Learning Assessment for the 21st Century

Overview

This week students will:

1. Examine practical, technologically based strategies for engaging students and assessing learning.
2. Investigate the value, purpose and use of rubrics for teacher and student assessment, thinking, and goal setting.
3. Align student performance tasks and rubrics with course learning outcomes.

Instructor Expectations

Discussion Post Expectations

In this week’s discussion, you will be asked to think about metacognition and demonstrate higher order thinking about your ideas about metacognition after exploring an innovative web resource called TEDEd and viewing a short related video. Take your time to fully explore TEDEd and consider the potential implications on both student learning and instructional effectiveness. Remember to follow the Guided Response prompt when responding to fellow classmates. This Discussion Rubric will help you with crafting your responses.

Assignment Expectations

This week’s written assignment asks you to contemplate your learning thus far by establishing relationships between the course learning outcomes (CLOs), examples that support each CLO from an innovative resource known as Smarter Balanced, and how the CLOs and what you learned from Smarter Balanced will help you in creating high quality assessments in your own practice. Notice that you are gathering information and evidence (examples from Smarter Balanced including a specific sixth grade performance task from Smarter Balanced prior to attempting the assignment.The following will help you prepare for and create this assignment;

1. READ/PREPARE: The first set of directions involves you GATHERING INFORMATION from the SMARTER BALANCED ASSESSMENT CONSORTIUM website.
   The 4 bullet points and the statement regarding DOK under that serve as a checklist only of what you must review before making any attempt to address the actual assignment which is outlined very clearly under Directions.
2. DO: Using the template shown in the directions, APPLY what you learned from Smarter Balanced to the course learning outcomes (CLOs) for this class. The course learning outcomes (CLOs) can be found under the Course Home tab in the Syllabus.

• • In column 1 in the template you will simply write in each of our six CLOs.
  • In columns 2: SHOW evidence (examples) from a mixture of the sources under Smarter Balanced that you discovered that directly align with (support) each CLO (see example in the assignment directions).*in other words, you should show MEANINGFUL connection between what you’re investigating in Smarter Balanced and what YOU are expected to learn according to our CLOs.
  • In column 3: Discuss how what you shared in column 2 will help you construct high quality summative assessments in the future and make a direct, personal connection with it.  With that in mind, you will want to select examples for column 2 that MATTER to you.

While the directions are multi-layered, they are very succinct but do require you to READ, THINK CRITICALLY, and PROBLEM SOLVE—just as we are requiring PK-12 students to do as 21st-century learners.  This is the kind of assignment that should yield different responses from everyone in the course.
Please be sure to read the assignment requirements carefully. The grading rubric can assist you in completing the Template.

Intellectual Elaboration

Introduction

In last week’s guidance, we examined the effects of diversity on the public schools, and suggested that while diversity clearly provides challenges and opportunities, we still have teach the students who are in front of us. Differentiation, as noted, is a key strategy for doing this well.

When it comes to teaching students and assessing their learning in a differentiated classroom setting, it is necessary to “think like an assessor” to be effective. This guidance will offer some ideas about this concept, exploring how standards, planning, and assessments fit together.

Thinking like an Assessor

Thinking like an assessor is a key teaching habit of mind. But what exactly does “thinking like an assessor” mean? How does it fit in the classroom? How can you use your understanding of your students’ (and your own) understanding of metacognition to assist you? Generally speaking, this means that we should be thinking about our teaching and student learning in ways (via our metacognitive processes) that blend mastery and understanding, and then design instruction and assessments that reflect this. To do this effectively, the teacher has to act almost as a disinterested party, removing emotion from the process, and focusing on the data that an assessment presents.

To do this, we first use the state standards (in most states, as we have seen in Weeks 1 and 2, these are often closely related to the Common Core State Standards) to help design the lessons. We then create several formative assessments, try them out with students, analyze the results, and create new lessons/instruction based on the results. Only after a few cycles of this do we give the summative assessment. And, if our students have not done well, we have to see this as at least partly our failure, and try to do something to help students learn.

