Rethinking Assessments
Why is it important to identify the Essential Learning?
With our modified schedules, it would be difficult for students to learn the same amount or level of content and skills that we have expected in the past. To accommodate this loss of instructional time and shift in instructional methodology available to us, teachers need to prioritize their learning outcomes for students.
Here are a few things to consider as your prioritize the learning outcomes...
Develop broader essential questions and enduring understandings to allow for flexibility, creativity, and interpretation. If your learning outcomes are too specific, it locks you and your students into regimented pathways.
Clearly identify what is most essential, favorable, and optional. This process can help keep your teaching team consistent with their focus and save you time when adjustments need to be made quickly in response to student feedback. What has to stay, what could go, and what can I choose from if extra time is available?
Do less, better! By reducing the number of outcomes you expect to address in your course, you can shift your efforts to finding engaging ways to authentically apply and measure the learning. How can we make sure these students remember what they are learning beyond the next assessment?
What can a really powerful EQ do for you?
Sometimes, we get stuck in a rut with assessments. We assess the same things in the same ways, year after year. But by refocusing a unit around an essential question, it can open you up to more creative, authentic assessments. Instead of a closed loop of options, you can give students the resources and skills to explore larger ideas.
According to Grant Wiggins, a question is essential when it:
causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content;
provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions;
requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers;
stimulates vital, on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons;
sparks meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences;
naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects.
Resource: "What is an essential question?" blog post by Grant Wiggins
When you ask powerful EQs, like these, for example, you give the students an opportunity to engage personally and deeply with the content they are learning and to apply the skills they are practicing. The mechanism for HOW the students share their answers becomes secondary to the answers they are providing.
Check out our Curriculum Toolkit under Curriculum resources to help craft these questions with powerful verbs.
Does there need to be a clear distinction between formative and summative assessments?
So many times in education, we want things to fit neatly into their categories so we can provide clear communication to our stakeholders. But sometimes, it may be beneficial to fuzzy the lines between the assessment categories. This may help students invest in the formative activities if they know if may help them demonstrate summative understandings. Additionally, many students feel redundancy between the formative work and the summative assessments; like they are being asked to do the same things over and over no matter how well they did on previous work.
Here are a few questions to consider in regards to formative and summative assessments...
Would you be willing to give students credit when they have demonstrated mastery wherever that might be in the process? Instead of assigning points for a specific task (assignment or assessment), can points be assigned when a level of mastery is demonstrated?
Does summative mean the end? Is it possible to start with the summative and have students build towards demonstrating mastery? Are separate formatives necessary or can they just be initial drafts of a summative product?
Is it possible for a collection of formative activities to "count" as a summative demonstration of mastery?
How can I mitigate cheating on assessments?
According to the Center for the Study of Higher Education, the "best starting point for countering plagiarism is the design of the assessment tasks."
Many teachers have been struggling with the lack of a controlled setting for assessments during remote learning. Teachers have been coming up with a lot of creative solutions to "gain control" of the setting to reduce cheating but many of them only solve part of the problem or limit the types of assessments that can be implemented.
Here are some ideas about how to rethink your assessment plan to take advantage of the new situation in positive ways...
Be authentic, determine what they might have available to them on a normal day during their adult life and write the assessment with that available. (You aren't there. You can't help. How can they help themselves through the problems?)
Give students permission to look things up and use the available tools or even have the students create the tools they will use to "cheat". They might actually learn something in the process.
Have students create unique answers/products that can't just be copied/pasted or Googled. Expand the question types to include answers in their own words. Ask more for their opinions, comparisons, analogies, processes, reflections, takeaways and not just for "the answer".
Offer assessments that can only be done in individual settings. It may be easier for students to record their understandings and engage with listening activities when they aren't all in the same classroom at the same time. View the isolation as a win for alternative assessment formats.
Place the focus on having the students explain their process and not on the specific product. What got you here? What choices did you need to make? Why did you make that choice?
Keep the specific material a mystery until the assessment. Give them a general idea about what to expect but don't give them the specific terms until they get started.
