What is the "Right Way" to Assess?

MY QUESTIONS FOR ASSESSMENT (Literature):

• How do we provide a variation of "good" assessment strategies to use in order to clearly address and yield  student progress or comprehension?
• Assessment is key and should be present as a formative and summative inclusion. How do we use assessment as a teaching tool and not a goal--- that is how do we teach students to learn for comprehensive success and not testing success?
• Do I place more value on student perspective or student fact compilation?

Options for assessment according to Ch. 13 Reading
There is a line between what a teacher finds valuable in literature and what a student may find valuable and I think that both of these perspectives have huge value and should be addressed equally during assessment. Backwards planning is a noted strategy, predetermining goals and specifics before you even begin to teach a literary piece.
I think this is a great strategy simply because it predetermines objectives and goals before you even begin teaching to a topic and thus your objectives and goals are already determined and won't be overlooked during instruction.

Personally with literature you can use fact based tests to touch on the basics of a literature piece. This includes characters, settings, plots, the fundamental make up of a piece. There are details that will be specific to the reading that can be pulled and tested on but I feel like this is more for the sake of testing to see if the reading was read or engaged in verses whether or not the reading was comprehended and critically considered from points of analyzation and other critical concepts. This includes concepts like perspectives and deeper learning questions that might come up in a discussion or while reading subconciously.

I agree that simple fact recall can honestly cause "good" or "deep" knowledge to diminish or weaken if this is the only focus we put on engaging ourselves and students in literature.

The reading "Assessing and Evaluating Learning" provided their supposed "purpose of evaluation" as follows:

• description of what they are doing and how they do it when they respond to literate.
• a blueprint for potential improvement in their responses.
• a way to self-evaluate so that they know where they need to improve.

I agree to some degree... Although this seems incomplete and very broad with regards to the purpose of why we evaluate literature and then assess our students on how they evaluated the literature. 

RUBRICS

The reading mentions the use of rubrics to specify expectations of the reading or literature so that there are no hidden tricks or components that students could possibly miss or overlook. I use rubrics in my visual arts class as well as my ELA classes and it seems to be a successful way to get kids to double-check their work and self-evaluate. Rubrics seem to help alleviate some fast or expectation confusion as well.

The rubrics can restate and retouch on lesson goals and expectations or objectives.Rubrics literally can be used to evaluate or determine criteria or guide any lesson or evaluation. Including literature, discussion, worksheets, projects, writing assignments. It can serve as a guide for students to follow in order to evaluate literature.