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December 2007/January 2008
| Volume 65 | Number 4
Informative Assessment
An Answer for the Long Term
Marge Scherer
Learning to Love Assessment
Carol Ann Tomlinson
Noted educator Carol Ann Tomlinson shares the insights that shaped her thinking about informative assessment. Informative assessment goes beyond tests and the grade book. It means assessing students both formally and informally in multiple ways and giving frequent, productive feedback on student work. Informative assessment isn't separate from curriculum or instruction; it spans student knowledge, understanding and skill. Informative assessment is about assessing students during the course of their learning to see how they're progressing. Although it looks at student readiness and student weaknesses, it broadens the scope to encompass student interests, students' preferred modes of learning, and student strengths. Tomlinson notes that the 10th understanding—that informative assessment isn't just for the teacher, that it involves a partnership between teacher and students—revolutionalized what happened in her classrooms.
The Best Value in Formative Assessment
Stephen Chappuis and Jan Chappuis
Varying definitions of formative assessment have blurred the meaning of the term and caused confusion among educators. To determine whether a test is formative or summative, write the authors of this article, we need to ask, "How are the results going to be used? and Who is going to use them? The purpose of summative assessment is to make a judgment after the learning process is finished—to assign a grade, measure program effectiveness, or determine whether a school has met adequate yearly progress. Formative assessment, on the other hand, informs the teacher and learner about the status of learning during the instructional process, allowing adjustments to achieve greater learning. A key ingredient of formative assessment is descriptive feedback that identifies the student's strengths and suggests what he or she needs to do to improve.
Assessing What Matters
Robert J. Sternberg
Conventional assessments do not meet the cognitive demands of the world today. WICS, an acronym for wisdom, intelligence, and creativity, synthesized, can provide a more meaningful model. Findings from the Rainbow Project, conducted by the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise, showed that assessing students for creativity and practicality in addition to analytic skills gave a more complete picture of student abilities, more accurately predicted academic success in college, and provided more opportunities to various ethnic groups to show where they excelled. Project Kaleidoscope, which involved including on a college application questions that assessed WICS, goes beyond the Rainbow Project to include in its assessments the construct of wisdom. Results show that admitted applicants are more qualified than before and in a broader way. Moreover, the numbers of applications by underrepresented minorities increased substantially. In the 21st century, students need to be creatively flexible as they respond to rapid change. They need to be able to think critically, execute their ideas, and use their knowledge wisely. Assessments can reflect these requirements by incorporating elements that assess for creativity, practicality, and wisdom.
The Rest of the Story
Thomas R. Guskey
To improve student learning, classroom formative assessments should provide feedback, (identifying students' individual learning difficulties) and be followed up with correctives (specific remediation strategies). Effective corrective activities, writes Guskey, teach the material using a wide range of learning styles and intelligences. He describes various types of corrective activities, including reteaching, tutoring, cooperative teams, academic games, alternative textbooks, learning centers, and others. He shows how a teacher can organize classroom time to follow up formative assessments with both corrective activities for students who have not yet achieved mastery and enrichment activities for those students who have achieved mastery. The skillful use of correctives, writes Guskey, enables teachers to realize the benefits for formative assessment.
Changing Classroom Practice
Dylan Wiliam
Research has shown that effective formative assessment has the potential to greatly increase student achievement. In working with schools attempting to implement effective formative assessment, the author and his colleagues have learned that the necessary changes in classroom practice, although often apparently quite modest, are actually difficult to achieve. To enable teachers to improve their formative assessment practices, schools need to provide a new kind of professional development that focuses on changing teachers' actions in the classroom rather than on giving teachers more information. Teacher learning communities—small groups of teachers who meet regularly to explore their practice—provide this kind of support. The article gives practical suggestions for planning and sustaining teacher learning communities.
Data in the Driver's Seat
Paul Bambrick-Santoyo
In 2003, Greater Newark Academy and North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey, began using data from interim assessments to improve student achievement. Teachers were given the assessments ahead of time so that they could ensure that they were teaching to the level of mastery required. After the assessments, teachers examined the data to better understand the reasons behind student errors. Teachers then kept the data on hand and carefully planned their instruction based on what the data revealed. After three years, students' scores on state assessments had improved considerably, outstripping the district average by at least 30 points on each assessment and surpassing the statewide average in almost every category. Teachers who had formerly resisted the changes were now ardent supporters of data-driven instruction.
The Road Less Traveled
Chris W. Gallagher and Suzanne Ratzlaff
Instead of opting for state tests, Nebraska has developed its own statewide system of local assessments: the School-based, Teacher-led Assessment and Reporting System (STARS). STARS is based on high-quality classroom assessments, such as student-involved visual rubrics. Although the primary purpose of classroom assessments is to inform teaching and learning, data derived from these assessments can be used for accountability purposes. Nebraska's assessment system has led to significant improvements in student performance and assessment quality at all grade levels. Student scores on the statewide writing assessment have risen sharply, the state's high performance on nationally normed tests has remained stable, most demographic groups are showing improved performance, graduation rates are up, and dropout rates are down in the state as a whole, especially in its urban districts. Moreover, a number of important shifts have occurred in the culture of Nebraska schools since the inception of the program. These include a renewed focus on student learning, greater assessment literacy, improved professional development, better use of data, and more teacher leadership.
