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2015: 10 Remarkable Opportunities to Improve Assessment

1. Rely on Multiple Measures: Develop and expand an array of strategies for measuring skills and knowledge.

2. Emphasize Realistic use of Differentiation and Personalization: While it is not feasible to write 25 different lesson plans, there are powerful ways to personalize learning and assessment.

3. Move Beyond Data: Numerical analysis of test scores provides part of a picture of student learning. Aim for more nuanced data collection and better evidence of higher level thinking and application of complex skills.

4. Select Technology for a Purpose: Choose and blend technology with intentional teaching and assessment.

5. Change the Formula for Success: From performance on a test to competency-based assessment that includes support for students in producing their finest work.

6. Prepare for the Future: Expand foundations of learning with more opportunities for applying, creating, collaborating, and owning learning.

7. Support Teachers: Continue to strengthen teachers as assessors through quality pre-service preparation and targeted in-service support.

8. Use the Research: Rely on high quality research while avoiding flashy sales pitches.

9. Monitor: Use the lesson of history to inform legislative decisions that will genuinely improve educational outcomes.

10. Increase Engagement: Include teachers, parents, and communities in the design, planning, implementation, reporting, and utilization of assessment.

Multiple Measures Ahead

My last posted concluded with the importance of multiple measures and flexible assessment. In today's world indicators of success stretch beyond basic cognitive skills and clear-cut actions. Higher and deeper learning is built on complex tasks that necessitate multidimensional assessments. Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when striving for these outcomes.

PLANNED: Prior to teaching and learning identify the learning outcomes and the ways they will be measured. During teaching, keep in mind the types of questions that students will be required to complete. Be sure to incorporate the necessary factual knowledge, practice for applying learning, and opportunities for evaluation, synthesis, and creation. Why would you start a race that had no ending point or even worse a constantly changing one?

PLACED: Consider when to assess and why. Do you want to determine incoming knowledge, student improvement, learning gaps, inquiry skills, or a review before the unit test? Assessment prior to learning identifies a starting point. During learning it offers direction, indications of road hazards, and guidance for next steps. After instruction it is a way to be sure that goals were achieved so there are no surprises on the summative.

PURPOSEFUL: Every assessment must have a purpose. Consider whether the assessment is aimed at recall of prior learning, tracking progress, displaying understanding, transfer of learning, or summarizing. A three legged race may assess collaboration but won't tell you which student is the fastest and multiple choice questions are not well suited for displaying creativity. To safeguard validity, select assessments intentionally.

Assessment for ALL

If I were a physician I would be trained to heal the human body; if I were a psychiatrist it would be mental malfunctions; if I were a pilot it would be managing the flight console. I am a teacher and trained to teach but I am also responsible for coping with family dysfunction, handling physical maladies, sorting through economic challenges, and managing technology.

Our efforts to homogenize learning for all has resulted in students taking the same test, at the same time, that is scored the same way, and results in data that is used for sorting and ranking students and teachers. There is a belief that this strategy will somehow reduce disparities in educational outcomes; outcomes that are dependent on so many factors beyond the control of the teacher. This in no way excuses teachers from providing the best education for every one of their students, but does mean that multiple measures of both students and teachers are crucial. Classrooms are places of variation; as such assessment should be flexible to meet the needs of all learners.

Searching for "Just Right" Benchmark Assessment

My Guest Blogger this week is Tim Flanagan who has graciously allowed me to repost his recent blog that summarizes his quest for "Just Right" Benchmark Assessment.

Searching for the "Just Right" Benchmark Assessment

I have spent the last few weeks discussing IAGDs, writing SLOs and communicating with administrators through Bloomboard, the professional growth platform my district is currently using.  The acronyms can by dizzying and learning a new platform can be frustrating, but this is a reality for teachers today.

In this post, I would like to share some online assessments I have reviewed while searching for the right tools to measure my students' growth.  Scroll down to see a summary of my findings.

My Student Learning Objectives must be measured with two Indicators of Academic Growth and Development.  These indicators are assessments that are given three times a year to measure student progress.  They can be standardized or non-standardized, and they can include teacher-created assessments.

After giving assessments last year that, in some cases, took my students three class periods to finish (that's three days times three times per year - for just one assessment!), I began searching for tools that would give me a quick snapshot of student progress in one class period.  I am lucky to work in a district that gives teachers the flexibility to problem solve and make changes when something is not working.  Below are three tools I researched, with some comments about each one.

