Educational Leadership:Assessment to Promote Learning Abstract

publications

November 2005 | Volume 63 | Number 3

Assessment to Promote Learning

Reclaiming Testing

Marge Scherer

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Seven Practices for Effective Learning

Jay McTighe and Ken O'Connor

Classroom assessments fall into three categories—summative, diagnostic, and formative. Summative assessment occurs at the end of a unit or course of study and is therefore an insufficient tool to maximize student learning. Diagnostic and formative assessments, on the other hand, offer descriptive feedback along the way. In light of these categories, authors McTighe and O'Connor consider several assessment and grading practices that can enhance teaching and learning. Teachers should use summative assessments to frame meaningful performance goals, show criteria and models in advance, assess before teaching, offer appropriate choices, provide feedback early and often, encourage self-assessment and goal setting, and allow new evidence of achievement to replace old evidence.

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Classroom Assessment: Minute by Minute, Day by Day

Siobhan Leahy, Christine Lyon, Marnie Thompson and Dylan Wiliam

Assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment of learning, requires educators to make a major shift—from quality control in learning to quality assurance, from assessing at the end of teaching to assessing while learning is still taking place. Five nonnegotiable strategies define the territory of assessment for learning: clarifying and sharing learning intentions and criteria for success; engineering effective classroom discussions, questions, and learning tasks; providing feedback that moves learners forward; activating students as owners of their own learning; and activating students as instructional resources for one another.

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Looking at How Students Reason

Marilyn Burns

The author, an experienced teacher and teacher educator, describes how she has learned to incorporate assessment purposefully into every mathematics lesson she teaches. Such an approach, she writes, tells her whether the lesson was accessible to all students while challenging the more capable, what the students learned and still need to know, how she can improve the lesson and make it more effective, and what other lesson she might offer as an alternative. The article includes strategies for assessing students' learning through written assignments and through class discussion—for example, by asking students to explain the answers, whether or not the answers are correct; asking for more than one solution strategy; using small-group work; and asking students to restate others' ideas.

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Mapping the Road to Proficiency

Thomas R. Guskey

Thoughtfully constructed standards provide valuable direction for curriculum and instruction. But to bring about significant improvement in education, standards must be linked to students' learning experiences and to classroom assessments. The author describes the table of specifications, a planning tool for analyze standards for instruction and assessment. This tool serves two important functions: it adds precision and clarity to teaching by helping teachers break down standards into essential components; and it serves as a guide for consistency among standards, the steps needed to help students attain them, and procedures for checking on students' progress.

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Helping Students Understand Assessment

Jan Chappuis

Research has established that formative assessment is more likely to produce significant learning gains if students can answer three questions: Where am I going? Where am I now? and How can I close the gap? She offers seven strategies that teachers can use to involve students in the assessment process and ensure that students are the primary users of formative assessment information: (1) Provide a clear and understandable vision of the learning target; (2) Use examples of strong and weak work; (3) Offer regular descriptive feedback; (4) Teach students to self-assess and set goals; (5) Design lessons to focus on one aspect of quality at a time; (6) Teach students focused revision; and (7) Engage students in self-reflection and let them document and share their learning.

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Documenting Learning with Digital Portfolios

David Niguidula

David Niguidula, an education consultant who helped research the effectiveness of digital portfolios as an assessment tool in the mid-1990s, discusses core questions for schools planning to use digital portfolios. Schools must take time to identify the purpose of portfolios, plan what will go into portfolios, and decide how to assess portfolio quality. Niguidula gives snapshots of innovative ways that schools are using portfolios: to have students demonstrate mastery of standards, to dramatize students' learning curves, and to fulfill graduation expectations. Rhode Island is a leader in the approach of using portfolios to prove students have met state standards required to graduate high school. Practices at Ponaganset High School in Rhode Island are showcased.

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Making Benchmark Testing Work

Joan L. Herman and Eva L. Baker

Many schools are moving to develop benchmark tests to monitor their students' progress toward state standards throughout the academic year. Benchmark tests can provide the ongoing information that schools need to guide instructional programs and to address student learning problems. The authors discuss six criteria that educators can use to develop, select, or purchase benchmark tests: alignment, diagnostic value, fairness, technical quality, utility, and feasibility. Together, these criteria determine benchmark tests' ability to provide both accurate information about students' progress and useful feedback to improve instruction.

