Assessment
What is assessment?
Assessment involves the gathering and analysis of information about student progress and performance and is designed both to inform practice in teachers as well as to promote and empower learning in students.
Assessment identifies what students know, understand, can do and the habits and attitudes which they demonstrate at different stages in the learning process.
Assessment also empowers students as the key agents within the process.
Assessment is ongoing, authentic and purposeful. It is a collaborative and informative process, involving students, families, teachers and community members. The results of assessment inform instructional and curricular decision-making for teachers and students.
Assessment Myths
Assessment AS learning
This involves teachers in engaging students in assessment activities which help them better understand themselves as learners and improves their capacity to effectively answer three questions: ‘where am I?, where do I need to be? And how do I close the gap?’
Examples:
Students engage in self and peer assessment in order to develop as learners, students track their own progress towards personalised targets in order to develop as learners, teachers engage students in a rich assessment task involving real world problems in order to help them learn, teachers ask students to complete an ‘exit slip’ in order to synthesise and solidify their learning from the lesson
Assessment FOR learning:
This involves teachers in the eliciting of student learning data with the express purpose of using these data to adjust, modify or adapt teaching and learning for the benefit of learners.
Examples:
A teacher reflects on patterns in classwork and homework and changes the way she plans for the next lesson in response, a teacher notices from the questions children are asking that a better route to the planned learning exists from the one he had originally planned for, a teacher uses the result of exit tickets to decide how to re-teach a difficult concept the next day, a teacher asks students to list 5 things he should start doing, 5 things he should keep doing and 5 things he should stop doing in order to help the students learn better.
Assessment OF learning
This involves teachers in making evaluative judgments regarding the extent to which students have provided evidence of the attainment against established learning targets. These judgments are made, usually for the purpose of recording and reporting to various audiences in the form of written records, comments or grades.
Examples:
A teacher gathers evidence with the express intention of using it to write a report card comment or generate a report card grade.
The evidence is gathered to confirm what the teacher should already know from teaching the process.
Assess WHAT?
What (DUKS) knowledge, skills, concepts or dispositions are to be assessed? These should be planned for; unit planners, scope and sequence and planning documents
Assess HOW?
How will we gather/collect evidence of this learning? What tasks, activities or strategies will we use to gather evidence of learning?. Teachers select the most appropriate type to validly align to the type of learning intention which students are learning
Evaluate HOW?
How will we evaluate the collected evidence? How will we know what good learning looks like? . Teachers will select methods in order to evaluate assessment evidence against the identified learning targets
Rubrics, exemplars, checklists and continumms
Feedback HOW?
How will we feedback to the learner so as to help her/him in her/his learning? Who else will give feedback?
Learning Data: Triangulation of data
External Assessments – These are assessments set and evaluated outside of ISY which provide valuable external verification of learning. Examples include MAP, WrAP and IBDP assessments.
Common Assessments – These are any assessment tasks (e.g. a common writing prompt for all HS students, a common design brief for both Gr.5 classes ) or common assessment tool (e.g. a group skills rubric shared by all Grade 6 teachers) which is used across multiple classrooms and evaluated as a team
Chunk Assessments – usually substantial in nature, and designed to assess multiple types of learning outcome, these assessments are usually given at the end of a substantial ‘chunk’ of learning, for example a major task completed at the end of a unit of inquiry
Ongoing Assessments – these are any assessment activities which occur on an ongoing basis and can be used to continually inform the interpretation of more formalised assessment methods (e.g. observational data, short tasks completed in class, etc.)
Grading and Reporting
Fair
For grades to be assigned fairly, schools must agree on their purpose. We see the primary purpose of grades as communicating current student achievement to whomever has the need and right to know that information, including students. This means that all students must have equal opportunity to learn and to show what they know, understand, and can do.
