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Using Assessment to Improve Student Learning. There are two main types of assessment: Summative assessment Formative assessment. Summative assessment is used to make a final judgment about a student’s learning achievement.
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There are two main types of assessment: Summative assessment Formative assessment
Summative assessment is used to make a final judgment about a student’s learning achievement. Examples: final examinations, college entrance examinations, credentialing exams, state achievement tests, exit exams.
Other types can also be considered summative if they culminate a course of study or are used to make a decision about a student’s status or future.
Summative assessments are called high-stakes assessments, meaning that an important consequence hinges on the results of the assessment. Key questions: how generalizable are they to other situations and tasks? Do they measure authentic learning?
Formative assessment: an assessment of a not-yet-completed learning experience, designed to give the teacher information about the student’s learning needs and to pinpoint for the student the efforts that are needed to reach mastery of the learning outcome.
Formative Assessment • Low-stakes; • Useful for “just in time teaching;” • Can help develop self-assessing and self-adjusting abilities in students.
An emphasis on the improvement of student learning has naturally led to greater interest in the use of and possibilities for formative assessment. Its main purpose is to produce feedback about student learning that will be used by the teacher to focus on areas where further instruction is needed and by the student to focus on areas where further effort is needed.
Types of formative assessments • Quizzes • Journals • Learning logs • Oral questioning of students • Pre-assessments • Interviews and conferences • Comment-only marking of student work • Self-assessment metaphors for students • Checklists
So Skeptical Sammy says, “So how is this newfangled formative assessment different from the quizzes, journals, classroom discussions and exercises that I’ve been using for decades?”
Well, it may not be that different after all.
“Using classroom assessment to improve student learning is not a new idea. More than 30 years ago, Benjamin Bloom showed how to conduct this process in practical and highly effective ways when he described the practice of mastery learning. But since that time, the emphasis on assessments as tools for accountability has diverted attention from this more important and fundamental purpose.” T.R. Guskey (2003)
To determine whether you have already been using formative assessment to improve student learning, ask yourself:
Have I systematically used the information gleaned from these assessments to adjust and refine instruction?
Have I kept written records of students’ learning problems and the specific areas in which improvement is needed?
And most importantly, have I deliberately involved students in decisions about their progress, thereby encouraging ownership of their learning, spurring their motivation to try to improve, and developing their self-assessing and self-adjusting abilities?
Some basic assumptions behind the use of formative assessment to improve student learning: 1. All students can progress and improve;
2. All students can develop their self-assessing and self-adjusting abilities; 3. Teachers must make clear to students the standards and criteria for success in order for true learning to take place.
4. Effective teaching cannot take place in the absence of learning, so teachers must endeavor to promote student learning in their classrooms if they want to be considered effective teachers.
“An assessment activity can help learning if it provides information to be used as feedback by teachers, and by their students in assessing themselves and each other, to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are engaged. Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the evidence is used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs.” Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, and Wiliam, Assessment for Learning: Putting It into Practice
Quizzes • Journals • Learning logs • Oral questioning of students • Pre-assessments • Interviews and conferences • Comment-only marking of student work • Self-assessment metaphors for students • Checklists
Quizzes: used as formative assessments, selected-response type quizzes can be used to quickly check student learning and to allow students to correct misunderstandings. To be useful, quizzes should be deliberately targeted at common student misunderstandings rather than merely used to test for recall of memorized information.
Journals and learning logs: When used as formative assessments, these tools can serve to encourage and foster students’ self-assessing and self-adjusting skills and to give the teacher information about the areas students are struggling in the most.
Oral questioning of students: To make questioning a formative assessment tool, take care to frame questions as open-ended ones that will elicit both student knowledge and student misunderstanding. Try not to encourage rote recitation of textbook material as answers to questions. And be ready and willing to tell students when they have got the answer wrong, or simply when their answer reveals an aspect of the material they haven’t mastered yet!
Pre-assessments provide information about students’ skills and knowledge at the outset of instruction. The results may influence a teacher to: 1. Add a remedial lesson before teaching new material. 2. Shorten or skip a lesson or portion of a unit. 3. Recommend additional help for an individual student. 4. Quicken or slow the pace of the curriculum. 5. Flag certain skill sets or knowledge areas for more intensive practice and work.