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Gifted and Growing

Linda Clark

When an Idaho school district initiated computerized adaptive testing, it discovered that all the growth occurring in the district was limited to the lowest-achieving students. The more proficient students, which included both gifted and above-average learners, showed little or no growth.

The assessment data showed a weak curriculum that tended to focus on what students already knew and could do. The district decided to implement a concept-based curriculum, which teaches big ideas and enduring understandings. The district also shifted to leveling, or flexible grouping, and initiated a gifted and talented program for students in its elementary and middle schools. In some of these classes, 90 percent of students met their growth targets.

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Grading to Communicate

Tony Winger

High school teacher and instructional coach Tony Winger laments how traditional classroom grading practices lead to grades becoming a distraction from learning—a commodity students feel they work the system to attain—rather than a clear message to students and parents. Teachers' passion for their subjects is too often met with students' pragmatic concerns about grades. To ensure that assigned grades reflect the learning teachers believe is most essential, teachers need to clarify for themselves and their students the knowledge, types of reasoning, skills, and connections between abstract concepts and life that students must take away from a given course. These learnings—as well as nonacademic skills such as completing assignments on time—can be broken into grade components that are assessed separately and then averaged into an overall class grade. Winger demonstrates how he has used this approach successfully in his high school sociology class. He gives suggestions for dealing with work turned in late and student requests for extra credit.

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Linking Formative Assessment to Scaffolding

Lorrie A. Shepard

Formative assessment and instructional scaffolding are essentially the same thing. Formative assessment uses insights about a learner's current understandings to alter the course of instruction and thus support the development of greater competence. Scaffolding refers to supports that teachers provide the learner during problem solving—in the form of reminders, hints, and encouragement—to ensure successful completion of a task. Four strategies illustrate the strong connection between formative assessment and research on learning: eliciting prior knowledge, providing effective feedback, teaching for transfer of knowledge, and encouraging student self-assessment.

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Dissolving the Line Between Assessment and Teaching

Gillian D. McNamee and Jie-Qi Chen

McNamee and Chen describe the Bridging assessment system they developed to measure performance on specific learning tasks for pre-K through 3rd-grade students. Bridging assesses an individual student's skill level on learning tasks in five curricular areas: language arts and literacy, visual arts, mathematics, science, and performing arts. The assessment tool includes a detailed 10-level rubric for each task. The authors give examples of how teachers in Head Start classes in Chicago used Bridging to assess particular students and made specific changes in how they taught those students as a result of the assessment.

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Show Me the Way

Matthew J. Dicks

Because today's students have grown up steeped in video games and the Internet, most of them expect feedback, and usually gratification, very soon after they expend effort on a task. Teachers can get quick feedback to students by showing them videotapes of their learning performances. The author, a 3rd grade teacher describes how the seemingly simply strategy of videotaping students and reviewing the tape closely with them helps his students assess—and improve—their patterns of learning. Dicks details how videotaping students enhances their learning in the areas of reading, science, and classroom behaviors. He also regularly turns the camera on himself to improve his own instructional practice.

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How Many Points Is This Worth?

Craig Huhn

A high school math teacher describes how U.S. schools unwittingly erode student learning by using assessments to emphasize the wrong goals. He claims that students have begun to see school as a “game” in which collecting the most points—seen as “capital” or wealth—leads them to success. Instead, he argues, assessment should mean being keenly aware of what students know and understand; having sufficient evidence of this understanding; and offering a grade that accurately reflects this. Only in this way will our students internalize the concept that their ultimate goal is to learn something and gain long-term understanding.

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Can Growth Ever Be Beside the Point?

W. James Popham

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Challenges of Value-Added Assessment

Harold C. Doran and Steve Fleischman

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Teacher Supervision: If It Ain't Working . . .

Joanne Rooney

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The Perils of High School Exit Exams

Deborah Perkins-Gough