Assessments and Readability of Texts

¶ … personal experiences with assessments is an ongoing and continuous life event; every individual on earth is either assessing or being assessed in almost every interaction one can think of. Assessment is especially important in the educational communities. Heeneman, Oudkerk Pool, Schuwirth, Vleuten, & Driessen (2015) found that most experts agree with the viability of student assessments saying that "it is widely acknowledged that assessment can affect student learning" (p. 487). If what Heeneman et al.

found to be true, is true, then assessing student progress (or lack thereof) through the use of assessments benefits the students by helping them learn. My personal experience with being assessed and with creating assessments is quite extensive. Throughout my educational career I have taken (and done quite well overall) a large number of assessments in an equally as large number of courses, clinics and programs.

Some of the most effective assessments that I can recall are the ones that had me interacting in a verbal manner with the instructor/teacher. These interactive assessments were much more beneficial to me and I must not be the only person to believe so; a recent article confirms that "a 5th-grade teacher at an independent boy's school gives a first-person account of how her constant assessments and requirement that her students be active participants in their own learning gainsays the need for high-stakes, standardized testing" (Suskind, 2015, p. 38).

The teacher believes that her type of assessments are intertwined, interactive and instructive, and my personal experiences provides substance to her assertion. I would personally much rather stand in front of a group of students, teachers or administrators and be assessed on my performance and knowledge, than I would prefer to take a standardized test with a list of yes/no questions. Schools should be (and I believe that most of them are) hotbeds of innovation and creativity.

That schools offer standardized testing on such a large scale belies that belief. Individual classrooms and teachers are much more apt to providing assessments in a more creative environment than do the schools and school districts where they work.

One of the main reasons why teachers have more options available to them, is due to the responsibility the teachers are given to teach "to the test." Some teachers feel that teaching to the test requires them to disseminate specific questions that can be found on the test, whilst other teachers teach the students to think for themselves. It would be interesting to determine which method is most effective over the long run.

My personal beliefs are that we should teach students to learn and to think, not teach them to answer standardized questions with rote material. The most difficult type of assessment to create is a final exam that covers the entire course curriculum. Not only is the final exam the most difficult to create, it is also the most difficult method for discerning student learning. Saint, Horton, Yool and Elliott (2015) found that both the learning outcome and the quality of the course(s) were enhanced by increasing the frequency of examinations.

This finding would tend to downplay the importance of the final exam and would also enhance the importance of providing consistent assessments throughout the duration of the course(s) instead of relying so heavily on a final exam that is difficult to create in the first place. I prefer assessments that are objective and allow for creativity. For example; assessing the knowledge that I have gained from reading a particular manuscript or text by having me verbally explain what I learned.

Since I am a fairly intelligent human being, and am quite capable of describing and defining my thoughts and thought process, the type of assessment that allows me to do so provides me with an advantage over the type of assessments that ask for exact and specific answers to mundane and ordinary questions. That being said, I would think that (overall) my students would much rather be tested on specific answers to specific questions.

This belief is based upon the fact that there are different learning styles and that the majority of students learn best through visual methods; in other words, the students see the answer and then remember it. What I have already learned about assessing types of text is that the assessments are very subjective in nature and that a compare and contrast type of assessment probably works the best for determining whether the student(s) has gained the knowledge and comprehension necessary.

Readability The text I wished to test is The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages, volume 1A, Seventh Edition. It is currently used throughout the higher education community in a number of English and Literature courses. My experience in conducting the readability test was quite simple; I entered a number of samples from the Anthology into the required space online and hit submit. The website I employed (http://www.readabilityformulas.com/freetests/six-readability-formulas.php) tested the readability using a number of different formulas.

Those formulas include the SMOG Index, Flesch Reading Ease, Gunning Fog, Flesch-Kincaid, The Coleman-Liau Index, the Automated Readability Index and the Linsear Write Formula. The SMOG index showed the grade level of my text to be Twelfth Grade (12) and the overall readability consensus was Grade Fourteen (14) with a definition of difficult to read. The results surprised me because I have been reading these types of books for years and do not consider them that difficult to comprehend.

I would still use this text in my 11th and 12th grade classrooms because I wish to push my students in their learning and comprehension abilities. It would be an interesting experiment in Literature classes to determine if the Readability Consensus was more accurate in real life, or as an electronic device. I found it interesting to see that the readability was so much higher than I thought it would be.

This of course could speak to the fact that I enjoy reading, writing and teaching literature, and that I have been reading these type of texts since I was a young child. My parents believed in reading as a great educational tool and there were always loads of books in the house. Teachers should conduct readability tests on every text they are using in their classroom(s). That does not preclude the teachers from using/not using the.