulates around the room during a test, she finds that students have been printing out notes from websites instead of taking their own notes, or, even though they are allowed to use notes, they haven't bothered, saying they did read but they don't know how to take notes on a novel, even though the teacher has been addressing that very topic all year.
It sounds like a hopeless situation. The teacher must assess students and make sure they do their work, but the nature of her assessments sends the message to the students that they aren't smart enough to read and understand literature, so they should either give up or seek answers outside the text.
As desperate as the scenario sounds, there is a solution: Stop trying to make students prove they've done the reading. Instead start asking why students are required to study literature and what outcomes can be achieved through the study of literature.
Setting Students Up for Success
The study of literature is not a quest for trivial answers. When students graduate and move on to the next stage in their lives, no one will care if they know who Trabb's boy was in Great Expectations. The task of the teacher is to try to find ways to motivate students to read, not to send them running to the internet for answers.
Objective assessments are convenient, but they reveal little about a students' actual ability level. Most teachers would probably concede that such assessments are a sort of lesser evil, a way to see if students are "getting" the material without placing a huge burden of grading on teachers who often have more than the optimum number of students.
The difficulty is finding alternative assessments that help teachers pursue the goals of their courses but that do not result in an unmanageable paper load. It takes some creativity to develop such assessments, but being able to set students up for success makes it worth the effort.
Some Suggestions for Alternative Assessments
- Structured discussions in which students earn points for participation. You can keep track of participation for one class or even an entire unit. Establish a reasonable expectation for the number of times a student should participate given the size and duration of the class. For instance, five meaningful contributions over the course of two class periods might earn an A. The student who fails to participate, does take notes, and does not disrupt those around him might only earn a C-. Make clear to students how you are grading their participation and be consistent.
- One paragraph reader-responses in which students offer a specific criticism of or praise for the previous night's reading. Such responses require little comment from the teacher so they can be read quickly. They allow students to show what they do know, instead of feeling bad about what they can't remember.
- Old Fashioned Commonplace Notes: Using an examination book (blue book), students can keep a log of their reading in a particular unit. It works best if the teacher keeps the examination books in the classroom and provides class time for entries. For each entry, students record the date and the title and author of the work. Then students copy out verbatim a short passage from the reading, noting the page number, and write a brief explanation of why they chose the passage. Students may chose to connect to the reading personally or to write a more analytic reason for their choice.
