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Abstract (Kim)
Chapter four of Fair Isn’t Always Equal focuses on using thee different types of assessments in the classroom: portfolios, rubrics, and self-assessments. Portfolios are useful for taking a comprehensive look at a student’s progress because they allow multiple pieces of evidences to be collected in one location. Rubrics are good for showing students what you expect from them before their product is turned in, as well as showing them how you evaluated their work. Self-assessments help students to make sure that they included everything they need in their product. Each type of assessment not only allows the teacher to evaluate the student, but also the student can evaluate his or her learning as well. Assessing students is important to understand what concepts, skills, and ideas students are acquiring through the lessons you are teaching, and these three methods are excellent ways to assess students. Having students assess their own works gives the teacher an idea of how the students feel they are doing. Teachers can then use these assessments to modify and adapt their teaching strategies to assist any students who are not meeting the understandings that the teacher created.

Synthesis
The common consensus is that these methods of assessment are necessary for an effective classroom. [|Portfolios] were popular because they can be used to show how students are making progress throughout a unit, a year, or even their entire high school career. The ability to organize them was also a popular feature and reason for using portfolios. [|Rubrics] also had a popular response because they show the teacher's expectations and it allows teachers to give feedback to the students. The important part of rubrics is making sure that they explain the requirements clearly, so that students will not have any problems interpreting the requirements. Personal experience with rubrics makes it easier for us to understand the importance of using them in our own classrooms. The same can be said for self-assessments, which most of us have experienced using in at least one class. It seems that these three types of assessments will find their way into each of our classrooms in some format.

**Brittany**
I think there should be a rather close tie in-between student self-assessment and teacher feedback. If students are just looking at a rubric and rating how well they did, than they may not be getting an accurate picture of how well or poorly they have done on an assignment. However, if a student can assess their own work and then have the teacher assess it, the student then has some feedback that they can think on and improve with. The real point here is that both feedback and self-assessment are good to have but that they work better together. Some students will need that push from the teacher that tells them they can do better and that better is expected from them while other students will see the high goal and push themselves to do the best that they can. Just a thought to go with this: students are like the English language; the only true rule that exists is that there is an exception to every rule.

Seth
After being “in the field” for the first time I realize that grading students is a lot harder than it seems; there’s not just a right and wrong answer. While creating anchor projects for the humanities class I team teach with Jen we had to come up with a rubric to grade said anchors. Let me tell you, it was hard. I can’t even begin to explain the difficulty but luckily one of our mentors provided examples for us by letting us look at old rubrics. Want to be that he’s a visual learner? But when creating a rubric it would really help to look at the points brought up in the book. “Does the rubric account for everything we want to assess… After completing one, what tips would we give first-time rubric creators?” (45). I really wish I had looked at this before diving into a rubric headfirst without any inkling of what to put into it…

Casey
In chapter four of Fair Isn't Always Equal Wormeli explains the three important types of assessment. I found this chapter very useful, even though I had already had background knowledge of these types of assessment. The first type of assessment was portfolios. I aggree with Wormeli when he states "portfolios can be as simple as a folder of collected works for one year or as complex as multi-year, selected and analyzed works from different areas of a student's life." I think that portfolios are a great, organized way to show your best work from the past. For example, I had research projects assigned in high school, and once we were done, some teachers suggested that we compile our research, and the research paper into an organized portfolio so we can later to refer back to this work of ours. The second type of assessment was rubrics. As a student I have always loved rubrics. I always found it so much easier to go about completing an assignment when I have a rubric to follow. Lastly was student self-assessments. I enjoyed self-assessing myself in high school on papers because it allowed for me to be honest to myself on how I completed my work. As a future educator I hope to use these types of assessments in my classroom.

Leighlan Martin
Portfolios are not just for art classes. They can provide valuable information on how a student has progressed in any subject. They can also help the teacher spot patters in a student’s work, which helps them know what to focus on. Rubrics are also powerful tools because with them students know what is expected and can keep themselves on track. Rubrics also have 2 styles, holistic and analytical. Rubrics can also turn into effective self assessment if the students go through and grade themselves. If one is having trouble knowing what they need to do to do well on a project that does not have a rubric they could ask what the teacher expects and build one from that. Portfolios don’t have to be only for the teacher to assign and look at either. One can keep track of one’s own work in a class, or subject, and go back to it to see what changes. A port folio might also help the student pinpoint how different factors like the time of month or how much they slept the night before affect their work because it’s all there, dated, and in order.

Brody
What do portfolios, rubrics, and self-assessments have in common? These three tools are effective assessments in a differentiated classroom. As Wormeli suggests, portfolios have the distinct ability to show student growth over a period of time. Thus, more accurate inferences can be made and the following decisions are more successful. Another important assessment tool, rubrics, help the student understand the question of the second chapter: what is mastery? Wormeli provided a couple interesting tips to keep in mind when designing rubrics. First, it’s integral to allow students to design a rubric once in a while as the important understandings will be at the front of their minds when completing the classwork. Second, change the focus to full mastery so students focus on that requirement instead of aiming for the “good” or “satisfactory” level. It’s the educator’s job to subtly push students toward the mastery level without seeming too pushy as the students might rebel or give up as they don’t believe in their ability to produce high level work. Yet another assessment tool I plan to use in my classroom is the student self-assessment. Self-checking, reflection, and analyzing are all vital aspects for the student to understand what they excel at, what they need growth in, and how they’re going to set up an action plan to turn the weaknesses into strengths. I believe these assessments would have an immense impact on my classroom as students would feel more prepared to put in the hard work that these project-like assessments require instead of cramming boundless information for a standardized test.

