This summer has been spent thinking about assessment and more importantly, how to assess my students in a way that benefits their overall learning the most. I started this summer by posting three thoughts about assessment, and I have returned to those thoughts every couple of weeks. Now, as the summer draws to a close and I am preparing for the start of a new year I have an updated, reworked, perspective on assessment. If you would like to read that first blog post you can find it here.
Having completed the work focused on assessment I have three new ideas. First, my feedback should result in students understanding their learning more deeply. Second, it is critical that I allow my students to assess their own work and the work of their peers. And third, the assessments I give should work together to give an overview of how student learning has developed over time. Some of these ideas are similar to my original three beliefs, but I feel my assessments in this new year will be more beneficial to my students than they have been previously.
In the first iteration of my beliefs about assessment I stated that “assessment should not be final,” but I have adjusted that thought to look more at how my feedback affects students’ overall learning. This allows for the possibility that an assessment can be final, but still emphasizes the importance of my feedback, specifically emphasizing that my feedback leads to the next possible learning step (Hattie & Temperly, 2007). Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) explain how critical it is for both the student and the teacher to have a shared understanding of the objective and how the student’s work is aligned with that objective. My feedback is an opportunity to align the objective and the student’s work when a student does not perform well, and then provide an opportunity for that student to make a new attempt at demonstrating their learning. But just providing feedback is not enough; after students receive feedback and additional instruction, they need an opportunity to demonstrate their new learning. Sams and Bergmann (2013) give students multiple opportunities to retake an assessment if they are unhappy about their performance. With quality feedback, and multiple opportunities to demonstrate new learning assessment is not punitive, and ultimately supports overall student learning. While I still agree that assessment should not be final my work this semester has proven how critical it is that my feedback supports, encourages, and guides student learning so that when they are given the chance to retake an assessment they understand what they got wrong the first time, why they got it wrong, and how to fix it next time. Just giving students a chance to retake an assessment is not enough, my feedback has to serve as a support for their ongoing learning.
My second belief is that a student’s self-assessment is critical. This is the evolution of my prior belief that students should be involved. I think the root of each of these statements is the same, but I feel it is necessary that my focus shift from thinking the student only needs to be involved in the outcome of their assessment to the student being responsible for the assessment itself. This self-assessment begins by students being able to explain what they are doing, why they are doing it, how their work will help them, and ultimately how they will show they have learned the intended lesson (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). If students are not able to explain those elements of their work then they will not be able to assess that work. To support their understanding of why they are doing work and how it will help them adding reflective journals and self-reflection is important to the overall body of assessment as Shepard (2000) argues, and supports as simply being good teaching practice. Reflective journaling gives students the chance to think through the work they are doing and demonstrates to me their understanding of the work. It provides additional context for my assessment and extends the data I am able to collect about their overall learning. As a starting point, students need to learn how to assess the work they are doing, but starting with self-assessment might not be the most effective introduction to this process. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick suggest introducing students to self-assessment by allowing them to assess their peers’ work first. This provides some separation from the work itself and begins to teach the students to be objective about the quality of the work.
My third belief about assessment is a complete departure from the first draft of these three beliefs. Previously I explained that assessment should inform me as much about my performance as a teacher as my students’ performance on the assessment. And while I should still consider how well I explained and taught the material, that is not one of the most important considerations of assessment as a whole. It is more important that the assessments I give fit together as a larger body of work to demonstrate student learning. One assessment is not enough to demonstrate a student’s successful mastery of new content or to determine their failure to master that content. However, taking diverse work samples, like a student portfolio that allows for larger reflections about a student’s growth and their strengths is a better assessment of their performance (Niguidula, 2005). And there are great benefits for students when their work is a part of a portfolio as well. Black and Wiliam (1998) explain how students can be more motivated when their work is a part of a portfolio that emphasizes growth rather than singular summative assessments. A portfolio supports student learning and encourages more meaningful feedback because student growth is the focus rather than a grade at the end of an assessment. Additionally, when students work to create a collection of work it can provide a context for their learning. I remember cramming for tests in high school and college then quickly forgetting everything I committed to short term memory. I had no context for the learning and spent my time simply memorizing facts that meant very little to me. It is important that students understand the context of their learning, especially as they move from my elementary classroom to middle and high school classrooms. Reading assessments so often focuses on answering questions about the words in a story without considering the context of those words. Gee (2003) uses the example of a basketball player dribbling up the court with two fingers raised. While a reader might be able to answer a question about what the player is doing, or how many fingers he raised, if the reader does not understand basketball and the strategy that is involved in calling a play then the actual meaning of that sentence is lost. Building a portfolio of work over time, and reviewing that portfolio periodically can give more context to the assessments students complete.