Newsela
I have known about Newsela for a long time, but had not used it often.  On Newsela, you can have students read the same article written at different levels, so it makes it very easy to differentiate.  What I did not know it that Newsela has an assessment tool built in to some of their articles.  It is easy to find an article for your students.  For example, I searched for 7th grade articles that have quizzes and focus on text structure.  There were 20 results.  The downside?  Each quiz has only four multiple choice questions.  While I will use Newsela in class, I was looking for something more robust for my IAGD.

Edmodo Snapshots
New to Edmodo this year, Snapshots allows teachers to create assessments by choosing which Common Core Standards to measure.  Just click on the standards, and a quiz will be created on Edmodo with reading passages and four multiple choice questions for each standard checked.  This was very easy to use, but again, it was not exactly what I needed for my IAGD.

When I chose two Reading for Literature standards, an assessment was created with eight multiple choice questions.  The students had to read two separate five-page stories to answer just eight questions.  Also, Snapshots automatically sends different versions of the assessment to each student in the class, so they will not all have the same passages or questions.  I have explored other snapshots for skills such as spelling and grammar, and I am mostly disappointed with the questions.

ReadWorks.org
I finally found this site after many hours of exploring others.  ReadWorks.org seemed just right for the type of benchmark assessment I wanted to give my students.  You can easily search for passages based on the topic, type (literary or informational), Lexile Level, grade level, subject area and skill or strategy being tested.  Best of all, each of the passages comes with a set of ten questions, both multiple choice and open-ended, and the passages I reviewed were all about 1-2 pages long.  Perfect for a one-class-period assessment.

The only downside I found with ReadWorks.org was that teachers cannot assign the assessment online.  I was able to get around this, however, by taking the assessment and typing it into Edmodo. Besides having Edmodo score it for me, I was also able to modify the questions to suit my needs.  I wanted to focus on certain standards to match my SLO, so changing the questions was easy.  My students had the experience of taking an online assessment, and I was able to tailor it to match my SLO - the best of both worlds. 

As promised, here is a summary of my findings.

Tool	Mult. Choice	Open- Ended	# of Questions	Passage Length	Notes
Newsela	Yes	No	4 per article	1-2 pages per standard	Same article offered in various Lexile Levels
Edmodo Snapshots	Yes	No	4 per standard	4-5 pages per standard	Separate articles for each standard; not all students receive the same quiz
ReadWorks.org	Yes	Yes	10 per article	1-2 pages	Assessment not online, but can be typed into Edmodo, Google Forms, etc., and customized.

Culturally Responsive Assessment

Every learner is unique. Each views the world through their personal experiences. These viewpoints are shaped by the cultural lens of customs, beliefs, practices, and symbols. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, white students are no longer the majority and these demographic changes present new challenges and opportunities. Diversity is the new norm in the classroom.

In any classroom, assessment is a complex process that becomes more so when each student brings different background to the text or topic. George Spindler’s (1988) idea of “Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange” resonates in today’s schools where learning and assessment must be respectful, non-judgmental, and adaptive. Here are three strategies to make this work.

Flexible Content and Context: I came across this math problem in a set of standardized test questions: Workmen use ½ of a pallet of pavers to build 3 steps into the school. Each step was the same size. How many pallets did they use for each step? If Veronique is unable to distinguish between a pallet, a palette, and a palate, how can she solve this problem? To unlock understanding we must deconstruct the questions into comprehensible nuggets and feasible sequences.                                            

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It's Not Business; It's Personal

There are many prevailing myths in education: more testing will produce better students, charter schools outperform public schools, computers can teach as well as humans, student test scores are a reflection of the quality of their teacher.

According to George Madaus “tests can and should be used to judge and hold schools accountable but not students because tests don’t adequately represent what kids know and can do.” He explains that there is always a statistical margin of error that could be due to factors such as the temperature in the testing room, a hungry child, or one who just had a fight with her best friend.  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/schools/interviews/madaus.html

  

Let’s consider that argument for a moment. He is saying that we should be concerned with how well the teachers at a school teach to the test but should not take into account the learner’s prior achievement, aptitudes, attitudes or settings. He believes that children and their individual circumstances are unique. But, isn’t that true of teachers too? 

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