What role should teacher judgment play in assessing whether students are meeting standards? A central role, argued Elliott Asp, director of assessment for the Douglas County (Colo.) Schools. Teacher judgment is important, he said, because teachers know the most about student achievement.
For the past five years, teachers in Asp's district have been experimenting with collecting a "body of evidence" to enable them to determine (and justify) each student's score on the district rubric for particular content standards. A body of evidence must include more than one kind of assessment, Asp explained, to give a comprehensive picture of how a student is performing relative to a standard. Homework may be included in the body of evidence only when it functions as an assessment of student learning, not when it is given as practice.
A body of evidence is different from a class grade, although the two may overlap, Asp said. In determining class grades, teachers "fold in" many factors other than whether students have met a standard: behavior, effort, class participation, homework completion, and so on. A body of evidence focuses solely on whether the student has met learning goals for the class.
Julie Bailey and Lois Kellenbenz also discussed bodies of evidence at their conference session How Do We Know What They Know? Bailey is a K–12 curriculum coordinator and Kellenbenz is a strategic plan facilitator, both with the Aurora (Colo.) Public Schools.
In Aurora, a body of evidence must include multiple assessments of various types. (At least one performance assessment is required.) It must also be comprehensive enough to provide solid evidence on the important skills, knowledge, and concepts in the content area. "A body of evidence is a collection of data, not necessarily of student work," Kellenbenz noted, so it might include test scores, for example.
In Aurora, students get both course grades and rubric scores, Bailey said. Teachers use bodies of evidence to determine whether each student has attained proficiency (a score of at least three on a four-point rubric) on 34 standards. "Because of the complexity of the standards, teachers need to have enough data to make those summative evaluations," Bailey said. The Aurora schools have retained traditional grades because "it's a huge transition for parents and teachers to give up the idea of a class grade," she added.
The Aurora Public Schools' guidelines for scoring a body of evidence emphasize that the final score represents the student's achievement of the skills and knowledge in a benchmark, not effort or progress. "With standards, we're not talking about averaging grades," Bailey said. "At the end of the line—when I've taught, taught, taught, and the student has practiced, practiced, practiced—where did we end up?"