Feedback That Fits
Susan M. Brookhart
Brookhart maintains that clear, positive teacher feedback, which provides precise information on the next steps a student can take to reach their learning targets, is at the heart of formative assessment. Because feedback is closely tied to students' feelings of self-efficacy, it can be destructive as well as motivating. Drawing on research and her own experiences as an educational consultant working on assessment issues, Brookhart describes what she thinks makes for powerful feedback—both in terms of how it's delivered and its underlying message. Good feedback focuses on both the work and the student's process; relates feedback to a learning goal; describes work products rather than passes judgment; and is positive and specific. Brookhart gives an example of both unhelpful and helpful feedback on one elementary student writing sample.
Self-Assessment Through Rubrics
Heidi Andrade
Many teachers hesitate to implement student self-assessment because they believe that (1) students will just give themselves As, and (2) students won't use the results to revise their work. These concerns may be valid, writes Andrade, for self-evaluation, in which students are involved in assigning their own grades. Self-assessment, in contrast, is formative—students assess works in progress to find ways to improve their own performance. Rubrics can support thoughtful self-assessment if teachers make expectations clear and give students the support they need to use the feedback from self-assessment to improve their work.
Taking Formative Assessment Schoolwide
Douglas Fisher, Maria Grant, Nancy Frey and Christine Johnson
Fisher and his colleagues argue that for too long schools have focused efforts on improving the elements of curriculum, instruction, and assessment in isolation from each other. Instead, curriculum, instructional strategies, and assessments need to be closely bound together, and implementing schoolwide formative assessment is a practical way to do so. The authors describe their successful two-year experiment with schoolwide formative assessment at Hoover High School in San Diego, California. During weekly time set aside for teachers teaching the same course to collaborate, they used a four-step process to help common assessments drive instruction: developing pacing guides, designing common assessments, conducting item analysis, and engaging in instructional conversations. The authors tell how student achievement increased over these two years and share lessons learned.
The Right Way to Measure Growth
Paul E. Barton
Our current sanctions-based accountability system has one basic flaw: its reliance on a single end-of-year test. End-of-year tests measure students' total knowledge, no matter when or where they acquired it. Comparing such end-of-year scores does not take into account how students in one academic year differ in their educational preparation from students in another academic year. A dual approach—which measures both gain and performance on end-of-year tests—would more accurately assess our students and schools. Students would take two forms of the same test, in the fall and the spring. This before-and-after approach would not only measure gain, but also inform the teacher of students' gaps in learning at the beginning of the school year. A focus on disaggregated gain scores would bare inequalities in achievement at all levels along the achievement scale. This dual approach would identify schools that need extra supports, whether or not they meet accountability standards or are subject to sanctions. In addition, it would make time for the use of formative assessments and implement proven approaches to raise the achievement of students in all low-scoring schools.
Homework: A Few Practice Arrows
Susan Christopher
Middle school Spanish teacher Susan Christopher shares her strategies for using homework and grades to help students achieve learning standards. Christopher likens homework to a musician's rehearsal before a concert or an athlete's practice before a big game. She collects student homework, comments on it, and uses it to guide her instruction, but she does not count it toward students' grades. Assignments are graded based on the standards being assessed so that one test or project often has several different grades, and feedback to parents and students show student progress toward standards instead of percentage scores.
The View from Somewhere
Maja Wilson
Wilson asserts that the quest for absolute objectivity in scoring student writing—including the use of rubrics—creates harmful distance between reader and writer and ignores the unique, transactional characteristics of writing. She puts forth the view of Rosenblatt and other literacy theorists that meaning and value of texts are not rigidly fixed by the writing on the page, but develop in relationship to the experiences each reader brings to the text. Thus, judging writing requires a collaborative and evolving process rather than a rigid formula, even a formula like a rubric created by teachers themselves. Wilson describes a situation in which the agreement demanded by rubrics led to teachers' censoring their individual perspectives on a piece of writing, resulting in tidy but bland scoring. She argues instead for "assessment as conversation" in judging writing, a model of assessment based on an illuminating exchange of the teacher's and student's perspectives and background knowledge about a piece of writing.
Classroom Walk-Throughs
Jane L. David
What Is Instructional Leadership?
Thomas R. Hoerr
Making Strategic Planning Work
Douglas B. Reeves
How to Play the Appraisal Game
W. James Popham
Left Behind—By Design
Amy M. Azzam
ASCD Community in Action
Best of the Blog
What Student Writing Can Teach Us
Mark Overmeyer
The author looks at how teachers evaluating student writing can use rubrics not just as a scorecard or grading device, but rather as prompts to help them read each piece of writing more deeply. He explains how, as a district literacy coordinator, he has seen teachers spend much time and mental energy wrestling with score agreement. When teachers turn instead to sharing nuanced views of a writer's strengths and weaknesses in the areas suggested by the rubric, rubrics can become an element of formative assessment. Teachers need to look beyond the search for a score to tease out what each piece does well, what it lacks, and what instructional steps could help fix those issues. Overmeyer gives an example of how a group of teachers adapted their state-created rubric into a chart, detailing strengths, weakness, and teaching points, for classroom teachers to use as a formative assessment resource.
A Little Help from My Friend
Steve Gardiner
English teacher Steve Gardiner shares the story of his professional collaboration with Vince Long, a technology education teacher and computer guru. Their collaboration began when Gardiner asked Long for help understanding how to use technology. Eventually, both teachers decided to enroll in a master's program in educational technology, for which they developed a Web site on Six Traits Writing. Throughout their relationship, the two teachers have helped each other take on new professional and personal challenges, such as National Board certification and a personal fitness regimen. Their contrasting interests and backgrounds have enabled them to achieve things together that would have been more difficult to take on alone.
Informative Assessment
Teresa Preston
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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