Ok, I'll start with the worst. In college, I had to write a 20-page paper for a class I was taking...British History to 1415. Our assignment, roughly (and I emphasize roughly!), was to read this book written in the 1970's about a contemporary English town (given a pseudonym), and then relate everything described in the book (in 1970-something) to everything we had learned about Britain to the year 1415. Yeah...not fun. Our professor was a guy who was literally 85 years old, had spent years living in the UK, and loved to go on and on endlessly about his experiences there (he also loved to wax nostalgic about the "good old days" before women were admitted to colleges)...yeah. He was, to say the least, special, and so was this assignment.

I decided that no matter what, I was going to do my darnedest to relate this obscure book to the things we had learned about British history. I spent days working on it, trying to recall every single detail I could possibly relate to the rather dull and long-winded book we had to read. I talked with classmates, and from everything I could gather, thought I was doing a pretty decent job with a very daunting, somewhat vague assignment. When I got it back a week after turning it in (you couldn't criticize the guy's efficiency!), I got a "B"...whaaat? How was this possible? I'd poured my heart and soul and time and sanity into that darn paper! On every single page of my paper he'd written comments like "you forgot about...." or "what about the....?" I was less than happy, needless to say. I feel that if he'd expect us to relate so much, the assignment would have had to have been longer. Also, he should have chosen something slightly less ridiculous and obscure for us to relate our knowledge of about 2000 years of British history to than some guy droning on and on about cranky village people circa-1973! I felt like he could have been much more clear about his expectations, and perhaps have even considered the appropriateness of assessing our knowledge of British history based on how well we could relate it to the mediocre descriptions of a British town in the 1970's!

Enough whining. Fortunately, I have had enough good experiences with assessment to off-set this one particularly unfortunate experience. One of the best assessments I can remember was getting to do a skit of a scene from Romeo and Juliet in my 9th grade English class. The assignment required that we choose a scene, memorize the lines, and perform it creatively, but we were graded based on how well we demonstrated, through our performance, our knowledge of what the dialog was about- whether or not we were able to capture the essence of what Shakespeare was trying to communicate in a particular scene. We then had a little award ceremony, and the best performances as voted upon by other students, won "Shakey" awards:) The whole experience was both fun, engaging, and challenging. Having to really think about how to deliver a line of Shakespearean verse, and how to interpret and respond to the lines of others, was really helpful for learning "Shakespeare speak."

 Like Abbey, I think having clarity about what is expected in an assigment is huge, and agree with her and Stiggens about the usefulness of rubrics for that purpose. Students should have a clear sense of what the goals of an assignment are and thus what they will be assessed on as a consequence of those stipulations. I don't think it's necessary to outline every single detail about why you will be doing something and how it will be important to your learning, but having guidance is important, and so is being able to see the "big picture" of a lesson.

I think the skit assessment I described was particularly effective not only because it was an engaging, creative, and active way to learn subject matter, but it actually forced us to think about how Shakespeare used language and what his words meant in a particular context (we had to figure that out in order to know how to deliver our lines!) The paper I did in college, on the other hand, was an interesting lesson idea and might have been better means of assessment had a the same lesson idea been applied to another more appropriate book, or if the instructor had made his very high expectations a bit more clear to all of us. As it was, I felt that I was grasping at straws trying to make connections which seemed unsubstantial to me, though apparently he wanted me to "reach" (in the negative sense of the word) even further!

Assessment is good when the goals of assessment are clear, but there is still room for the person being assessed to think creatively and create much of their own learning through the assessment process.