I'm encouraged by current conversations that recognize the crucial role of assessment in teaching and learning. Such talk should remind educators of three easy-to-overlook truths. First, teachers need to have clarity about what matters most in our teaching before we start to plan or implement curriculum. Second, we must understand that, even on our best days, no matter how effective we think we are, many students will not at first understand, retain, or be able to use what we taught. So the third truth is that we must find out daily where each student is in the learning trajectory we had in mind—and should feel duty-bound to use that information to focus our teaching so that each student moves ahead.
Our current appetite for "data," however, sometimes worries me. My hackles go up when I see conversations leading educators to separate students into "capable" and "incapable" learners. I'm more troubled still when such categorizing leads us to construct fixed "remedial" and "normal" groups or classes. We underestimate both our own possibilities as teachers and our students' possibilities as learners when we do that.
In my view, we've also headed down a wrong path when we overvalue standardized test data at the cost of undervaluing daily formative assessment. Standardized test data may help us see where a learner performed last year on items that often don't line up too well with tomorrow's content. But standardized test data can't tell us much about whether a student is engaging with learning, how he is thinking, how deeply she understands an idea, or how much better the student could perform, given the opportunity.
A Two-Tiered Way to Use Data
In an earlier and less data-laden time, my teaching partners and I arrived at a two-tiered way of using assessment data for thinking and planning in our language arts program. Although at the time we were minimally informed about effective assessment practices, the general idea we landed on still makes sense to me.
We used both standardized assessment data and our teacher-created "skills" inventories to get an early sense of our 7th grade students' foundational skills. In language arts, that meant assessing things like visual comprehension, aural comprehension, supporting ideas with evidence, vocabulary, spelling, and expository writing. Standardized test data gave us a sense of how each student performed in a particular context at the end of a prior school year; our own surveys gave us a second opinion.
Often the two data sets aligned. Sometimes, they didn't. Both scenarios gave us important information. Daily observation and assessment helped us understand what students knew, understood, and could do related to our learning goals. They helped us plan for student growth at a more granular level.
We were careful to weave foundational skills into every unit we developed, so that students were always reading, writing, spelling, developing vocabulary, and speaking. We saw those skills not as ends in themselves, but as compelling tools students could use to explore ideas related to a broad range of topics.
These assessment practices, in turn, led us to two-tiered instructional design. On many days during a unit of study, our classes would explore a topic such as how writers help us understand ourselves, how advertisers influence people's thinking, or how language mirrors culture. My colleagues and I would use varied resources, specialize in different aspects of an inquiry, or express insights in different ways, but we all focused on the same big ideas.
On other days, we worked with the foundational knowledge and skills that students would need to use in an upcoming task, project, or performance assessment. Some students might work in a small teacher-led group to refine comprehension skills or examine how authors used repetition effectively. Others might be developing a line of logic for an argument on an issue related to unit content. Still others might be recording a relevant article to become part of a classroom library of audio recordings. Students worked to strengthen the foundational skills they needed to work on.
A Richer Balance
In retrospect, I think my colleagues and I were using standardized test data and learning surveys as a wide-angle camera lens. This angle gave us a sense of where each student was in the broad scope of critical skills that would propel them forward—or hold them back—as learners. We used daily, formative assessment data as a close-up camera lens—to help us follow a student's progress with the specific knowledge, understanding, and skills needed at this particular point in their learning. Our curriculum incorporated both general and specific knowledge and skills. Our instructional planning enabled all our students to engage with inviting, dynamic content—and to progress steadily in service of meaningful work.
I still like leveraging the paired but different purposes of standardized test data and formative assessment information. I still find it useful to think of curriculum as a vehicle that lets students explore ideas while incorporating foundational skills. And I still think it's important that instructional planning make time for students to grow their skills so they can explore and express ideas with increasing confidence, no matter their starting points.
Had my colleagues and I overinvested in standardized test data, it would've skewed our belief in the right of all students to work with our highest-quality curriculum. Standardized tests would have become the curriculum. Had we only invested in formative data, it would've been easy to assume it was someone else's job to teach foundational knowledge and skills. Finding the right role for each type of data helped us provide meaningful teaching that attended to students' individual needs.
