What Really Is Authentic and Adaptive Assessment?

According to Wiggins (1990), "authentic assessment is when we directly examine student performance on worthy intellectual tasks". In order to truly enhance student learning, I believe backwards design is so important. Start with the learning targets and assessment, then build your lessons from there. Authentic assessment takes time and requires a good deal of thought and consideration. However, the end result for the student makes it all worth it.

In my inquiries and readings on authentic assessment, I came across many great resources. One of them is the book titled Basics of Assessment: A Primer for Early Childhood Professionals by Deborah J. Leong, Elena Bodrova, and Oralie McAfee. These wonderful authors point out that authentic assessment focuses on "the situation or context in which the child performs the task as well as what the child is asked to do.” Assessments such as these require that "children apply their knowledge and skills in a situation that is meaningful to them and is within the range of typical classroom activity.”

While limitations such as time or resources can make authentic assessments very challenging to develop and implement, this type of assessment is absolutely vital to student engagement and positive learning outcomes. Authentic assessment thrives on the basis of construction and application of ideas, whereas traditional assessments focus on recall and/or recognition. When students are able to make the correlation between the acquisition of new knowledge and how it applies to the real world, then the learning becomes meaningful.

According to the article titled "Authentic Assessment" by the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at the Indiana University Bloomington, authentic assessments have many advantages over traditional tests. One of the major advantages is that authentic assessments are more likely to be more legitimate and accurate than the standard traditional test. Authentic assessments will look different for each student, therefore requiring much more time and effort on the teacher's part.

So how can educators develop meaningful authentic assessment tasks? In the video titled Authentic Assessment at School of the Future, Andy Snyder was quoted as saying, "In terms of authentic work within the school, it needs to be something that the student really cares about, and that the teacher really cares about. So if we want a school where it's just really making real change, and really addressing students in their hearts, then we can't have curriculum that is just going through the motions." I couldn't agree with this statement more. I think it is important to really reach students in ways that tug at their heartstrings. This goes hand-in-hand with relationship building. When you are able to identify and capitalize on students' needs and desires, their comfort level increases, they buy in to their learning, and a level of trust is built.

In addition to authentic assessments, another important piece of the personalized classroom is adaptive assessments. In an article by ASCD titled The Potential of Adaptive Assessment, a thought-provoking question was asked: "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?" So what exactly is adaptive assessment? According to Ashleigh Crabtree (2021) for Curriculum Associates, "adaptive assessments are tests that individually assess students by providing a tailored set of test questions to determine where they are in their learning."

Here are some quick adaptive assessment facts:

They are typically responsive in nature, meaning the test pulls questions from a large pool of questions based on how the student is answering.
Not every student will get the same set of questions
They are not "fixed-length" assessments. Some students could have more or fewer questions than others.
Adaptive assessments are designed in such a way that students will answer some questions incorrectly.
Adaptive assessments provide such valuable feedback and data on what students do and do not know, therefore allowing teachers to tailor the curriculum to their specific needs

My school uses a form of adaptive assessment for math called Dreambox. Dreambox is a great program that tailors the questions to the student. Teachers are also able to go back and assign remediation lessons for standards that the students struggled with.

Preparing Learners To Self-Assess

Teaching students the importance of self-assessment is a necessary element of the personalized classroom. This has been a big focus at my school this year. We want students to be aware of where they are in their learning journey. One reason is for this is to let students know that it is normal if they don't know or are struggling with a particular standard or concept. With this comes the realization of growth and I think that can excite even the most reluctant learner.

Self Assessment

One way that we encourage self assessment with our students at my school is by using a learning target model. This model is formed like a bullseye, with different colors for each of the rings. At the beginning of a lesson or unit, students will self-assess by identifying which color they feel they fall within.

For my special education students on an IEP, I use the form you see to the left. We look at their particular IEP goals and create I can statements. As we work toward this goal, I will periodically check in with the students to see how they are feeling about their progress toward their goal. Where do they feel they fall on the learning target model, as it relates to their IEP goal. This is invaluable information that can be shared with parents during their IEP meetings.

When I teach in the co-taught setting, we also encourage students to reflect on their learning by showing growth from their pre-test to the post-test. We then encourage students to self-assess their learning by identifying pluses and deltas at the end of the unit. The pluses are things that the students feel went well and that they enjoyed during the unit. The deltas are things that they feel could have been better or things they would have liked to do differently.

Another way that I encourage self-assessment is by using highlighters when students turn in work. I have a cup of highlighters next to the bin where they turn in their work. The students highlight their name based on how they feel about their learning and assignment. I wanted to keep the highlighter colors the same as our learning target model so there wasn't a whole lot of confusion with the colors. Therefore, there are green, yellow, blue, and pink highlighters in the cup. It took a while to teach the students that the green highlighter did not mean they were good to go and understood what they were working on. However, having a large poster of the learning target model on display in my classroom was very helpful and I often catch the students referring back to that. This method is a win-win because students are truly self-assessing in a simple way, and there are also fewer assignments that are missing names.