So, in thinking like an assessor, teachers need to see assessment as one piece of a larger puzzle and not use assessments to judge students, but rather to inform instruction and work to gain a balance between student mastery and student understanding. This link provides an alternative view of this process.

Characteristics and Attributes of Quality Assessments

Since assessments are a cornerstone of this process, it stands to reason that the better quality the assessment, the better likelihood that there will be good information to help inform instruction.

Good quality assessments have the following characteristics:

1. They are closely matched to the teacher’s instruction, and should be based on state standards.
2. They are representative of the primary knowledge and skills that are being assessed.
3. They have clear expectations for student performance.
4. They neither confuse nor cue student responses.(http://metroedservices.com/assessment/CharacteristicsofQualityAssessment.htm)

To this list, we may add two additional items: They should be able to be readily analyzed, and there should be little elapsed time among assessment, analysis, and adjustment of instruction. These factors help to give the assessments more value in the classroom.

Developing Appropriate Assessments

Of course, designing assessments is a continuous process, especially when you take into account the necessity to design assessments that meet the needs of a diverse group of learners. As an example, here is an actual classroom demographic found in a public school classroom of 25 students: a Talented and Gifted (TAG) student with Cerebral Palsy, two additional TAG students, six additional special education students with accompanying IEPs (the student with CP also has an IEP), and five Hispanic students in need of varying degrees of English language learner services. To effectively address this diverse demographic, you might develop a series of assessments that take into account each individual student’s diverse characteristics. Typical strategies include reducing the amount of reading expected prior to assessment, altering project requirements, targeting the assessment to the most important information (a “power standards” approach to assessment providing alternative, non-written means for students to demonstrate their learning), etc.

Two useful general works for assessments are Marzano (2006) Classroom Assessment and Grading That Works, and Stiggins (2011) Introduction to Student Involved Assessment for Learning (6th edition). Of course, the Sousa and Tomlinson’s (2011)Differentiation and the Brain is always worth a look as well.

So Where Does This Lead?

A key idea behind all the work of developing classroom formative assessments is to help students to learn the information connected to the standards. As noted in previous guidance essays, the Common Core State Standards, adopted by 45 states, are the likely target here. Moreover, a companion initiative, The Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium, is developing summative assessments directly linked to the Common Core State Standards (this link to the Smarter Balance website provides additional information). The end result is alignment- your understanding of the Common Core State Standards, translated into classroom lessons, with instruction informed and adjusted by both differentiation and formative assessment results, all aligned to the Smarter Balance assessments.

Summary

Student assessment is a key part of student learning. We can use the results of assessments to inform and shape our instruction. Thinking like an assessor, which involves depersonalizing the assessment process, is a key piece of this, as is a willingness to take some instructional risks. It is by taking these risks that we grow as professionals.

Additional Resources

• Carol Lerch. (2011, October 25). Creating Rubrics [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgjBylERjV8
• Schrock, K. (2014, February 14). Assessment and rubrics. Retrieved from http://www.schrockguide.net/assessment-and-rubrics.html
• Susan Zvacek (2013, October 20). Authentic Assessment and Rubrics [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22nNj27lPkY

References

Marzano, R. (2006). Classroom Assessment and Grading That Works. New York, New York: Prentice Hall

McTighe, J., and Wiggins, G. (2012). Understanding by design framework. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/siteASCD/publications/UbD_WhitePaper0312.pdf

Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/)

Sousa, D., and Tomlinson, C. (2011). Differentiation and the brain. How neuroscience supports the learner-friendly classroom. Bloomington, Indiana: Learning Tree Press

Stiggins, R. (2011). An introduction to student-involved assessment FOR learning (6th Edition). New York, New York: Prentiss-Hall, Pearson Education

The Metro Educational Services Website. (n.d.). Characteristics of quality assessment. Retrieved from http://metroedservices.com