How effective are your assessments?

     

      In a short article by Grant Wiggins, he asks us "How can the verb, itself, determine the rigor?" We recently stopped using Bloom's Taxonomy in favor of Webb's DOK chart and this brief article begs the same question that made the change to Webb's model. Is your assessment doing the best job possible? How can we improve assessment?
      One of my instructors discussed this conundrum with us just a couple of weeks before the last semester ended and it's kind of stuck with me. It's been easy in my brief experience to rely on buzzwords for assessment, using Bloom's or Webb's models to find an easy way to put something on paper. While this is a great way to complete a lesson plan for an assignment in an education course, I don't believe it will the best approach for my students. So, back to the drawing board, looking for the best method of assessment and assuring that the assessment is effective.
     In short, I think good old fashioned effort and a little ingenuity are the recipe I'm looking for. Nearly gone are the days of lesson planning for a grade, slapping something together that merely fits the rubric and looks good on paper. Now, I need to focus on the long term effects of my lessons and assessments. Does this lesson maximize retention and comprehension for a majority of my students and does the assessment highlight more than simple recall. Will my students be better thinkers after this? Did critical thinking, creativity, and growth happen? That's what the assessment needs to show, not how many of the buzzwords in the chart I included in my lesson plan, even if it does look great on paper.