Authentic and Adaptive Assessment
Authentic and Adaptive Assessment
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Authentic and adaptive assessments are very beneficial for our students. Traditional assessments certainly have their place in our classrooms and are useful, but we should not be using them 100% of the time. According to the GAPSC Standards for Personalized Learning, teachers should be implementing assessments that are "varied and data-rich performance that are on-going, authentic, flexible, and relevant".
In Linda Darling-Hammond's TEDx video about testing, she points out that in the real world, students will not be handed test after test on which they select from multiple choices; there has been an increase in demand for more authentic skills such as higher-order thinking and complex communications. When our students are out in the workforce after their schooling is complete, they are going to be handed real-life tasks, and they are going to have to know how to solve the problem without being given a list of options. Wiggins states that teachers should provide their students with assessment opportunities that mirror what the priorities and challenges found in real life so that they will be prepared. Furthermore, researchers at Indiana University Bloomington have found that the most effective authentic assessments not only assess student learning but also teach students and improve their skills and understanding at the same time. Traditional assessments test students' knowledge at that time on that assessment; authentic assessments allow students flexibility and room to grow while completing the assessment. The assessment can be a learning opportunity in itself. Mueller has provided a toolbox with ideas for authentic assessments across all curricula and has included a helpful chart of what a traditional assessment looks like vs. an authentic assessment. Some of the ideas from his toolbox include writing essays, analyzing films, identifying goals, designing experiments, recording and graphing data, peer editing, roleplaying, creating a skit, conducting an interview, and more. These are all tasks that mimic things that students may be asked to do in the future when they are out in the workforce, and they all include transferrable skills across multiple career pathways. Implementing these kinds of assessments can certainly take more time for the teacher, especially when it comes to grading, but it also provides teachers and students with more comprehensive feedback and better ways to self-assess. Rubrics are an effective way to judge these kinds of assessments, and in Nolan's article about single-point rubrics, she provides an example of a single-point rubric that also incorporates "glows and grows" so that students are better able to self-reflect as well as keep a growth mindset.
Also effective in a personalized learning environment are adaptive assessments. The ASCD poses a thoughtful question: "If we believe that education should meet each student's academic needs, why wouldn't we use assessments that adjust to their individual achievement levels?" As adaptive assessment is an assessment that uses student responses to adjust the challenge level for each individual student. In order for it to work, a question bank, a measurement scale, a scoring process, a mechanism for selecting the appropriate questions, and reports for relating scores are all needed. A short adaptive assessment provides just as accurate of a measure of a student's current achievement level as a traditional assessment that is twice as long, and each student faces an appropriate challenge level for their needs vs. some feeling like it is too easy and some feeling like the entire assessment is too hard. An example that is used by some schools in the United States is Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) testing, which measures students' abilities in math, reading, and language arts. Most schools systems are still using traditional standardized assessment, so getting our education system to a point where adaptive assessment is the norm will take time.
Preparing Learners to Self-Assess
Preparing Learners to Self-Assess
One way that I prepare learners to self-assess is by using a "ticket out the door" at the end of class. My class is very fast-paced because students are receiving Latin I credit in the fall semester and Latin II credit in the spring semester, so we are moving at a pace of about a chapter a week.
Self-assessments are very important with the pacing we need to implement, and I find a ticket out the door to be very effective, because a student can take a second to really think and summarize how they are feeling. I can then take these tickets and write personalized feedback for the student to receive as soon as they come in the next day.
Students have told me that in particular, the question about how they feel today vs. yesterday helps them reflect and self-assess their progress the most, because they have to consider how comfortable the felt on the previous day, and then they have to rank how they are feeling today. These tickets out the door become part of their "portfolio" of work that they keep in their binders/folders in order to progress leading up to each summative assessment.
On the first day of each chapter, we begin by going through the new vocabulary list. We brainstorm ways to remember the words and what they mean (such as relating the Latin word "equus" with "equestrian" to remember that it means "horse". Students receive examples of the words in action, and then we do our first practice activity either on Blooket or Gimkit. The students look at their percentage correct on the activity to gauge their current understanding, and then they go through the list to pick out which words were the hardest for them. Once they identify those words, their goal becomes finding ways to remember those words as they see them in our Latin stories. Throughout the chapter, they continue to self-assess on their vocabulary knowledge, and they compare to their results on day 1.
Another way that I have my students self-assess with a set of "I Can" statements. This helps them self-assess their abilities, because they have to really reflect and think about whether they really have shown mastery on each statement before they check it off.
If a student is self-assessing and is not sure whether or not they are ready to check off a statement, we can sit down and have a conference together while we look at their portfolio of work or that day's current Latin story to see how many times they have been able to complete each item successfully. This always leads to productive conversations in which the students are able to truly assess what their current ability level is. Pulling out work from their portfolio is especially helpful, because students can evaluate their progress from the first day of the new concept to their current work in progress. Students are often surprised that they know more than they think they do!
Multiple Means of Demonstration
Multiple Means of Demonstration
As part of the Latin curriculum, students learn about different elements of Roman culture. Our adopted textbook series is the Cambridge Latin Course, and in Unit 1, the students follow a family in Pompeii. In Stage 12, the final stage of the unit, their cultural topic is the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. We had read the Latin stories related to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and what happened to our characters, we had read through the discussed the historical and cultural information as well as viewpoints, and we had discussed the science behind the eruption. After this, I had students participate in a mini project of their choice to demonstrate their understanding of what occurred during the eruption.
