Assessing Student Performance: Exploring the Purpose and Limits of Testing

(also a teacher...) This book is a provocative critique of the way that testing and assessment are currently handled in schools. Wiggins excels at teasing out the inherent, often invisible, contradictions between our stated goals as educators and what it is that we're really teaching and reinforcing in the way we go about testing. This book is best at provoking the reader to think more carefully about the place of assessment in the curriculum; for me, it's made me rethink how I plan my tests, what I could do differently to encourage students to learn and to allow them to display their strengths, and to question "the system" from a more informed standpoint. This is a book of advocacy, however, and as such it has flaws. Wiggins is better at attacking what we have now than suggesting how it might be changed *considering the conditions under which most of us teach.* He places the entire burden on teachers (he is extremely disparaging of teachers who talk about students as responsible for some part of their education; it's up to the teacher to motivate them) and his focus on constant reiteration fails to consider the top-performing students, I think, who actually do well with current assessments. You don't have to buy the whole package, however, to find new concepts, techniques and perspectives in this book that will provoke you to rethink some of the aspects of testing most of us take for granted, while giving you inspiration for applying some of these new ideas in the classroom in practical ways.