Assessing Cognitive Complexity

Assessment for learning offers the educator a look into individual acquisition of knowledge and skills throughout a learning progression. Given individual student performance, the skilled teacher adjusts questions, tasks, and supports to move student learning in a positive direction. At its core, formative assessments make a lot of sense and educators can support this line of thinking. What happens when we begin to give students voice and choice with guardrails and the instructor moves to a facilitator of inquiry role? Base assessments feel separate and cannot measure the higher cognitive function that we have designed. How can we move forward?

When teams design for cognitive progressions, fleshing out the thinking required, they are also identifying the look fors in an assessment. We encourage teacher teams to identify the knowledge, statements, and dispositions that will be evident in each progression and final cognitive outcome(s). As thinking increases in complexity, how and where might we see it within student work? Teacher teams collect evidence within the student thinking and doing in each progression. But what is evidence?

Knowing the thinking journey that students will engage with throughout a meaningful learning experience prior to instruction, gives us the benchmarks. The evidence may be a student reflection that is written or recorded, it may be found during a conversation, and it may be overcoming a specific point in a project. The key is to collect clear and consistent evidence that the student is cognitively moving to more complex thinking within the instructional design. It is to a casual onlooker that the evidence supports the desired cognitive complexity.

In this process of designing for cognitive complexity and evidence as assessment, the team dynamic and frequent milestones on the learning journey are developed and reviewed collaboratively. Important to note that in this work of measuring complexity, we have not spoken about content. Cognitive complexity is related to the content but not dependent on the content. Both concepts are needed in quality instruction, yet independent. The engaging student centered learning experience is the binder for cognitive complexity and content.

At the end of the day, students benefit from clear cognitive progressions with explicit evidence of their thinking. Instruction can improve when teacher teams collect evidence on mutually agreed cognitive outcomes on a regular basis. Typical data review cycles place educators in a position to adjust to further support individual student learning. These cycles can occur in a more authentic and frequent manner when teams collect real evidence of thinking, and taking the time to be planful for the levels of cognition, moves students and teams further and faster while increasing student ownership of their learning

C.Welch 6/17/22