To gain another measure of student progress in a course, a pre-assessment can be paired with a post-assessment, either at the end of a unit, a section of the term, or at the end of the term.
Comment-only marking of student work The Assessment Reform Group’s study found that comment-only marking of student work led to the strongest gains in student learning.
“Feedback given as rewards or grades enhances ego rather than task involvement - that is, it leads students to compare themselves with others and focus on their image and status rather than encourages them to think about the work itself and how they can improve it.”
“A culture of success should be promoted where every student can make achievements by building on their previous performance, rather than by being compared with others. Such a culture is promoted by informing students about the strengths and weaknesses demonstrated in their work and by giving feedback about what their next steps should be.”
While a grade has to be given at the end of the term, student progress during the term does not always have to be measured by a grade or a score. Giving students feedback about the quality of their work without grades or scores can increase motivation to improve. You can also give a grade for an assignment but still emphasize the feedback rather than the grade by writing a commentary on the work that explains problem areas in the work and gives students specific directions for how to improve.
Granted, most of us give scores and grades for every assignment because we believe that they will motivate students and alert them to learning problems. The trend has been more towards point systems and concrete measures of how students are doing, such as grade point averages being available at all times during the term. Once, we thought that this kind of constant monitoring would make students more accountable and responsible.
Has it? When you give students points rather than grades, is their ownership of their learning increased? Do they become more self-motivated to learn and to improve? Do you see much improvement after a student receives only a low grade or low score without feedback?
While you may not be able to do comment-only marking on major assignments, think about how you might supplement numerical scores and letter grades with narrative descriptions of strengths and weaknesses of a performance or project.
Self-assessment metaphors for students Help students to self-monitor their learning by offering them metaphors they can use to describe their level of mastery. Start with a simple metaphor with three levels. Some examples: traffic lights (green, yellow, or red); windshield (clear, buggy, muddy).
Another choice is novice, apprentice, expert. Students are asked to identify the one that matches their level of understanding of a lesson or concept. They then use these metaphors to focus on areas in which they need to work harder and to identify those that they don’t have to worry about.
Teachers can use the self-assessment metaphor choices to create groups or even different exercises based on the different levels of understanding, so that all students are working to their highest ability.
Checklists Checklists should include “specific indicators that describe the skills, action, or behaviors that are expected in terms of a criterion.” Kay Burke, How to Assess Authentic Learning
“Checklists show teachers and students the areas of concern early enough to be able to help students before they fail the test or the unit. They also provide teachers the opportunity to ‘change gears’ in a classroom if a large percentage of the students are not doing well.”
Example of a checklist for an online discussion forum: ___ Student shows consistent effort in posting sufficiently complete answers regularly. ___Student demonstrates comprehension of course concepts and materials in answers. ___Student exhibits mastery of course concepts and materials through appropriate application to discussion topics. ___Student exhibits independent thought through addition of new information and insights to discussion.
Anecdotal Records • Anecdotal Records: good for observing small group work. Table with one column for activity and amount of time observed. One column for each student in the group. Brief description of significant behaviors. At bottom of record, summarize implications of observation, including any planned changes.
ABC Observations Good for recording conference information. Table with “antecedent” in first box: teacher’s questions or information. Second box, behavior: student’s responses. Third box, consequence(s): what the student or the teacher (or both) will do in the future.
“Formative assessment is a process, one in which information is evoked and then used to modify the teaching and learning activities in which teachers and students are engaged.
Few of the changes introduced for school improvement have such compelling research evidence in their support as does formative assessment.” Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, Wiliam Assessment for Learning: Putting It into Practice
Now, self-assess your own level of experience and familiarity with formative assessment: Are you a novice? Are you an apprentice? Are you an expert?
Share with a colleague sitting near you your self-assessment and try to explain why you selected the one you did.
If you consider yourself a novice, do you have any desire to become an apprentice? Why or why not? If you consider yourself an apprentice, do you have any desire to become an expert? Why or why not? If you consider yourself an expert, how might you share your expertise with your colleagues who want to reach experthood?
