*The following post is an assignment for my doctoral class on assessments.*
Definition of Assessment
Stiggins (2018) defines assessments as collecting evidence of student work to make informed “educational decisions” for students. While this definition is close to my own personal definition, I would replace “educational” with “instructional.” In my current role as an assistant principal of a 6-8 grade middle school, I have learned that the term “instruction” is more personal for teachers. Administering well-planned assessments can provide the teacher with data to make the best instructional decisions for students in order to maximize learning, growth, and achievement.
Student assessments are not the only educational assessments, though. Teacher effectiveness is assessed through several observations throughout the year that are rated on an evaluation rubric. While most districts include areas of professionalism and contributions to school culture in the evaluation process, planning and instruction are weighted most heavily on teacher evaluations because those areas have direct, significant impact on student learning.
Assessments are not limited to individual people. Indiana schools are assigned a letter grade each fall based on student results on state standardized tests, as well as overall student attendance, from the previous school year. Utilizing an A-F system, schools are assigned a grade, which some argue does not fully represent a school, since the grade is based on achievement and does not take into account growth.
Preferred Type of Assessment
“Recent research suggests that both principals and teachers find many types of assessments useful. Yet, while more than 90 percent of teachers say they use data to adjust instructional strategies,nearly 30 percent did not feel prepared to interpret results” (Jackson et al., 2017). This suggests that educators need more experience in building assessment literacy in order to better prepare students and move them to proficiency of standards. Using assessment data to make classroom instructional decisions can be powerful.
My own personal preference for assessment is a combination of multiple choice questions and constructed responses for a formal assessment. Utilizing Google Forms to build these assessments allows data to be collected and analyzed quickly, assessments to be housed to make quick revisions each year, and students are familiar with Google Forms, so I do not need to worry about a new platform interfering with the reliability or validity of the assessment. For quick checks for understanding, nothing will ever take the place of pre-planned questions the teacher asks throughout a lesson that students answer on dry erase boards so that the teacher can immediately see what students understand the learning objective and who needs assistance.
Effort Grades
Stiggins (2008) states “we must implement classroom assessment practices that rely on an ongoing array of quality assessments used strategically in ways that keep students believing in themselves.” When assessments focus too heavily on mastery of standards and not enough on a student’s growth towards the mastery of standards, some struggling learners can feel lost or lose a sense of confidence in learning. Historically, educators have not been provided opportunities to learn sound assessment practices or focus has been on high-stakes assessments (Stiggins, 2008).
Effort-based grading focuses on the effort a student puts forth on work. Effort-based grading has benefits, such as students are more willing to take risks, students learn that the effort put forth impacts their outcome, and because the focus is not necessarily a grade, effort-based grading allows the instructor to focus on feedback that promotes student growth (Sull, 2022). Participation grading is when a student gets a grade for attempting the assignment, no matter the quality of effort put forth. Participation and effort grades are similar in that accuracy is not being assessed, but rather one’s attempt.
Effort and participation grades can impact student achievement. Participation and effort grades can provide the instructor opportunities to give clear, actionable feedback to students that push learning forward. Effort and participation grades also allow a student to attempt something and take risks without worrying about whether the attempt was “right” or “wrong”. Focusing too much on participation or effort can be detrimental, though. Focusing just on effort or participation does not show a student’s progress towards mastery of standards.
Student Self Assessment
Student self assessment can come in a variety of forms. It can be as simple as students placing exit tickets in bins labeled “I got it,” “I have some questions,”and “I’m confused.” It could be a reflection log. Or, it could even be something like this assignment, where we are reflecting on the major learning objectives from the modules. Zhang and Jackson (2022) states, “While the contribution information can be collected, the challenge is whether it is rigorous enough for evaluative purposes. In other words, can the ratings be trusted?”
Teachers across the country share the same concern in regards to student self assessments, especially whether or not students will actually use the assessment to reflect on learning, or as a manner in which to boost their grade. “Statistically, answering this question is equivalent to evaluating the reliability and validity of those ratings,” (Zhang & Jackson, 2022). With low stakes, I found that more students are willing to reflect honestly. In my experience, once a numerical score is part of the reflection process and is added to the gradebooks, students tend to rate themselves much higher in order to bring up their overall grade.
