Providing Multiple Entry Points for Assessment

What is it?

Multiple entry point assessments allow students to choose what level of understanding they are going to demonstrate. It can look different depending on the type or set up of the assessment and the number of entry points you want to provide.

To the right, you can see a check in that student's completed in SNC1W that included the atom and periodic table trends. Each column included 3 different questions about a specific concept - one per row. The three rows are the different entry points for that concept - a mild (level 1-2) question, a medium (level 3) question and a spicy question (level 4). For this check in the students could pick a different entry level of each question, and they could also complete more than one level for each question.

For some assignments, students were given a mild, medium and spicy option and would only complete one of the options.

Other assignments (lab activities, discussion questions, conclusions, learning activities) identified each question or step, as mild, medium or spicy, using the chili pepper 🌶️ or flame 🔥 emoji and students are encouraged to complete as much as they can. In this case we talk about making sure that students complete all the 🔥 and 🔥🔥 questions since our goal as a class is to reach for all of us being able to do the 🔥🔥 (level 3) questions.

Why Provide Multiple Entry Points?

We have a number of reasons for providing students multiple entry points, but all of these specific reasons are really about supporting student learning and achievement.

Our Why:

Providing multiple entry points is about restructuring our learning and assessment opportunities for students and assessments to allow ALL of our students to be successful.

Students learn & demonstrate their understanding by engaging in work that is within their capabilities

It is more rewarding than penalizing. Students are able to correctly answer a question within their capabilities and build their confidence.
Helps students identify where they are and what they need to do to move forward.

How to Get Started with Multiple Entry Points:

If you are just getting started with multiple entry points and just want to dip your toes in, we suggest using the chili pepper 🌶️ or flame 🔥 emoji on your already existing activities or assessments. Use the emojis to identify, for the students, the level of understanding of that question. This will help them to identify where they are in their learning journey.

A good next step to integrating multiple entry points would be to start identifying what the mild, medium and spicy skills or knowledge are for the different expectations you are assessing. As well as what mild, medium and spicy would look like in assignments. For example, for lab reports, the students build on the lab report as they move from mild to spicy. A mild lab report would include preparatory work, data collection, and the claim (answers the guiding question) as well as some evidence to support the claim. A medium lab report include all the mild lab report requirements as well as specific, relevant supporting evidence. A spicy lab report would include all the medium lab report requirements, and the student would include some reasons for the link between their evidence and claim.

Changing assessments takes time, but it can be a helpful place to start because it forces you to think about what you consider to be mild, medium and spicy for different expectations. There are many different ways to do assessments with multiple entry points, and we've all set ours up a bit differently to best suit the students in our classes.