Evaluation, Grading, and Assessment, Not the Same Thing

Many teachers and parents of students in secondary education think that these three words: Evaluation, Grading, and Assessment are the same exact thing. They are very mistaken. These are three different steps that are very important to student's while they are learning to write.


Each one of these steps help to improve student writing. Assessment is seeing where the student is at with their writing or what they are able to accomplish. Also seeing what students finish or complete can be a good way to assess where they are in the writing process. Evaluation is quite different from that because this is the part in the process where we add our  judgement to the process of writing. We want to have a rubric for students to show them what we as teachers are looking for so that we can evaluate them based on that criteria and so that their fellow students can do the same in peer review. We can also have our students assess themselves on these criteria so they can tell us where they think they are and how well their writing is fitting into that criteria. Grading is the point where we actually put a letter grade on the stuff that students turn into us. The best way to grade student writing would be pass or fail but according to many school districts we have to put a letter on student work. This can be hard because most the times students will just look at grade and not comments. We want to make sure that during the other previous stages students are getting that feedback from us teachers so that we don't have to leave all our comments till the final draft. I think that the best way for teachers to do this grading is to see the growth that students have made throughout all these processes. Having students form portfolios to show off their best work that they have worked hard on for a long time and seeing where that started at and seeing the final product. This is the best way to grade students based on that growth that happened from the first draft to the final draft. Just picking random assignments to grade and there being no opportunity for growth would be a waste of our time to grade but also it wouldn't be helpful at all to the students.