Growth and Mastery Mindset

Mastery in Assessment

Mastery is a buzzword that every educator has heard, and mastery in assessment has become a rightful focus in many school settings. In his 2013 essay Towards a growth mindset in assessment, Geoff Masters asserts that"[a]ssessment and reporting processes shape student, parent and community beliefs about learning – sometimes in unintended ways." I take this to mean that when a student takes a test, they receive a score - usually a number - that at times can lead to student/parent disappointment and possibly even punishments or altered relationships driven by that score. All students are capable of success, but they cannot all be expected to learn on the timeline and pacing dictated by school districts. Assessment is not a 'one size fits all' situation.

The goal of mastery is to allow students to demonstrate that they have mastered a topic, so only providing one summative assessment opportunity for each content unit doe not allow all students adequate opportunity to demonstrate mastery. "We allow people to retake their driver’s license exam as many times as they need to in order to demonstrate competency. The same is true of other professionals such as teachers, lawyers, doctors, and electricians who are required to pass a certification/licensure exam. Reassessment is a part of our real world" (Stack, 2013). However, reassessment is not the only strategy to improve assessment mastery. In order to truly benefit students, mastery strategies need to be implemented long before a summative is given. I have created a cycle of the steps I use in my classroom to promote student mastery, displayed in the graphic below.

Pre-Assessment

Pre-assessments serve as indicators of a students' current knowledge on a topic, prior to receiving instruction. In many courses, such as Biology, students may have taken a similar class or learned select content in past years. A pre-assessment not only informs the teacher of what a student already knows but also gives the student a preview of what they will need to know.

Informed Instruction

Informed by the pre-assessment, teachers are able to construct lessons for the specific group of students they are working with. Here's an example:

• Mrs. Koch's 2nd-period class takes a pre-assessment on Genetics. There are four basic monohybrid crosses. To her surprise, every student solves all of their monohybrid crosses correctly. In 5th-period, the same pre-assessment is given. Only about 60% of the students get all of the monohybrid questions correct.

In this scenario, the 5th-period class clearly needs to have more instructional time focused on solving a monohybrid cross. Does that mean 2nd-period needs no instruction on it? No! It simply means that 2nd-period students have a higher mastery of this than their 5th-period counterparts.

Formative Assessment

"...[B]rief formative assessments provide both students and teachers with feedback about whether a particular instructional goal has been mastered" (Zimmerman & Dibenedetto, 2008). Formative assessments should be conducted often and with enough time remaining before the summative assessment that corrective instruction can be provided to address weaknesses and improve student mastery.

Individualized Feedback

Feedback is an essential part of promoting student mastery, and this is the responsibility of the teacher. Teachers may choose various methods of feedback - one-on-ones, written feedback, even co-planning sessions. Personally, I provide written feedback directly on formative assessments by writing on a paper assessment or feedback through Google Classroom. As I work on feedback, I make lists of students who are sharing their misunderstandings along with a list of common errors to inform my corrective instruction.

Correctives -or- Enrichment

Dependent on student mastery on the formative assessment, they should either be provided with corrective instruction or enrichment instruction.

• Corrective instruction can sometimes be referred to as "re-teaching" but ideally, the information should be presented in another way, if possible. Students may complete the same formative again to measure whether the corrective instruction has helped.

• Enrichment activities can vary depending on what the course is. Enrichment activities should always be educational and reinforce the content. Students engaging in enrichment might play a game, do a laboratory activity, or construct a creative assignment.

It can be difficult to manage corrective instruction and enrichment activities in the same classroom. Partnering with another teacher or working as a course team can make this process easier for teachers to conduct effectively.

Summative Assessment

The "big day" has arrived! Students all take the summative assessment. As the teacher grades summative assessments, it may be helpful to keep a spreadsheet of who has - and has not - reached mastery. It is important that the course team or school has come to a decision about what exactly "mastery" is, and that a clear grading scheme has been developed, especially for rubric-scored assessments. Summative assessment data should be collected to inform future instruction and edits to summative exams should be made when necessary.

Re-Assessment

Remediation and retest opportunities should be provided in a timely manner. Mastery in assessment means that "[t]he consequence for a student who fails to meet a standard is not a low grade, but rather an opportunity..." (Reeves, 2000). There is a vast range of mastery opportunities that may be offered after a summative assessment, including retakes, test corrections, remediation assignments, tutoring, and many different combinations of strategies.

Re-assessment strategies are not uniform at my school as a whole but rather are developed by each department and/or course team. In the Biology group at my school, we have a remediation/retest policy that we have found very beneficial so far. It allows nearly every student a chance at improving mastery, the exception being a student who has earned a perfect score on the initial summative assessment. The policy is outlined in a student-facing graphic below.

Regardless of the reason a student has not reached mastery on a summative assessment, they are all provided the opportunity to increase their score per the policy outlined above. Each score range includes an outline of the "prescribed" solution to reach mastery on their summative assessment.

Remediation score increases are determined by the department and provide students the choice to pursue a higher grade without having to take a reassessment - that choice is left to them. Ultimately, all students have a choice to participate or not to participate in these opportunities, and all outcomes are sent to parents and logged in the gradebook.

It is my belief that there should be a discussion between the teacher and student about the cause of the original score and what can be improved. Students might have failed or just performed lower than they wanted to for a variety of reasons - frequent school absences, lack of study, family issues, and mental health struggles all have impacted my students this year. Second chances are justified because not everyone learns at the same pace, and life circumstances are not static- the dynamic nature of life demands a dynamic approach to education.

Students who have a score between 0-59 must first attend tutoring in order to earn the reassessment opportunity. Without attending tutoring, they still are permitted to complete a remediation assignment for a score increase (by school requirement). When students attend tutoring with me, the session begins as a co-planning meeting. I cannot release specific test items to them per school and district policy, but I inform them of which learning targets or curriculum standards they performed lowest on, and they are responsible for suggesting what content we go over during the tutoring session as well as describing to me what they will do to prepare for the reassessment. Students who missed multiple questions from the same topic often ask me if I can 're-teach' that part, and some students attend tutoring more than once prior to completing the remediation and/or reassessment. I also have students fill out a study plan template for the following unit to better prepare for their next summative assessment. Students who fail multiple summative assessments in a row are given the opportunity to go to study skills sessions with their school counselor.

Sources

Masters, G. N. (2013). Towards a growth mindset in assessment. ACER Occasional Essays.

Reeves, D.B. (2000). Standards are not enough: Essential transformations for school success. NASSP Bulletin, 84(10), 5-19.

Stack, B. (2013). Reassessments and Retakes: A Necessary Part of a School-Wide Grading Policy. Aurora Institute.

Zimmerman, B.J. and Dibenedetto, M.K. (2008). Mastery learning and assessment: Implications for students and teachers in an era of high-stakes testing. Psychol. Schs., 45: 206-216. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.20291