Introduction

Loren McGrail
SABES, Boston, MA

"We must be less technical and more criti- cally reflective of what we do and are, that we must set aside our 'How ? I questions and begin to ask and reask 'What ? I and 'Why ?'"
Virginia Sauve

The contributors to VolumeTwo of Adventures in Assessment are practitioners who have written critical reflections about what and why as well as how they have developed ongoing assessment procedures and tools.

"The Progress Portfolio" by David Rosen describes an assessment-presentation model currently being tried with young adults throughout the country .As Rosen states, "this portfolio model has the advantage of providing direct, performance-based assessment of writing, mathematics, problem-solving, oral presentation, job readiness, and even vocational skills."

In "Keeping Us Aware," Janet Kelly continues her description of the procedures, tools, and processes that make up her portfolio approach in a "learning community." As in Volume One, she has included the tools and forms with a focus this time on reading and writing assessment and learning logs kept by both learners and teachers.

Paul Trunnell, from Harborside Community Center in East Boston, describes in "Self-Assessment: Doing and Reflecting" a portfolio approach similar to Janet Kelly' s for assessment with his ABE 2 students. He describes, in detail, two ongoing assessment procedures he has had success with: the learning log and the skills evaluation sheet.

In "When Asking Isn't Enough, " Kathy Brucker documents a variety of evaluation tools she has used with her Spanish speaking students at El Centro del Cardenal in Boston. Her critique of checklists that don't ask "which did you enjoy and why?" reminds us all that we need to adapt tools to fit our own contexts and answer our own questions.

Janet Isserlis from the International Institute in Providence, Rhode Island writes in "What You See: Ongoing Assessment in the ESL/Literacy Classroom" about action research on how adult learners progress in and out of the classroom. Her focus is on ongoing observation, reflection, and feedback aimed at assisting learners and facilitators. Her anecdotal reports provide a model for what, why, and how to write up daily observations.

Karen Ebbit, Priscilla Lee, Pam Nelson, and Joann Wheeler from the Community Learning Center in Cambridge describe in "Three by Three by Four: Ongoing Assessment at the Community Learning Center" their cooperative effort to develop assessment tools used with ESL/1iteracy students. They describe the creation of a "three- part/three-tool" process which includes an initial goal-setting exercise, a weekly self-assessment, and a progress record. The tools were field tested in three ESL classes during the summer of 1991.

In "Further Adventures in Alternative Assessment: an Annotated Bibliography, " Don Robishaw outlines some key principles underlying ongoing assessment and cites four annotations from the bibliography.

While all of these writings fall under ongoing assessment, there are many other lenses through which to view and analyze these writings. One way to look at these articles is to examine the myriad ways practitioners have gone about documenting their experiments. For example, even though all three teachers at the Community Learning Center were testing a jointly designed initial goal-setting tool, each of them describes different objectives for doing this activity. Compare the evolution of the forms and tools Paul Trunnel developed for his ABE learners to the Brucker developed her tools. How are their processes similar? How are they different? What kinds of information do these tools give? How do they compare to the kind of anecdotal reporting Isserlis does daily in her class room? If progress is achieved, for whom is it achieved and by whom?

Another way to look at these writings is to try to determine to what extent they document the kinds of changes mentioned in the foreword and how they accomplish this. Which tools work best for measuring which kinds of change or progress? Which ones work best with which kinds of learners?

It is my personal hope that future editions of this journal will include reactions or comments to these writings in the form of letters to the editor or descriptions of a tool or procedure borrowed and tested out. I would also like to encourage people to write about the process involved in choosing and developing certain tools--the burning issues and questions that prompted you to explore another form of assessment. Although the backbone of this publication is the research and writing of Massachusetts classroom teachers, in future issues I will continue to encourage submissions from practitioners who are not classroom teachers, such as David Rosen, Interim Director of the Adult Literacy Resource Institute in Boston or from out-of-state practitioners such as Janet Isserlis from Rhode Island who has been a pioneer teacher researcher in adult literacy. I would like to encourage anyone and everyone to think about reviewing and annotating an article or book for this journal and for the annotated assessment notebook at your SABES Regional Support Center .

I would like to express my thanks to the SABES Central Resource Center staff who contributed their time and skill to this project: Laura Purdom, Sally Waldron, and Lou Wolrab.

Volume Three of Adventures in Assessment is expected out in the fall of 1993 and will focus on "Looking Back" activities that come at the end of a cycle and that help teachers and learners reflect on what they have and haven't accomplished. Many of the activities in "Looking Back" will be the same as in earlier volumes and will look at progress over a specific period of time. Thus, we will be looking for writings that fit into all three components: initial, ongoing and end-of-cycle assessment with a special emphasis on class and program evaluations.

--Loren McGrail

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 2 (May 1992),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 2003.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.