This student chose to use a fake Twitter Direct Message website to provide a few conversations between our characters that also included some of the vocabulary and historical information related to the eruption. He used our characters because he felt he could make the conversations seem more real, but he wrote in a style he and his friends might use on a daily basis to pull in the Twitter realism. It certainly made it more authentic for him, because it put the historical and cultural information within a context that was easier for his peers to understand.
This student chose to create a fake newspaper article as if she had been on the ground, receiving news about the eruption, and then she had written this article for the survivors a week after the fact. She included a lot of information about the warning signs as well as eyewitness reports of the pyroclastic flow. She also included quotes from our story characters, which was great because she pulled in the Latin quotes from our stories and then translated them into English.
This student and her friend both chose to write diary entries with their account for August 23 and 24 in which they survived. She wrote about escaping to the countryside before continuing her journey to the harbor and heading to the city of Naples. She pretended to be a friend of some of our characters, so she wrote an alternate storyline for a couple of them, all while including the historical information for the eruption. After this assignment, this student and a peer chose to create another project in which they wrote an account of their journey to tell the emperor what had occurred!
The Latin standards related to this content are the standards for Cultural Perspectives, Practices, and Products (CU) and Connections and Comparisons (CC).
CLI.CU1: The students demonstrate an understanding of perspectives, practices, and products of the Greco-Roman culture.
CLI.CU2: The students interpret cultural practices of the Romans.
CLI.CC1: The students reinforce and further the knowledge of other disciplines through the study of Latin.
CLI.CC2: The students acquire information and recognize distinctive viewpoints via the study of Latin and the Greco-Roman civilization.
Since the standards are so vague, the assignment was very open-ended. There are not particular standards for each cultural/historical topic, so these standards are overarching for the entire course.
I had certain information from the cultural readings that I wanted them to include, and they also had to include at least 6 vocabulary terms either from the stories or the reading, as well as some of the scientific information we learned about pyroclastic flows. Through their words, whether in first person or third, I had to be able to tell what the viewpoints were about the eruption, and they had to demonstrate their understanding of the event.
All three of these assessments demonstrated students' understanding of the event and the cultural practices and viewpoints as well as how vocabulary and science tied into their cultural knowledge.
Assessment Types
Assessment Types
Diagnostic
A diagnostic assessment is used to determine where a student is at in their academic progress at the beginning and/or end of instruction. It can also be used to identify "glows and grows" for the student to reflect upon. At the beginning of Latin II, I provide a diagnostic assessment that goes through the content from Latin I so that students can self-assess what they know and what they need to work on before we get anything new. This semester, I used a Nearpod that ran through the different grammatical concepts from Latin I, and I assisted students during class as they were completing the assessment. This Nearpod included informational slides, some traditional assessments such as quizzes and matching pairs, and authentic assessments in the form of open-ended questions. Students were asked to translate Latin sentences/passages into English as well as identify and pull evidence for grammatical structures. These two tasks mirror what might be asked in real life when working with a Latin text.
Formative
For each chapter, two of the overarching goals are being able to recognize and use the new vocabulary words as well as the new grammatical structure(s) when reading a Latin passage. Along the way, we read multiple stories and interact with them in different manners. One way for a student to self-assess as well as demonstrate the meaning of a Latin passage is through a comic strip. This is one that one of my Latin II students recently completed over a story called "caerimonia" which was about a ceremony in Roman Britain. Comic strips allow students to think critically because they have to illustrate in one box everything from that smaller passage of Latin, which makes it more authentic because of the skills they are using. Also, it helps them really reflect and assess whether they can proficiently read the Latin and know what is occurring. Each story that we read leading up to the summative assessment is a formative in which we reflect on how students are progressing along with vocabulary and grammar, as well as figuring out strengths and weaknesses for them to work on.
Summative
This student work sample is from two girls in my 3rd block Latin II class. It was a summative assessment over Stage 15, including vocabulary words, grammar, and culture. Students had multiple options for completing this assessment, and these two students chose to create a presentation in which they were a teacher. For this slide that you can see here, they found an example of a relative clause (the chapter's new grammatical topic) from a story they read in class. They have broken down which part of the sentence is the relative clause, the relative pronoun, and the antecedent, and they have included a translation with an explanation. One of these students is considering becoming a teacher in the future and the other is considering going into business, so they both will need to be able to make an informative presentation that teaches/explains a concept to a whole group of people. It also incorporated critical thinking skills and pulling information from other sources, which are skills they need now as well as later in college and the workforce.
References
References
ASCD. (2014, March 1). The potential of adaptive assessment. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/the-potential-of-adaptive-assessment
Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (2021). Authentic assessment. Indiana University Bloomington.
https://citl.indiana.edu/teaching-resources/assessing-student-learning/authentic-assessment/
Georgia Professional Standards Commission. (2019, January 15). GAPSC standards for personalized learning.
https://www.gapsc.com/Rules/Current/EducatorPreparation/505-3-.108.pdf?dt=%3C%25
Mueller, J. (2016). Authentic assessment toolbox. http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/index.htm
Nolan, J. (2018, January 19). The single-point mastery rubric. Aurora Institute. https://aurora-institute.org/cw_post/the-single-point-mastery-rubric/
Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation: Vol 2, Article 2.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&=&context=pare&=&sei- redir=1&referer=https%253A%252F%252Fscholar.google.com%252Fscholar%253Fhl%253Den%2526as_sdt%253D0%25252C11%2526q%253Dwhat% 252Bis%252Bauthentic%252Bassessment%252Beducation%2526btnG%253D#search=%22what%20authentic%20assessment%20education%22
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