Assessment

What is Assessment?

In thinking about assessment, we must move past thinking about testing events, and more about what assessment is and why we do it...

- Assessment OF Learning: using evidence of student learning as a way to measure the impact of our teaching practices.
- Assessment FOR Learning: using information about students' knowledge, understanding, and skills to inform our teaching practice and providing feedback to students about how to improve.
- Assessment AS Learning: involving students in the learning process to monitor their own progress and work toward their learning goals through self-assessment and reflection.

In our classrooms, assessments can go by many different names and have many different functions. No one data point or assessment can be the sole basis of educational decision making. We must be sure to use multiple points of information to triangulate our findings so we can best understand and best plan for individual student needs. It is important for us to think about assessment in terms of the purposes for which we are administering them. Before we design or administer an assessment we must think about the skills or outcomes we want to measure and also about how we plan to use the resulting information.

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment is a planned process wherein both students and teachers continually gather evidence of learning and use it to change and adapt what happens in the classroom minute-to-minute and day-by-day.

- Used in real-time to make adjustments to instructional practice
- Excellent to provide direct feedback to students about their progress
- Can be used to uncover opportunities for review and reteaching

Interim Assessment

An interim assessment may be administered multiple times throughout the year between summative assessments to measure progress towards meeting particular expectations or to measure growth on a continuum of learning.

- Helps to identify patterns and trends
- Identifies individual strengths and weakness
- Useful in grouping students for instruction
- A blend of formative and summative practices

Summative Assessment

A summative assessment is a culminating assessment which measures and reports whether a student has learned a prescribed set of content or skills.

- Usually includes students receiving a final score or grade.
- May include grade-level proficiency or other levels of performance.

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