by Susan K. Green and Robert L. Johnson (2010)
Please note: text in black comes verbatim from our textbook, text in red are glossary words from the reading; text in orange are my notes/thoughts/instructions.
(clipart uploaded July 6, 2014 from http://assessment.uconn.edu/images/Assessmen_06.jpg)
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
"But we have come to see assessment as an amazingly flexible and comprehensive tool that has measurably improved our own teaching. Even more important, we believe learning to design good assessments also helps students for participation as citizens in a democracy" (page 3).
Achievement Gap: The disparity in performance between student groups (e.g. ethnicity, gender, and or SES) on achievement measures such as large-scale tests or graduation rates.
The current achievement gaps have begun to erode our belief that anyone who conscientiously tries hard, regardless of race, color, creed or wealth can succeed in our schools and in our country (4). Achievement gap exists before children even enter kindergarten.
Good assessment practices provide the opportunity for teachers, working in the realm where they have primary impact--their own classroom-- to maximize learning for their students. Equal access does not mean that every child receives the same instruction, rather it suggests that some may need extra accommodations or differentiated resources and instructional opportunities to be able to reach mastery on the learning goals for the class (5).
Self-Governing Skills for Participation in a Democracy
Performance Goals: Academic Goals held by students that focus on performing well in front of others and that assume ability is fixed.
Students with strong performance goals are motivated to perform well in the eyes of other people (parents, teachers, peers). Those schools focused on performance goals have students who decide it's better to be bad than stupid, if they don't perform at the top of the class.
Shift is toward mastery goals, that every child can improve, so no one falls in the cracks (7). Students want to learn to improve, to better themselves, take pleasure in learning. They persist when the work gets harder.
Mastery Goals: Academic goals help by students that focus on a desire to understand the task and that assume ability can increase.
Assessment Tasks that Enhance Mastery Goals (page 9)
1. Varied, meaningful, challenging tasks
Strategy: Many different types of assessments (papers, projects, brief oral and written-check ups)
Challenging, novel, relevant assessments (eg using data with students collected on their friends for math, etc.)
2. Students participate in decision making.
Strategies: Provide choices for ways for students to show what they have learned.
Use student participation in designing scoring guides for assessments.
Have students engage in self-assessment and peer assessment.
3. Focus on personal goals, own improvement
Strategies: Keep assessment goals private rather than public
Focus on individual improvement across time using benchmarks
Allow students to develop goals and keep track of their progress using a chart/graph
Develop assignments where mistakes are an expected par of learning and improvement is expected across time (multiple drafts)
Recognize student effort.
Effort Optimism: The idea that effort brings rewards. For example, if you work hard in school, you will learn more. The idea that effort has a payoff. Students enter kindergarten this way, and then they experience failure, discrimination, etc and those the optimism they once had. (10)
The the classroom, teachers must make the connection explicit and strong between student effort and academic success.
Promoting Mastery Goals through Assessment: Examples
The ability to assess oneself is one of the goals of education.
Self-assessment-
--the ability to assess oneself is one of the primary goals of education (11). It teaches objectivity--being able to get beyond your own point of view and look at yourself in relation to a standard...allows you to become open to feedback from a variety of sources...helps you decide which sources of information are valuable and which are not..become active in connecting their work to criteria used for evaluating it. (11).
Metacognition: The process of analyzing and thinking about one's own thinking enabling such skills monitoring progress, staying on task, and self-correcting errors...the ability to step back from merely listening to a lecture or doing an assigned task, to thinking about what is happening in a more critical way. Metacognition must be taught by teachers (11-12).
Focus on Individual Progress Across Time
Importance of goal setting and conferencing about student progress (12).