Max
In this chapter, the book discusses different assessments. They go over portfolios, rubrics and self assessments. In high schools today I think the most popular are self assessments. They are the best way of showing understanding. I personally really enjoy portfolios. I’ve always been really organized so when a teacher wants a portfolio of all the work from the year it feels like a free grade to me. I think when I am a teacher I will assign that my kids keep a portfolio because it will just benefit them if they keep their things neat all year. I noticed in my practicum class that no one even has binders or notebooks. They just show up to class with a laptop and all their homework is crammed into the front pocket of the laptop case. If I force them to keep a binder, at least they will have somewhere to take notes so they can remember material. I don’t know how these students plan on remembering anything without doing so.

Lily
Chapter four once again brings up different assessment ideas, the differences is this chapter talks about examples of specific assessments versus types of assessments. The three main examples are portfolios, rubrics and student self-assessment. Portfolios allow each teacher to collect and look over the students work, this makes it easier to see what type of learner the student is because you can see all the work put together and the similarities the student does. The rubric provides different levels of tasks and assess how well the student has met the task. The last example is the student’s self-assessment and this offers feedback that is so helpful in making it easier not to make the same mistake twice.

Mike
This chapter talks about portfolios, rubrics, and self-assessments as ways of grading. The most important thing I believe is that teachers need to create a rubric that details clearly the project, directions, and your expectations. When it comes to portfolios, I feel they are very helpful in not only storing any data or work that you have been working on but also it teaches students taking responsibility of a history of your research. Self-assessments are simple because it is a great communication tool for a teacher and student to go over what they did well and what they need work on. As a future teacher, these tools I feel will be valuable for me to not only progress a student's growth throughout the year, but it will also be great to use these tools as a way of communication between my students and I where we can reflect back together on their work.

Kim
Chapter 4 had a lot of examples of the three different types of assessments, portfolios, rubrics, and student self-assessments. Portfolios are good because they show progress and improvement over a period of time, but they can be difficult to maintain sometimes. Rubrics, if structured well, can serve as good tools not only to guide student work, but to assess it as well. With rubrics, it is important to remember that parallelism is necessary for students to understand what the rubric is asking for. If the rubric isn’t clear than it is hard for the students to know what it is they were supposed to be doing, especially if the rubric was passed out at the beginning of the assignment. Student self-assessments are a tricky method of assessing students, but if they are crafted appropriately then they can be really beneficial to both teachers and students. You just have to keep an eye out for the students who will say that they did everything just the way it was supposed to be done instead of accurately assessing their work. I would really like to use portfolios in my classroom, and will probably attempt a variation on them at the very least, and I know I will be using rubrics and self-assessments, so the examples for both from this chapter will be helpful.

Jen
===It's really important that you present some essential points or questions that students should be focusing on because it helps students get a better understanding of what is up and coming and it helps them focus their learning more efficiently. Assessing students with rubrics are important and giving them the expectations ahead of time is critical because as they are producing whatever product or assignment they are doing they are able to have a layout of exactly what is expected from them. I feel like these expectations are what really put things into perspective for students and this may even allow them to answer the most common question "what is the purpose of this?"I feel like both holistic and analytical rubrics are beneficial depending on what your motives are in terms of feedback but in terms of students gaining a significant understanding of how they did it's important to focus on the analytical feedback. In high school I really feel that feedback was the biggest thing that teacher's needed to work on, they needed to give it back in a timely manner and they needed to give more detail on the feedback. Some teachers did really well with this but others not so much and it's the feedback that was really important to me as a student in order for me to grow.

Jasmyn
There are three important types of assessments described in this chapter, portfolios, rubrics and student self-assessment. These types of assessments can all show the understanding of a particular subject or assignment. A teacher can provide feedback to all of these assessments that will help the student aid in further development in a subject. In this chapter //Wormeli// explains that the assessments should be graded for form, content and explanations of knowledge of subjects. I have had experience with all three of the assessments and I think that self-assessment would be the easiest place for the teacher to identify intelligences and provide a lesson that best suits the student. The teacher can also offer feedback and the student can use that feedback to reach goals that they have yet to complete. When doing a self-assessment we, as students, can provide our likes and dislikes our background knowledge and lists the things that we want to learn about.

Kaitlyn Bartlett
In chapter 4 of Fair Isn't Always Equal, you get a lot of good ideas on three different types of assessments. The one the idea that impacted me in this chapter are different types of self assessments. In high school and middle school for that matter, I have always been given a slip of paper and either rated myself from 1 to 5, or I have been given the same rubric that my teacher was grading me on and just evaluated myself. On the self assessment list in that chapter, the biggest standout to me was that I never would have thought of having kids recite what they're presenting in front of a mirror. I don't know how well you could grade that, but I feel that it could be a powerful tool to help some kids. Although, after reading the new types of student self assessments I feel that in my classroom the strongest student self evaluation rubric would be a checklist/ rating system for them to grade themselves. If students have to go back and really look over what they've done, they will notice what they have or do not have from my rubric; if they don't catch something, my feedback on the scoring rubric will help to point out what they might have looked over.