The last method of self-assessment that I use in my classroom is probably my students' favorite method. When students feel that they have achieved the blue or pink level on our learning target bullseye model, I allow them to go on Flipgrid and "teach" a mini lesson. One thing that I have noticed is that this method of self-assessment allows the students to truly identify if they have mastered a concept. The pink area on our learning target model states that if they are in that area, they can teach the concept to a peer. You can see the student on the left holding up a white board and walking through the steps to show that she can teach her IEP goal.

Multiple Means of Demonstration

Multiple means of expression or student demonstration is an important part of Universal Design (UDL). According to Posey (n.d.), "UDL guides the design of learning experiences to proactively meet the needs of all learners." One of the major goals of UDL is to create and inspire intentional and motivated learners. In a true UDL classroom, students will rarely be doing the same thing in the same way at the same time.

Multiple Means of Expression in my Small Group/Resource Classroom

My students get to choose the way they would like to "show what they know". Multiple means of expression looks a little bit differently in my small group setting. It looks different because the students are not necessarily working on the same topic or goal. In the ELA small group setting, one student could be working toward a main idea and key details goal, while another could be working toward a phonics goal.

Auditory Expression with FlipGrid

Students represent information verbally and also visually by recording FlipGrid videos. This particular example shown to the left was a "Would You Rather" scenario where the students had to explain their reasoning. Students could also choose to demonstrate their thinking by sharing their screen or by simply using a white board.

Visual Expression with product creation

Students can also visually represent information by creating products. My students know they can always create a poster using construction paper, or participate in a craftivity to demonstrate their understanding.

Kinesthetic Expression with hands-on activities

Whether I am teaching in the small group setting or in the co-taught setting in the general education classroom, I believe in the power of having fun while learning by having students participate in hands-on activities. I find myself always trying to think outside the box and trying to find new and exciting ways for my students to practice their skills. To the left you can see some examples of these hands-on activities. Most recently, I transformed our learning space into a construction zone so the students could "build" equivalent fractions. I have invited students into my "donut shop" as they started the beginning stages of their opinion writing on the best type of donut. I have repurposed red solo cups so that students could practice 3-digit addition and subtraction by building cup towers. I have even transformed my classroom into an operating room so students could perform surgery on numbers to practice place value.

Assessments

Diagnostic

FastBridge by Illuminate Ed. is a great tool not only for screening and diagnostic information, but also for progress monitoring. We use FastBridge at my school to conduct "Universal Screening", as well as to progress monitor our EIP and some IEP students. Within the FastBridge testing platform, there are two adaptive assessments that the students participate in - one for reading and one for math. "The responsive nature of these tests makes them both efficient and precise" (Crabtree, 2021).

Formative

Formative assessments are an invaluable tool to monitor student progress and achievement. The ultimate goal of formative assessments is to stay on top of and monitor a student's progress toward their learning target or goal. Again, because I am not in the typical, general education classroom, I conduct formative assessments in many different ways. In the example above, I gave this Google assignment to the whole group. I did this because it would touch on three of my student's math IEP goals, but I gave it whole group because I knew the rest of the class could use the spiral review. I knew the group as a whole could benefit from the spiral review based off of formative assessments done during our daily number talks.

Summative

Summative assessments can also look very different for me. I am not held to a certain county or even school standard when it comes to assessing my students on their IEP goals. Majority of the time, I give my students their summative assessments via Google Forms. This allows me to collect data quickly and easily and these are the assessments I use to report data on.

References

Crabtree, A. (n.d.). What are adaptive assessments? why do they seem so difficult? Curriculum Associates. Retrieved February 2, 2022, from https://www.curriculumassociates.com/blog/what-are-adaptive-assessments

McAfee, O., Leong, D., & Bodrova, E. (2006). Basics of assessment: A Primer for early childhood educators. National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Mueller, J. (n.d.). Authentic Assessment Toolbox. Authentic assessment toolbox home page. Retrieved February 4, 2022, from http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/index.htm

Posey, A. (2021, April 1). Universal Design for Learning (UDL): A teacher's guide. Understood. Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://www.understood.org/articles/en/understanding-universal-design-for-learning

UDL Principle II: Multiple Means of Expression. UDL Principle II: Multiple means of expression. (n.d.). Retrieved February 3, 2022, from https://ssbp.mycampus.ca/www_ains_dc/Introduction7.html

Wiggins, Grant (1990) "The Case for Authentic Assessment," Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation: Vol. 2 , Article 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/ffb1-mm19 Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol2/iss1/2

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