How do we really know if students are learning? Not just completing tasks or complying with expectations, but genuinely developing their understanding? For educators committed to making every moment of their teaching matter, collecting evidence of learning is essential.
Collecting evidence of learning is at the heart of responsive instruction. It enables teachers to make decisions within and across lessons and share student learning with students themselves and with their families/caregivers. It means paying close attention to what students say, do, and create. It also helps educators design opportunities that reveal student thinking and interpret that evidence to inform next steps. To do this effectively, we believe that teachers and teacher teams need to align their short-cycle, medium-cycle, and long-cycle assessments (Wiliam, Fisher, & Frey, 2024).
Short-Cycle Assessment
Evidence collection in short-cycle assessment occurs within a single lesson, often many times during that lesson. The evidence is intended to provide immediate feedback to both students and teachers. This can include observing students as they complete tasks, quizzes on just-taught concepts, clicker questions or polls, response cards, exit slips, personal whiteboards, and more. These assessments are brief, low-prep, and designed to give teachers instant information about what students know, misunderstand, or are ready to learn next. The power of short-cycle assessment lies not just in collecting data, but in acting on it immediately.
Medium-Cycle Assessment
Evidence collection in medium-cycle assessment occurs across several lessons or over a unit of instruction, typically spanning a few days to several weeks. The goal is to determine students’ developing understanding and increasing proficiency with the concepts and skills being taught. This evidence can include journal entries, weekly quizzes, task-completion checkpoints, drafts of written responses, concept maps, labs and simulations, cumulative reviews, diagnostic checks such as reading fluency, or group projects. Medium-cycle assessments guide decisions about pacing, reteaching, and targeted interventions.
Long-Cycle Assessment
The evidence collection in long-cycle assessment occurs over an extended period, typically covering several weeks, a full quarter, semester, or even the entire school year. The goal is to evaluate cumulative student learning and overall mastery of key concepts, skills, and standards. These assessments are often used for reporting purposes, curriculum planning, or broader instructional reflection. They can include end-of-unit or end-of-course exams, benchmark assessments, district or state standardized tests, final projects, portfolios, or performance-based tasks. Long-cycle assessments offer a summative perspective on student progress and program effectiveness. Although they do not provide immediate feedback for in-the-moment instructional decisions, they provide teachers and teams the evidence needed to identify long-term trends, set future learning goals, and inform changes to improve student learning outcomes.
They’re All Formative and Summative
We challenge the notion that short-, medium-, and long-cycle assessments must be either formative or summative. Rather than an either/or, evidence can be used formatively and summatively, as needed: For example, a quiz could be formative if used to adjust teaching the next day, or summative if it contributes to a report card grade. To take meaningful action, though, assessments must be intentionally aligned—so that evidence gathered across short-, medium-, and long-cycle assessments builds toward a coherent picture of student learning.
Alignment Is Key
It’s ineffective to evaluate students in a final assessment (long cycle) if they haven’t had opportunities to develop and demonstrate those same skills during earlier stages of instruction (short and medium cycles). The key to generating strong evidence is alignment among these cycles. For example, Ezcally Lopez, a high school chemistry teacher in San Diego, California, worked with her science team to align their assessments across cycles during a unit on equations and reactions. (See Table 1.)
The video that accompanies this column features another example of evidence collection: Charity Guinn, a kindergarten teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, focuses on early math concepts using 10 frames—simple visual tools that help students build number sense by seeing how numbers are composed. Her lesson supports foundational skills like subitizing (instantly recognizing small quantities), understanding place value, and developing a flexible sense of how numbers work. She introduces the task, then structures the lesson using collaborative learning and independent activities. As the students engage in the lesson, Ms. Guinn collects evidence—such as observing students’ completed tasks and having them record their answers on a response sheet—and asks students to self-assess and provide evidence for their learning.
From Assessment to Instructional Impact
Generating and using evidence is a key skill for all teachers. There are many formats that the evidence can take, but it should always align with learning goals and be used formatively and summatively to improve student performance. As teachers, we’re always looking for opportunities to accelerate learning, and when we have the right evidence, we can make informed and effective decisions about speeding up the lesson or providing additional examples, explanations, or practice to solidify student understanding.
Video Reflection: 10 Frames in Kindergarten
After watching the video, consider the following questions for reflection or discussion with your colleagues.
- What tools does the teacher use to collect evidence of students’ learning?
- How do the students’ peer and teacher interactions foster their learning and allow the teacher to check for understanding?
- Based on the evidence collected, what would you recommend next for this group of learners?
