Bakashaba Andrew

Dr. Spangole

Instructional Alignment

Using Argumentation Learning Progressions to Support Teaching and Assessments of English

Language Arts

Summary

This article presents to us how to carry out effective assessments that provides genuine

feedback either your students are learning. The author of this article has gone deeply to zero the

assessments progression to the subject of English. Per this article over the years guardians have

debated either the summative assessments given in class are helpful to their children and some

have gone ahead to say that teachers lack high quality formative assessments. A research

company called Cognitively Based Assessment of, for, and as Learning (CBAL) has come up

to conduct research that is beneficial to both the students and teachers to find out either students

are learning in writing a strong argument in the English language or not.

Per the research that was conducted they believe that the language of English is leant and

assessed better with going through progression of learning A learning progression is defined

as a verbal description of qualitative change in a students level of sophistication for a key

concept, process, strategy, practice, or habit of thinker. This progression is divided into three

parts which are the teacher finding out what students already know then you move from there
into what you want them to know because this saves time rather than going through what they

already know. learning progressions support the design of assessment tasks intended to measure

student qualitative achievement levels. The assessment results can then be used to recommend

classroom activities that can help students proceed to the next step. Therefore, this research

emphasizes that students start with understanding argument by reading it and deciding on which

side they want to be. This means that the teacher provides an article with each student and they

read on their own and make their judgments per what they have understood from the reading. If a

student can do that and decide either to be in support with the author or be against the author

with sounding reasons, then the teacher is in position to find out that students are learning. The

four areas that are to be emphasized as teachers evaluate their students in essay writing include;

Understanding the stakes to make effective appeals in an argument, students must understand

the stakes, which involves thinking about the context and the target audience. Secondly does the

student have a meaningful conversation about a topic,

scholarly person must understand shallow cognition leads to ineffective argumentation

and lastly if the student can understand and evaluate the arguments of others, these have been

referred to as component tasks. With all this the teacher, can know in which part of progression

is lacking per student and hence effective learning and assessment for the two parties.

Reflection

As I read of this article I was challenged to first understand the definition of summative

and formative assessments to understand where guardians based their argument when they said

that summative assessment is not helpful to their children. And I found out that summative the

goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit
by comparing it against some standard and this helped me reflect on what happens back home. In

my country, its commonly summative assessments that teachers use and I find this not fully

helpful. Because students during the semester are just taking notes and not learning. I strongly

believe that effective learning consists of our students mastering the process and not the content.

Process helps a lot for the teachers in formative assessment because in the process the teacher is

in position to monitor the students progress. For example, in my country most of the teachers

give only the final exam without any formative assessment. They focus on content which at the

end of the day students just master the content to pass the exams without process which in my

opinion it is not helpful to students. I totally understand that summative assessment provide

feedback but during the semester as a teacher how will I know if students for example are

understanding how to write a good essay without any form of assessment? So, I believe that

schools ought to have plenty of formative assessments this will come into existence with

teaching focusing on process and monitoring different steps how their students are learning

because it provides immediate feedback and gives a sense of direction to both the teacher and the

student. Furthermore, it helps boost your students grades at the end of the semester. Because

after all at the end of the day as a teacher your happiness is to know that your students are

learning regardless of their grades as a redemptive teacher. This could be achieved by the

teachers changing their mind set about assessments and knowing that what is more important is

these students mastering the process rather than the content. This could change the students

perspective and enjoying school knowing that however much assessments are paramount but

what is more important is a student learning the process for example in writing an essay they

need to know how to come up with a claim then grounds naysayers and finally the conclusion.

Lastly, I surely believe that subjects like English they need to be taught in steps for students to
understand after all its not most of the students first language therefore, if taught in steps and

progressions it helps a lot in evaluating both the teacher and the student. In this campaign of

article review I have learnt from people other peoples articles for example I have come to

understand about classroom management. I came to understand that as teachers we evaluate our

students through summative tests to give feedback to our students and thats how we get to

understand if our students are mastering the content. However, I agree with this to a smaller

extent because according to Teaching Redemptivelyby Donald we come to understand that its

not through summative tests that we get to evaluate our students even outside class which is very

true because students are talented differently some it could be theocratically and others

practically.