Assessing Assessments in the Secondary Latin Classroom

What message do our assessments send to students?

From Latin I through advanced levels, our assessments convey our values and communicate to students what we think is most important about course. What do our exams say about us? How do our assessments inform students’ attitudes about themselves and towards our field? In many cases, we reduce Latin to an exercise in trivial pursuit, memorization, and preparation for standardized tests.

Assessments should give teachers an idea of where students are in their learning and provide helpful feedback to facilitate growth and mastery. Rarely is that the only outcome. For high-functioning students, assessments are a way to earn a high grade, not to demonstrate knowledge. It is easy for them to prioritize achievement on assessments above actual learning. The questions students ask us about assessments reflect a skewed priority. “How can I improve my grade?” is a far more common question than “How can I improve my Latin.”

Results of assessments can also divide students into categories by sending one of two messages: “You are good at Latin” or “You are bad at Latin.” An assessment can erase the confidence and pride a student has built up during the course of a unit or it can confirm her existing self-perception: “I can’t do this.” When students think their teachers agree, the message becomes “I do not belong here.” In this case, an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge and understanding becomes a tool to weed out students in the name of rigor.

Teachers and students have their own ways of navigating some of the problems posed by assessments. For some teachers, easier assessments are the logical solution. This approach can be problematic as well. Over the years, I’ve seen vocabulary quizzes with word banks, matching, and other types of questions that require almost no knowledge or understanding of the content. Students also devise counterproductive solutions to hack assessments. For translation exams, students often resort to memorizing vast amounts of English, with the occasional the result that they provide a perfectly rendered translation of a Latin text that was not even on the exam.

Further complicating the matter of assessments are the National Latin Exam and the AP Latin Exam. Literal translation, multiple choice, and short answer questions can indeed gauge what students know, but both the AP exam and the National Latin Exam are designed to evaluate thousands of students. Since we do not have thousands of students to evaluate, we can — and should — be more flexible in the ways we assess knowledge, skills, and growth.

Here are a few ways we can make our assessments more meaningful:

Determine if you even need to give a summative assessment. In some classes, I do not give a summative assessment if students have shown their mastery throughout the unit via formative assessments. In that case, I already have the information I need about my students’ learning. This practice also provides an incentive engagement and diligence throughout the unit because students know that if they learn the material well, they can avoid the stress of a test. And, we can do a more meaningful project or activity in its place. This system requires extra housekeeping, however. I typically divide the unit into the competencies and knowledge students need to demonstrate and keep track of mastery on a spreadsheet as we go along. Students can demonstrate mastery through participation, conferencing with me, in-class activities, and other ways.

Reward and value growth. Latin is difficult, especially as students adjust to the concept of an inflected language. Not everyone will learn at the same pace. Accommodating different rates of learning is also a helpful practice for students who pick up Latin very quickly. Nobody should feel bored or frustrated because of the pacing of the course. Rigid grading practices can be particularly discouraging for students who learn at a slower pace. If students know that it is not a race and that they can get credit later in the quarter or semester, they are more likely to persevere and less likely to check out. Again, this requires a system to keep track of the major objectives of the course so that students’ grades can be adjusted as they demonstrate proficiency. End-of-term portfolios are another way to measure growth over the course of a semester so you and the student can see how their ability to use and understand Latin has evolved over the semester.

Allow students to show what they know. A lot of times, students fear assessments will show what they do not know. There are ways to structure exams to alleviate that fear. For example, if a student has a restricted Latin vocabulary, she will not be able to show her reading or composition skills either. Including a separate open-dictionary reading passage or composition task can solve this problem. Students can also demonstrate knowledge and reflect on growth by answering a simple prompt: “Write about something that is still confusing. What has made this difficult to understand? What can you do to move forward? What support do you need from the teacher?” This task helps the student reflect on her learning and provides valuable feedback for the teacher as well. Typically when students are confused, they still know quite a bit and the missing piece is relatively simple to provide.

Consider sight exams. If developing reading skills is a priority in your classroom, sight exams can be an extremely effective form of assessment since it removes memory from the equation. Sight exams do not need to be graded for accuracy alone (like the dreaded literal translation section of the AP exam). Instead they can target specific skills. How do students navigate a text? Can students figure out which words belong together? Can they identify the basic components of the main clause? Sight exams also encourage students to focus more on reading than mastering previously-seen texts.

Change the types of questions you ask. Ask vocabulary questions in Latin instead of English or have students provide their own simple definitions to Latin words in Latin. Have them illustrate vocabulary words or sections of Latin passages to demonstrate comprehension. Provide a cartoon for students to caption. Instead of translating a text into English, students can summarize it in simple Latin or rewrite it to create a new story by changing only certain syntactical elements of the sentence.

Give students some control over assessments. “How do you want to show me what you know?” is a question that can create buy-in and enthusiasm from students. In a Latin II/III class where students chose their texts for the final quarter, one group made an illustrated children’s book in Latin based on Pliny the Elder’s section on bees. This involved reading the Latin, simplifying the information, writing about it in Latin, and illustrating the text. Another group made a video of Pyramus and Thisbe in English, but subtitled it with selections from Ovid that corresponded to each scene.

Involve students in the evaluation of their work. John Piazza, a Latin teacher in California, has students grade their exams as a class activity. He told me, “It is an effective way to get kids to reflect on their work. If I require them to write in the correct answers, they are getting exposed to information and input, and it takes me out of the equation.” This practice has the added benefit of shifting the focus to the actual learning. With this model, the teacher isn’t giving out grades, the students are evaluating their learning.

Let students evaluate you and your course. The best sources of information on effective practice are your students. Ask for feedback via conversations and less formal surveys throughout the semester about assessments, grading practices, and other aspects of the course and classroom environment. At the end of each semester, my students to create a cartoon or story about their experience in Latin. This activity helps students to reflect on their own growth and elicits helpful information about their experience with Latin and me. Recently, one student’s cartoon had a series of frames depicting a race during which he was running, laying on the ground, being carried by me (while eating donuts), and then finishing the race triumphantly under his own power.

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