The biggest change came in my third belief. Throughout the semester the readings I completed, and the work that went along with them, did not support the idea that assessment should serve as an indicator of my performance as a teacher. While I think I should consider my role in student performance, that is not one of the most important parts of assessment as a whole. I have not used portfolios consistently enough through my career for them to come to mind as I created the first list of beliefs, but after reading multiple authors talk about how beneficial they can be, and reflecting on the few times I have successfully created portfolios of student work, I think this is an important addition. The focus on growth is my favorite part of portfolios. Encouraging students to continue working to improve their previous scores has always felt like an uphill struggle, but I think implementing a primarily summative assessment method made that work feel defeating to students. If the assessment method encouraged growth then my additional encouragement would support the purpose of the assessment (this idea has been growing from early this summer). Additionally, I am more convinced of the importance of students having the time to reflect on their learning. Last year my principal pushed for more reflective writing as an ordinary part of student’s daily work. I tried to build it in periodically, but I did not see the benefit and frequently pushed that part of my lesson plan to provide more time for in class practice. After seeing the research that supports having students reflect on their learning I regret not devoting more time to student reflection, even in a math classroom. My work this summer has convinced me that students will retain their learning more after reflective assessments, and I will have a better understanding of my student’s learning when I read those reflections. And my work on a formative assessment has helped me implement some of the benefits that technology allows for when providing feedback. In that Twitter thread I talk about the importance of students being able to read and write in order to make effective use of some of the affordances in Google Docs, but using Flipgrid makes it so much easier for an elementary student because both the student and I can record our message without having to type it out and then read it.
I am sure it is not a coincidence that the two most influential assignments this semester were designed to be completed in three iterations with feedback provided frequently. The Assessment Design Checklist has helped to solidify these three beliefs about assessment. While an assessment may not hit all five of my questions, it is a good guide to help determine how effective an assessment I am planning to use might be. And if an assessment does not most of those questions the ADC serves as a guide to determine what additions or alterations might be needed to make an assessment more meaningful. As I prepare for the start of a new school year I am excited about introducing numberless word problems through the Formative Assessment Design I created. This ongoing assessment is an ongoing body of work designed to demonstrate student growth over the course of the semester and respond to student needs as they are apparent through their work. Each day students record a quick assessment of their own work, and compare it to the assessment of a peer’s work, and it allows me to provide feedback to students then give them a chance to demonstrate their learning after receiving that feedback. The development of these three beliefs informed the creation of my FAD. Recently, I worked on creating a game that could be used to assess my students focused on the events leading up to the American Revolution. That assessment is still very much a work in progress, but as I designed the game I tried to link the frames so that an “incorrect” response would lead the player to a screen with feedback attempting to point them back in the right direction. I am still working on how I might better incorporate student self-assessment and reflections, but for now, having a tight feedback loop is a good start.
This course was a great course for me this summer. I needed the space to really think about assessment and work through so many different iterations of my own work to come to a more solid understanding of what assessment is. That would have been more challenging during a semester. I would have tried to implement ideas that were not fully formed and the eventual undesirable outcomes would have been disheartening for me. Having the time and space to really work through what I think about assessment and how I can alter my practice has been good for me, and more importantly, it will benefit my students this year.
References:
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and Classroom Learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1), 7-74.
Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112.
Nicol, D., & Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006). Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), 199–218.
Niguidula, D. (2005). Documenting learning with digital portfolios. Educational Leadership, 63(3), 44-47.
Sams, A., & Bergmann, J. (2013). Flip your students’ learning. Educational Leadership, 70(6), 16-20.
Shepard, Lorrie A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher 29(7), p. 4-14.
Wiggins, G. P. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
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