Assessment
Assessments are evidence teachers collect of student knowledge, skills, thinking, or learning in order to evaluate what students understand and how they are thinking. Informal assessments include such things as student questions and responses during instruction and teacher observations of students as they work. Formal assessments may include such things as quizzes, homework assignments, lab reports, papers, journals, and projects.
Practice and feedback are critical aspects of the development of skill and expertise. One of the most important roles for assessment is the provision of timely and informative feedback to students during instruction and learning so that their practice of a skill and its subsequent acquisition will be effective and efficient.
A high quality assessment includes the following criteria:
- Allows your students’ to demonstrate depth of understanding relative to specific student standards/objectives
- Allows your students to access both productive (speaking/writing) and receptive (listening/reading) modalities to monitor student understanding
- Provides all students (including those with diverse learning needs) access to demonstrate learning relative to specific student standards/objectives
Assessment types include, but are not limited to:
- Authentic Assessment: Alternative tests that assess student ability to solve problems and perform tasks under simulated "real life" situations. It measures student responses which demonstrate what students think, do, and have become. These outcomes are recorded during normal classroom involvement.
- Formative Assessment: This assessment is part of the instructional process. When incorporated into classroom practice, it provides the information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are happening. In this sense, formative assessment informs both teachers and students about student understanding at a point when timely adjustments can be made. These adjustments help to ensure students achieve targeted standards-based learning goals within a set time frame. Feedback to students as a component of formative assessment is among the most important and powerful elements contributing to student learning.
- Objective Assessment: Measurement of learning based on easily-verifiable criteria (e.g. number of books read, length of written work, tests of facts or definitions, number of right or wrong answers).
- Norm-Referenced Assessment: An assessment in which an individual or group's performance is compared with a larger group. Usually the larger group is representative of a cross-section of all US students.
- Student Self-Assessment: The practice of having students participate in assessing their own progress and achievement, often by creating rubrics or test questions, or by having them reflect on their own learning and describing what they have and have not yet achieved. Used especially for assessing the “soft skills” (e.g. collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, intellectual or behavioral risk-taking) that are not easily measured objectively.
- Subjective Assessment: Measurement of learning based on the observer’s (usually the teacher’s) personal, holistic view of a learner’s progress or achievement. This often includes the learner’s effort, growth over time, attitude, etc.
- Summative Assessment: Assessments given, usually at the end of a period of instruction, to determine at a particular point in time what students know and do. Common forms are “Mid-Term” and “Final” Examinations.
- Performance assessments measure students' skills based on authentic tasks such as activities, exercises, or problems that require students to show what they can do.
- Pre-assessments evaluate students needs and readiness to engage in new learning. Pre-assessments may include evaluations of students academic literacies, developmental readiness, learning preferences, and/or cultural or personal characteristics.
Assessments may address both receptive and productive modalities.
Providing students with multiple ways to demonstrate knowledge and skills increases engagement and learning, and provides teachers with more accurate understanding of students' knowledge and skills (Darling-Hammond, 2010). Culminating products, or other forms of summative assessment, may themselves be differentiated, taking different forms for different students, with the goal of finding a way for each student to most successfully share what he or she has learned in a learning segment (Tomlinson, 2001). This requires teachers to do careful work developing rubrics that clarify both for themselves and for the students the essential knowledge and skills the assessment is intended to evaluate (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006). For instance, if an Social Studies teacher is evaluating students’ research skills through a written report, they need to ask themselves if the purpose of the assessment is for the student to communicate what they learned by consulting sources, in which case other options than a written paper may better allow students to share what they know. Additionally, carefully constructing and backwards planning the final assessment based on a clear rubric allows the teacher to use the rubric as an ongoing tool for self-assessment, and feedback, providing diagnostic information that can inform adjustments to instruction prior to the final assessment (Tomlinson & McTighe, 2006).
Hattie’s meta-analysis suggests that feedback and formative evaluation are amongst the top approaches to improving student learning.
Sources:
Pellegrino, J., Chudowsky, N., & Glaser, R. (Eds.). (2001). Knowing what students know: The science and design of educational assessment. Washington DC: National Academies Press.
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