Introduction: Looking Back

Loren McGrail
Editor
SABES Central Resource Center / World Education

How to begin? Where to begin? I read back through my other carefully composed introductions for help. Maybe I said something I can use to get me going. No luck. There is no neat, overriding category that I can use to frame the articles I received for this volume of Adventures in Assessment. The categories or components: Getting Started, Ongoing, and Looking Back still provide a useful framework, but I’m growing bored talking about tools, checklists, questionnaires, and surveys.

I want to talk with you on another level, the level of why. I want to talk not from the perspective of what researchers are saying about what learner-centered approaches to assessment are, but what you and I know. The authors in these pages are telling us about the teaching/learning process and how assessment either helps or hinders this understanding. If we believe in the validity of teachers as researchers of their own practice, it is time for us to really listen to the voices of these narratives and not just focus on the tools they have developed, adapted, or modified.

As I was reading through the articles for this volume again, for pleasure now, and not for editing purposes, a few voices sang out to me loud and clear. They said, “underline this, this is important, you could build an introduction around this.” So, colleagues, I would like to change the format and the nature of what an introduction is supposed to do, and tell you instead some of the things I learned from listening to what the practitioners and learners in this volume have to say.

The voices from the learners Nancy Venator interviewed in Through the Eyes of an ABE Interviewer stand out immediately. “When I could not read and went into stores, there was an animal inside of me (he touched his stomach). As I learned more and more the animal slowly went away (he moved his hand slowly up to his chest) and now it is gone forever (he moved his hand upward and out with a flourish) [page 44].” Hearing the way learners actually talk about their own learning process is a baseline for me by which to measure all that we say and do. The “animal inside” reminds me of how little I really know about just what it feels like not to be literate.

I do know, however, what Dulany Alexander is talking about in her article, The ESL Classroom as Community: How Self-Assessment Can Work, when she writes, “The kind of evaluation, defined as progress from one level to the next, has meant that if learners don’t keep progressing, we don’t get paid [page 34].” Her voice has a kind of resignation that reminds me of Sally Spencer’s words when she remarks, “Passing the GED test, which still tests for ‘single correct responses’, is the primary goal of the GED student [page 42].” I can imagine Eileen Barry joining this duet and adding her own complaint about the TABE: “After the students completed the assessment, it was our turn to struggle with it. We felt frustrated as we looked at the answers, both correct and incorrect, because we had no way of knowing why the student chose a particular answer [page 22].”

Missing from this chorus, however, is the Even Start project in Amesbury, which is mandated to use the CASAS for their formalized assessment process. They seem to have managed to include their CASAS assessment in their more holistic intake process. I still wonder how the CASAS results are integrated into the adult learner’s individualized learning plan. Or why they needed to develop another goalsetting tool beyond the CASAS. Is it because their goal sheet offers elements of “affective measurement,” a chance for parents/adult learners to express their dreams and wishes, combined with “felt” or “real” strengths and weaknesses which can later provide learners with an opportunity to “ethically analyze how they perceive themselves, and whether their perceptions have helped or hindered their progress [page 18].”

An aversion to standardized measurements is not all these practitioners have in common however. In addition to sharing a view of literacy as practice, how learners use literacy in their daily lives, inside and outside the classroom, they share the view that how learners judge their own capabilities and their own progress is also critical. Many of the tools they have developed, whether they are tape journals (page 38), informal reading inventories (page 22), goal-setting activities (pages 8 and 15), or self-evaluation forms (page 34), ask the learners to redraw their image of themselves as learners from a position of strength, not as isolated individuals, but as learners “joining a community of learners who share similar experiences, frustrations, and accomplishments [page 22].”

These are my reactions, dear reader, some intellectual, some gut. I invite you to practice what we preach about reading not being a passive activity, to interact with these articles, to ask questions, make predictions, look for answers and — if you feel like sharing your responses — write to us at Adventures in Assessment so we can share your ideas with a growing circle of practitioners committed to participatory approaches to assessment.

Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 4 (April 1993),
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.