Madison Teaching & Learning Excellence Faculty Learning Community : Formative & Summative Assessment

This third edition of Suskie's text adds a stronger emphasis on making assessment useful; greater attention to building a culture in which assessment is used to inform important decisions; an enhanced focus on the many settings of assessment, especially general education and co-curricula; a new emphasis on synthesizing evidence of student learning into an overall picture of an integrated learning experience; new chapters on curriculum design and assessing the hard-to-assess; more thorough information on organizing assessment processes; new frameworks for rubric design and setting standards and targets; and more.

An updated version of a resource that has long been a staple for many who teach writing and critical thinking skills. In addition to excellent, research-based guidance, this text provides many examples of authentic assessments and rubrics.

During our B2 module in MTLE, many instructors express interest in learning different ways to compose an authentic role, audience, and task for their assingnments. This text provides ideas on how to effectively define a writing task, explore the expectations for a composition activity, and assemble the supporting materials that students need to do their best work. (Of particular relevance is Ch. 4: Defining New Tasks for Standard Writing Activities.)

The Meaningful Writing Project offers readers a story of writing in higher education that shares students' experiences in their own voices. In presenting the results of a three-year study consisting of surveys and interviews of university seniors and their faculty across three diverse institutions, the authors consider students' perceptions of their meaningful writing experiences, the qualities of those experiences, and instructors' perspectives on assignment design and delivery.

In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, some in K-12. This research-based text includes honest reflections on what makes ungrading challenging and stories about what makes it transformative.

This book features many examples of courses that faculty have adapted to specs grading.

In Labor-Based Grading Contracts, Asao B. Inoue argues for the use of labor-based grading contracts along with compassionate practices to determine course grades. The heart of the book details the theoretical and practical ways labor-based grading contracts can be used and assessed for effectiveness in classrooms and programs.

This book engages the discussion of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model. The book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.