Well-designed assessment can encourage active learning especially when the assessment delivery is innovative and engaging. Discussing the ways in which you're assessing with your students can also help to ensure that the aims and goals of your assessments are clear. Utilising assessment that makes use of technology, such as the use of online discussion forums or electronic submission of work, can teach students and perhaps your colleagues new skills.
If you design your assessments well they can also help to deter plagiarism by reducing the ways in which students can gather and report information. At the end of the day, taking some time to think about why, what and how you're going to assess your students is a worthwhile investment of time. It can help ensure you're assessing the skills and knowledge that you intended and it could open up new possibilities for different ways to assess your students, some of which may be more efficient and effective than the current methods you're using.
He posited the only way to improve student learning at scale was to raise the level of the content offered to students, improve the quality of instruction related to that content, and increase student engagement with that content. Elmore emphasized that all three components must be addressed before reformers can hope to see gains in student learning.
However, addressing the instructional quality component of the core requires focusing more specifically on the connections among curriculum, assessment, and instruction.
For example, Lorrie Shepard and her colleagues persuasively described how learning progressions serve as the foundation for both instruction and assessment, enabling teachers to gain greater knowledge of student learning and teacher practices.
For now, either choice must provide a defensible framework for assessment design and, more importantly, a lens for interpreting the assessment results. This foundation in content and curriculum is critical to help teachers learn about student learning and get smarter about teaching. But, the mechanism for how teachers will actually get better at teaching is still implied and not explicit.
This is a vexing problem. It is one thing to provide assessment information tied to rich curriculum, but it is another thing to help teachers improve the ways in which they foster student learning. On the second or third try, however, they may reach the same high level of performance as others did on their first. Should these drivers be restricted, for instance, to driving in fair weather only?
In inclement weather, should they be required to pull their cars over and park until the weather clears? Of course not. Because they eventually met the same high performance standards as those who passed on their initial attempt, they receive the same privileges. The same should hold true for students who show that they, too, have learned well.
Using assessments as sources of information, following assessments with corrective instruction, and giving students a second chance are steps in a process that all teachers use naturally when they tutor individual students.
If the student makes a mistake, the teacher stops and points out the mistake. The teacher then explains that concept in a different way. Finally, the teacher asks another question or poses a similar problem to ensure the student's understanding before going on. The challenge for teachers is to use their classroom assessments in similar ways to provide all students with this sort of individualized assistance. Successful coaches use the same process. Immediately following a gymnast's performance on the balance beam, for example, the coach explains to her what she did correctly and what could be improved.
The coach then offers specific strategies for improvement and encourages her to try again. As the athlete repeats her performance, the coach watches carefully to ensure that she has corrected the problem. Successful students typically know how to take corrective action on their own. They save their assessments and review the items or criteria that they missed.
They rework problems, look up answers in their textbooks or other resource materials, and ask the teacher about ideas or concepts that they don't understand. Less successful students rarely take such initiative.
After looking at their grades, they typically crumple up their assessments and deposit them in the trash can as they leave the classroom. Teachers who use classroom assessments as part of the instructional process help all of their students do what the most successful students have learned to do for themselves. 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 Bloom, , But since that time, the emphasis on assessments as tools for accountability has diverted attention from this more important and fundamental purpose.
Assessments can be a vital component in our efforts to improve education. But as long as we use them only as a means to rank schools and students, we will miss their most powerful benefits. We must focus instead on helping teachers change the way they use assessment results, improve the quality of their classroom assessments, and align their assessments with valued learning goals and state or district standards.
When teachers' classroom assessments become an integral part of the instructional process and a central ingredient in their efforts to help students learn, the benefits of assessment for both students and teachers will be boundless. Barton, P. Staying on course in education reform.
Bloom, B. Learning for mastery. Mastery learning. Block Ed. Evaluation to improve learning. New York: McGraw-Hill. Guskey, T. Implementing mastery learning 2nd ed.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Making time to train your staff. The School Administrator, 55 7 , 35— Twenty questions? Twenty tools for better teaching. Principal Leadership, 1 3 , 5—7. Evaluating professional development. Kifer, E. This table outlines what, why and how we can assess and more importantly how we can make students an integral part of the process. Over time I have worked with educators to better define the profile of success or competencies and measure what matters.
The tendency, that we have to fight against, is to get a rubric and rate students with a number or met or not met on all of the competencies.
Instead, when we identify the specific knowledge, skills, and habits that are valued, explicitly teach them and provide guidance to develop them, we can have students reflect on these skills, get peer feedback, and provide evidence of strengths and areas of growth.
With clear learning goals, we can bring students into the process to create their own portfolio, self-assess, and capture evidence of their own growth like pictures, pieces of work, anecdotes from the playground, home, or group collaboration that better capture their learning journey and growth over time. When students know the learning targets, have multiple opportunities to learn, experiment, and refine, they are much more invested.
Students should be central to the assessment process, setting goals based on the course and or their current performance and taught to document and share evidence of their own personal goals related to academic mastery, growth, and habits. The answer is simple: If we let our high stakes test that primarily measures content knowledge and basic skills drive what we do every day in school, we will narrow the curriculum.
When students are behind or lack skills, what they need is more context. They need to understand the purpose of what they are learning instead we reduce their education to drill and kill and never-ending worksheets, and then we wonder why they hate reading or think math is boring. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Submit Comment.
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