Assessment Philosophy
CCSD#1’s Local Assessment System
Purpose
The last thing Curriculum and Assessment wants to be responsible for is the creation and administration of a lot more testing in CCSD! The goal of our assessment system is to carefully think through the types of information that is needed about student learning, when and why it needs to be collected, and how that information is going to be used.
We do agree that formative assessment is assessment FOR learning – assessment that provides information about what students know now in relation to where they are going and used to help them get to the intended learning target. Several key ideas emerge from the last two decade’s research on effective uses of formative assessment.
CCSD’s Key Ideas - Approach
#1: Authentic assessment is continuous. Formative assessment is both integral to the cycle of learning and part of a balanced assessment system. The success of formative assessment use within a local assessment system (formative assessment + interim assessment + summative assessment) is highly related to the quality of student involvement and how effectively teachers plan for and use assessment data to adjust instruction.
#2: Formative assessment may take different forms, but should always inform instruction and learning. Feedback from formative assessment is based on different sources of observable evidence (written, oral, visual, kinesthetic, etc.) and used to guide next steps in instruction and learning. Formative assessment is constantly occurring. It may be (a) “in-the- moment” (e.g., quick checks for understanding, probing questions during instruction based on what was just heard/observed), (b) designed with a specific purpose and learning target in mind (exit card, pre-assessment, conferencing, planned formative “probe”), or (c) curriculum embedded, such as formatively using interim assessments (mini summative assessments, such as performance tasks) to monitor student progress across the school year.
#3: Feedback is multi-faceted and used to gauge how close a student is to the intended learning target. A balance of feedback coming from three key sources - from teachers, from peers (e.g., peer tutoring, peer editing, peer conferencing), and self-assessment tools (e.g., Hess’ ‘what I need to do & what I did’ rubrics) - has been proven to enhance effectiveness of formative assessment use.
#4: Students are actively involved in formative assessment. Active involvement means students use assessment evidence to set and monitor progress towards learning goals, reflect on themselves as learners, and evaluate the quality of their performance.
#5: All high-quality assessment utilizes three key components – understanding how one learns, how one demonstrates what was learned, and how we interpret/measure the evidence observed. The concept of the Assessment Triangle, first presented by Pellegrino, Chudowsky, and Glaser in Knowing What Students Know/KWSK (NRC, 2001) is shown below. “The assessment triangle explicates three key elements underlying assessment: ‘a model of student cognition and learning in the domain, a set of beliefs about the kinds of observation that will provide evidence of students’ competencies, and an interpretation process for making sense of the evidence’ (NRC, 2001, p. 44). KWSK uses the heuristic of an ‘assessment triangle’ to illustrate the relationships among learning models, assessment methods, and inferences one can draw from the observations made about what students truly know and can do” (Hess, Burdge, & Clayton, 2011, p. 184). Assessment design (formative-interim-summative) and planning should consider all three.