Patterson (2003) stated that “fair does not mean equal; yet, when it comes to grading, we insist that it does” (p. 572). Traditionally, teachers have expected all students to do the same assessments in the same amount of time, but to provide fairness in assessment and grading, we must recognize individual differences by using practices that acknowledge that fairness is equity of opportunity, not uniformity. Treating all students the same when they are obviously different in many ways is unfair. This means, for example, that the time available on tests and exams must be flexible not fixed, and that students should almost always have a variety of ways to demonstrate their knowledge, understanding, and skills
The idea of fairness as equity of opportunity was brilliantly stated by the Ministry of Education, Citizenship and Youth in Manitoba, Canada. It stated, “All students are given an equal opportunity to demonstrate what they know and can do as part of the assessment process. Adaptations to assessment materials and procedures are available for students including but not restricted to students with learning disabilities to allow them to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, provided that the adaptations do not jeopardize the integrity or content of the assessment” (Manitoba Ministry of Education, 2006, as cited in in O’Connor, 2018; our italics for emphasis). It is particularly important to note that the second sentence means that fairness requires that all students, not just students with disabilities, have access to accommodations that don’t change the what or the how well of the learning goals being assessed
Accurate
Leaders must require the elimination of common practices that compromise the accuracy of grades. These include penalties for late work, academic dishonesty, absences, and inappropriate behaviors; extra credit that awards points for behaviors that are unrelated to the standards; group scores; any semblance of a bell curve; zeros on the 101-point scale; and almost all homework. (To be clear, we certainly believe in having students practice, sometimes at home, but effective practice includes feedback, differentiated work just outside the student’s comfort zone, and the flexibility to proceed to the next level of difficulty — properties almost universally absent from traditional homework, especially when it’s made part of a student’s grade.) Because the grade should include only the data that accurately represent the student’s current performance, it is not necessary for teachers to devote inordinate amounts of time entering all these data into a master database.
One of the most common sources of inaccuracy in grading, particularly in schools with diverse student populations, is the tendency to confuse proficiency in English with subject-matter competence. A student may be able to demonstrate mastery of number operations when the questions are presented with numbers and symbols, but fail the same subject when the questions are embedded in unfamiliar language. For that student, an accurate grade for Mathematical Operations would be an A, with a C for Mathematical Communication. While both of these proficiencies are important, it would not be accurate to award a grade of C in math, which the student has largely mastered, because the student lacks advanced proficiency in English.
Specific
Specific grades are grades based on standards and learning goals, not assessment methods, and grades based on clear descriptions of a limited number of levels, not points and percentages.
The ‘traditional’ system in which the final grade is a mechanical and mindless calculation that reflects not the students’ progress, but punishment for every missed homework assignment and wrong answer along the way. We argue that the principle of specificity allows teachers to both point out errors and praise the learning that results from the errors. Indeed, an error-free class might as well be called a learning-free class
Timely
The role of the teacher is to develop, encourage, and extend learning. To accomplish this, we must be timely in our feedback. If given feedback in time, a writing student is able to improve low-quality drafts of a paper before creating a final portfolio, or a student coder is able to correct bugs before a final project is due.
But measuring learning and communicating in a timely fashion can present real challenges for educators of all levels. Secondary-level teachers have hundreds of students, and elementary teachers have to assess learning for every subject area. With this in mind, one of the most important questions educators can ask is, “Am I measuring what matters?” If we have more checklists, quizzes, and assignments than we have time for, it may be best to reduce the quantity of assessments in order to increase the quality.
Thoughtfully assessing students’ performance on a single project that showcases their skills authentically across multiple standards may be a better choice than marking many quizzes that provide little fuel for reflection and improvement.
No one questions the value of practice. Musicians, athletes, geographers, mathematicians, and poets all practice their craft and, with coaching and support, improve their performance. The characteristics of what Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool (2016) call gold standard practice are consistent. Students must receive coaching and immediate descriptive feedback, proceed in incremental steps, and engage in practice that is specifically designed to help them get to the next level of skill, understanding, or knowledge.
Any work assigned for homework is practice not to be assessed
The compulsion to grade homework is often based on the conviction that applying a score to practice, even when done in non-ideal conditions, will lead to better performance. In fact, this approach to homework leads to two types of negative outcomes— blindly compliant students who sullenly work at skills that rarely matter, and their even more sullen peers who work at nothing, unable even to approach the task because they can’t do it independently. The first group finds school excruciatingly boring; the second group finds it humiliating. Students in neither group engage in authentic learning.
Get past tradition
Much of the defense of traditional trading systems is based on the claim that, “It’s not our fault that we use toxic grading practices, because we have to get them ready for college!” However, a growing number of colleges, including MIT and Wellesley, are substantially reforming their grading systems, to the point that they provide rich feedback, but no letter grades, to first-year students. And while some colleges and universities do have awful grading practices, terrible pedagogy, and hazing rituals by social groups, wise K-12 educators do not allow those practices in higher education to justify unacceptable practices for younger students.