What are the most comprehensive methods for assessing students in my content area?

All operations need a way to measure their output to know if they are reaching their goals, and schools are no different.  The goal of a school is to make sure students are acquiring knowledge, and this presents a bit of a challenge to measure the school's success in doing this.  Right now, our nation uses high-stakes testing to do this.  But is this the best way?

There are many concerns with high-stakes testing: students have different learning styles that do not allow them to express their knowledge on a test like that, it restricts classroom exploration from the required curriculum  and many students do poorly on tests because they are not literate to the point where they can comprehend the test.

An alternative to this high-stakes testing is through authentic assessment, which is a highly personal strategy where the teacher decides whether or not the student is meeting a certain set of standards.  This is a good approach because a teacher is already adapting everything in their classroom to meet the unique needs of students, so who better to know how best to assess a student's learning?

As a future English teacher, it was important to me to know how to assess students' learning in ways other than a test; multiple choice tests and the like cannot capture the complexities of something as dense as a novel.  After going through chapter four of Content Area Reading, I found a few strategies I really liked.

The first one I really liked was the portfolio assessment.  Students gather work from throughout the class and present it in a portfolio to show his or her unique talents and weaknesses, the progression of skill level from the start of the term to the end, and allows them to display a wide variety of trials not just a one shot hit-or-miss like a test.  This also gives them a sense of accomplishment in their work, and the teacher gets to see what they are proud of.

I also liked the checklists and interviews methods.  I think it would be very helpful for a student to sit down with a teacher and conference about how their writing is going, their different strengths and weaknesses, and their learning goals.  A formal self-assessment with different categories for them to reflect on is also a good way to help them self-monitor and lead them in the right direction towards what they should be achieving.