Most teachers agree that good, solid assessment is part of good, solid instruction—but creating good assessments is "an additional burden" for teachers, said Larry Lewin, a teacher on leave from the Eugene, Oreg., school district and co-author of the ASCD book Great Performances: Creating Classroom-Based Assessment Tasks (1999).
As a teacher, creating your own assessment tasks is better than relying on off-the-shelf ones because they will be aligned with the curriculum, Lewin said, but also worse because the work of creating the tasks "sucks time and energy from instruction."
To resolve this dilemma, teachers should convert parts of instruction into assessment, Lewin advised. "Teaching and assessment should be blurry." In choosing instructional tasks that will also serve as assessments, "I try to pick things that will be motivating," he said, noting that traditional tests and quizzes "motivate only the better students."
For example, to assess students' comprehension of readings from their history textbook, Lewin asks his students to draft a memo to the textbook authors explaining what aspects of the text "worked and didn't work" for them as learners.
Creating such a memo is a new and motivating activity for students, Lewin noted. "They get pumped up; they can't wait to go to the computers and create a word-processed memo." Students like the fact that their finished product looks professional. "It has the To:, From:, and Re:," he laughed. "They love that Re:!"
The memo assignment doubles as an assessment tool because it allows Lewin to assess whether his students have gained a deep understanding of the text. In giving advice to the textbook authors, "kids have to go beyond literal-level comprehension to analysis," he pointed out.
Similarly, teachers can convert fiction-reading assignments into assessments that measure students' reading comprehension or their appreciation of literature, Lewin said. Graphic organizers such as concept webs—used mainly as instructional tools—can serve as assessments to give teachers insight into such questions as Did the student understand the plot development? and What did the student perceive as the strengths and weaknesses of the author's writing craft?
Lewin uses another instructional task to assess what his students have learned from watching a videotape: He gives them a worksheet with an outline of a face and asks them to fill in the thoughts of a character from the video—for example, a pioneer heading to Oregon or even a cell about to be injected with an antibiotic. During the course of the year, "I might score three of these assignments" out of many, he said, because not every task that serves as an assessment needs to be graded.
Before using a particular task as a scored assessment, "I like to do a lot of rehearsals with kids," Lewin said. Any assessment tool should be used more than once, he recommended, and the initial uses might be "self-graded or graded for one trait only." When students have had experience with the tool, then a teacher may use it as an assessment that weighs more heavily. "It should be like rehearsal and show time," he said.
Lewin emphasized that teachers need to know specifically what they are looking for from students on assessment tasks. "Create a rubric with the kids' help," he advised. Then "score a sample paper with the kids—use an example from last year with the name blocked out—so the kids will know what ‘good' looks like." And "don't feel bad if an assessment doesn't work the first time," he added. It's not unusual for them to require tweaking or fine-tuning.
As a veteran middle school teacher, Lewin has found that classroom-based performance tasks can harness adolescents' energy. Students in the middle grades are "a tough audience," he said, because they tend to be "blasé about school." But good assessment tasks "really catch these middle school students off guard," he said. The tasks "trick them into performing at the highest level."