Have the student write their own assessment. Let them propose how they are going to model they have mastered the content and skills.
Give the students the answers and then ask them how the answer could be revised to be more complete or correct. How would you fix this? What would your answer be better?
Meet with students individually and have them explain what they do know about incorrect answers they may have provided.
How can I assess with empathy?
Remote learning has been a very challenging time for most teachers and students. So many of us are experiencing record levels of stress and frustration especially as it relates to the measurement of student learning. We would like to recommend the concept of grading with empathy as a way to relax the process a bit and provide the necessary "wiggle room" to keep everyone engaged and moving forward. Find ways to ensure that the grades on the transcript represent what your students have learned and are not just a reflection of difficult circumstances.
Here are some suggestions on how you might be able to grade with empathy...
Try using more holistic rubrics that focus more on "the spirit of the learning" or develop single-point rubrics to allow space for creativity and extenuating circumstances. Rubrics that are wordy and specific-point oriented can cause teachers to feel "locked in" to how points need to be awarded for work submitted by students. Less restrictive rubrics may also be more concise and less overwhelming for students.
Trust your professional judgement. If you believe that in the photo album of work that a student has produced and demonstrated for you that they have achieved a level of mastery, then go with your gut. There are a lot of extra variables that may be impacting student performance on a specific assessment, don't let yourself assign a student a score that you don't feel reflects their true level of understanding. Be creative and work it out with them!
Allow for retakes and/or revisions. Find ways for students to reflect on their initial performance, ask questions, learn from their mistakes, and improve their demonstration of understanding. This is a perfect time to focus on building up our students and showing confidence in their ability to learn even if it isn't on our preferred timeline.
Talk it out with the students. Schedule time to meet with a student so they have the opportunity to clarify or expand on their answers that may not have initially be up to standard. Provide them a chance to share with you what they do really know and be open to adjusting the scores based on that conversation.
Additional Resources
This article has some very practical ideas on how to approach summative assessments during remote learning (and really for anytime). It supports many of the suggestions that we made above and provides additional links to resources related to assessment in the classroom.
This resource was written for World Language teachers and provides some practical ideas on how to make it difficult for students to use a translator for written work.
This videoblog post was created by a World Languages teacher and provides a very heart-felt reflection about the role of assessment in his classroom. Definitely worth the watch for any teacher.
This blog post from a world languages teacher shares her personal approach to making assessments work in her remote/hybrid classroom. Near the bottom, she provides access to her proficiency-based rubrics as examples of how teachers can "grade with compassion".
This padlet board is broken down by types of product and tools that students can use to create them. The concept discussed in this Cult of Pedagogy blog post encourages teachers to move away from traditional assessments where cheating is an issue to having students create to demonstrate learning.
Jon Mueller's Central defenses:
Authentic assessments are direct measures
Authentic assessments capture the constructive nature of learning
Authentic assessments integrate teaching, learning, and assessment
Authentic assessments provide multiple paths to demonstration
This blog post outlines 8 online assessments strategies that can work with remote/hybrid learning. Use correctly, they can provide you and your students with the necessary feedback and save time.
1. Assessment should help students to learn.
2. Assessment must be consistent with the objectives of the course and what is taught and learnt.
3. Variety in types of assessment allows a range of different learning outcomes to be assessed. It also keeps students interested.
4. Students need to understand clearly what is expected of them in assessed tasks.
5. Criteria for assessment should be detailed, transparent and justifiable.
6. Students need specific and timely feedback on their work - not just a grade.
7. Too much assessment is unnecessary and may be counter-productive.
8. Assessment should be undertaken with an awareness that an assessor may be called upon to justify a student's result.
9. The best starting point for countering plagiarism is in the design of the assessment tasks.
10. Group assessment needs to be carefully planned and structured.
11. When planning and wording assignments or questions, it is vital to mentally check their appropriateness to all students in the class, whatever their cultural differences.
12. Systematic analysis of students' performance on assessed tasks can help identify areas of the curriculum which need improvement.
Other REAL Hub Resources
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