Student Growth Portfolios
As a former English/Language Arts teacher, I find portfolios to be an invaluable tool to showcase student learning and to highlight student growth. In my particular content area, student growth in writing is illustrated effectively through student writing portfolios. Paired with quick reflection assignments, educators, students, and parents can quickly evaluate how a student is moving towards mastery.
Unfortunately, in the past decade, standardized testing has taken more of a focus in middle school classrooms across the country. This has reduced time and focus on portfolios to emphasize student growth. “The intervening years have been sobering: the call for an opportunity to learn standards proved too politically charged, portfolios lost ground to more tractable standardized measures, and a focus on measuring achievement came to exclude much tougher and more fundamental discussions of how to promote and calibrate student growth. Ultimately, the curriculum narrowed to emphasize literacy and mathematics in schools serving less privileged and lower-achieving students who depended on their public schools for a chance to study the arts, science, and world languages,” (Palmer Wolf & Holochwost, 2017).
Figures in the Assessment Process
A comprehensive assessment system includes a multitude of assessments - formative and summative, low-stakes and high-stakes, academic and behavior, and accuracy and effort/participation. A balance of these types of assessments is needed in order to help student learning and to measure progress of learning. Helping students understand how they are being assessed creates self-efficacy which can lead to greater achievement.
Figures, tables, and assessments go hand-in-hand. Educators in schools utilize figures, tables, and charts every day to represent assessment data in order to use the data to make productive changes to assessments. Sometimes these figures are used to introduce new strategies or assessments that a professional learning community (PLC) would like to implement. For example, if a group of educators wanted to start incorporating Socratic Seminars in classrooms, they might highlight an example as seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1
Socratic Seminar Rubric
Behavior Assessments to Improve Instruction
There is this picture that floats around on the Facebook posts of teachers every year. It has the phrase “You have to Maslow before you can Bloom” meaning we have to take care of students' basic needs before they are ready to learn. When we don’t, there are often behavior issues that arise that impact academics.. The majority of students with emotional or behavior issues read below grade level (De La Cruz et al., 2019). “In addition, there is some evidence that students with problem behavior and reading problems in kindergarten are likely to demonstrate the least reading growth across time” (De La Cruz et al., 2019).
When I was in a classroom, those students who might exhibit off-task/disruptive behavior would be the first group I would pull. I would want to make sure that the directions given were clear, and I wanted to make sure they felt comfortable with the work, so that it might diminish the off-task/disruptive behaviors. I realized that when I didn’t pull that group first, the behaviors would start and then interrupt others.
References
De La Cruz, V. M., Otaiba, S. A., Hsiao, Y.-Y., Clemens, N. H., Jones, F. G., Rivas, B. K., Brewer, E. A., Hagan-Burke, S., & Simmons, L. E. (2019). The Prevalence and Stability of Challenging Behaviors and Concurrent Early Literacy Growth among Kindergartners at Reading Risk. Elementary School Journal, 120(2), 220–242. https://doi.org/10.1086/705785
Jackson, C., Gotwals, A. W., & Tarasawa, B. (2017). How to Implement Assessment Literacy. Principal Leadership, 17(9), 52–56
Palmer Wolf, D., & Holochwost, S. J. (2017). From the Middle: A Quarter Century Later. Voices from the Middle, 25(1), 27–29.
Stiggins,R.J.(2008)Assessment Manifesto: A Call for the Development of Balanced Assessment Systems. A position paper published by the ETS Assessment Training Institute, Portland, Oregon.
Stiggins, R. (2018). Better Assessments Require Better Assessment Literacy. Educational Leadership, 75(5), 18–19.
Sull, E. C. (2022). Labor-Based Grading: Perfect for Distance Learning! Distance Learning, 19(1), 59–62.
Zhang, B. & Jackson, L. (2022). Exploring the Utility of Peer and Self Assessments in Grading Group Projects for Urban Middle School Students. New Waves - Educational Research & Development, 25(2), 20–31.
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