IMPORTANCE OF CRITICAL THINKING
Analyzing arguments, seeing both sides of an issue before choosing a position, and discerning what is left unsaid are key critical-thinking skills related to democratic participation that must be taught. In our view, providing opportunities to learn these skills is one of the essential functions of schools (14),
Designing assessment questions that address only basic concepts and definitions is a common problem in the teacher-made assessments that we see. Questions about facts and definitions are the easiest kinds of questions to design, and they are also easier to grade. But if you want your students to learn more than the facts, if you want them to learn critical-thinking skills and master the requirements of the standards you are teaching, you need to develop assessments that do this too (14).
Assessment FOR learning promotes democratic values by guiding the development of tools to help teachers address achievement gaps by promoting skills such as independence and responsibility, and by designing assessment tools essential in your classroom (14).
AN OVERVIEW OF ASSESSMENT
Assessment: The variety of methods used to determine what students know and are able to do before, during, and after instruction (14).
See fifty second video clip of educator Carol Ann Tomlinson: Tomlinson
Purposes of Assessment (page 15)
from table on page 15
Diagnostic Assessment:
Why: Getting a sense of strengths and needs for planning instruction.
When: Before Instruction
How: School records, teacher observations, teacher-made questionnaires and pre-tests
Let's look at higher education a minute: SNHU administers the CIRP Freshmen Survey every five years. See the instrument here. What questions do you want to know about your peers that could be answered with this survey??
Formative Assessment:
Why: Monitoring Growth as you teach (assessment FOR learning)
When: During Instruction
How: Teacher Observations, quizzes, skill checklists, homework, student self-assessments, systematic teacher questioning
Summative Assessment
Why: Determining what students have learned after instruction or for accountability purposes (assessment OF learning)
When: After instruction
How: Teacher Observations, quizzes, skill checklists, homework, student self-assessments, systematic teacher questioning
Educator Rick Wormeli distinguishes between summative and diagnostic assessment in the video above.
Purpose 1: Diagnostic Assessment
Diagnostic Assessment: Assessment at the early stages of a school year or unit that provides the teacher with information about what students already know and are able to do (16)
Accurately understanding your what your students know and are able to do from the beginning of the year is crucial in designing instruction for them that challenges but does not overwhelm them (16).
Differentiation: Using students' current understanding, readiness levels, skills, and interests to tailor instruction and meet individual needs (16).
Purpose 2: Formative Assessment
--Links goal-oriented instruction and assessment
• Promotes learning as well as informs
instruction
• Used continuously- before and throughout
instruction
• Encourages students to become more aware of their
own learning (metacognition) and the ideas of
others
• Transforms the learning environment
 |
| from Page Keeley (2012) accessed on July 6, 2014 at http://esd113.org/cms/lib3/WA01001093/Centricity/Domain/46/Page%20Keeley%20Presentation%20May%2022%202012.pdf |
A key aspect of formative assessment is giving students feedback on their growth toward the learning goals they need to master...It helps students understand where they are now compared to where they should be going and it gives them suggestions for getting there (17). A video of how this is done in Sweden can be seen here. Despite its cheesy guitar rock, it's quite good.
Many [college] students have a difficult time wit the distinction between formative assessment and assessment for grades (summative assessment). After explaining formative assessment and its use to enhance learning, we often have students write a paragraph for homework explaining how they saw a concept we discussed in class demonstrated in the classroom in which they are currently observing (17).
For our purposes, and since this class isn't tied to a field experience classroom, this week when you go to your other classes, write down an example of a formative assessment a professor gave. If you are certain there were no formative assessments, explain how a professor used a summative assessment.
Purpose 3: Summative Assessment
Summative Assessment: A summing up if what students know and are able to do after instruction is completed.
It is assessment OF learning...includes exams, projects, and term papers. Grading is based on information from summative assessment at the classroom level. It can also be large-scale state or national tests administered infrequently and used by local, state, and national decision makers (17)...Large scale assessment requires covering a wide range of content. These kinds of assessments are administered differently (see table on pg. 18 in text). (We would not use the SAT as a graduation requirement!) Large-scale tests must be standardized.
Standardized: administered, scored, and interpreted exactly the same for all test takers.
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