Assessmentology- Why We Need Assessments

My seven year old son is way into sports, and we have tried them all it seems-- soccer, baseball, basketball, you name it-- we are holding off on football.  It is necessary for me to say here that I like some sports, but I am not the sports fanatic.  I like basketball the best, but I do not have to watch games to survive.  I did not play organized sports growing up, so I have had to adjust my thinking as my son has been in many sports.  I always have my  teacher hat on, so I was recently observing him at baseball practice, and through I had drawn the analogy before, it came clear to me how important formative assessment is.  The coach knows exactly where his weaknesses are (throwing the ball and batting), and that has given him the opportunity to hone practice for him, and it has given me an idea of how to help him at home.  So, when he is home and we are practicing, I know that we are batting (Today, he hit 7 out of 9), and we are still working on that throwing. But I see how sports relates big time to formative assessments.  I am sure that a coach would not want a player to continue to practice something incorrectly or have to correct something during the game.  That is why we have practice.

I have shared this analogy with teachers, and I immediately get the quick retorts:  Yeah, but kids out on the field want to play and want to be there.  Sports are different from learning.  I reply that kids are engaged in the sport usually and they see progress.  My son was highly discouraged as he watched all the balls fly by and he swung, just to miss the ball.  When he began hitting, he built up confidence.  Kids want to be engaged in learning, but they want and need success. Often in classrooms we ask for students to go to the big game without practice and expect greatness without emphasizing the process. When we slow down and teach the process, students do excel

Assessment.  This word gets a lot of attention, and frankly a bad wrap.  I vividly remember when I began teaching at Athens Drive High School, I was recharged.  I had finished three years of grueling learning and teaching in another county, and I came to Athens loaded with optimism.  I remember that year (1996) that I stopped using he word "test" and began using the word "assessment" when I was trying to gauge understanding. In fact, my students fond this humorous, and I would always remind them that I was assessing not testing.  "Testing" has a connotation of trickery, and that is not what I was doing. In this post, I want to look specifically 1) the kinds of assessments that we should be using   2) Why high stakes assessments are not the evil we paint them to be   and 3) how we need to use assessment to move instruction forward

So, I will start with the easiest-- kinds of assessments-- and the least controversial of assessmentology.  Most of s educators are aware of formative and summative assessment and many of us are probably aware of Benchmark assessments.  All of these are important to the learning process, and I argue that diagnostic assessment is an oft overlooked form of assessment. I also content that education often focuses more on summative assessments.  I begin with the basic definitions of assessments:

• Diagnostic assessments were always important to me in the classroom.  These assessments are an amalgamation of previous work and pretty much previous scores on high stake tests.  Looking at overall patterns over time gives me a good idea of where students are when they enter my classroom.  However, it is important to assess students in different ways- even diagnostically.  Vocabulary assessments, writing assessments, and prior content knowledge assessments can be important for students.  Also, it was important for me to get to know students, so I wanted to know their likes and interests and how they learn, so I spent the time gathering this important information.  I used this information all year to group students and to plan instruction. 
• Formative Assessment: This is the buzz word of the day, and they take on many forms.  Warm-ups, exit tickets, question trackers, observations, short quizzes, any form that gathers information about how students are understanding during learning.  These assessments to me are the most important because they are low stakes, highly informative and often given the least attention. Teachers will say (and I do understand) that students will not take these seriously if they know they will not count, but my experience has been different.  Students quickly learn that because I use assessments to differentiate and design curriculum this information become personally important to them.  I have seen the power of formative assessment as students are able to tackle the curriculum focused on their ability. 
• Benchmark Assessments: These are not used as often, but they can be powerful.  Unfortunately, it takes a great deal of time to make because the benchmark should cover a body of material and gauge understanding at a particular time in learning.  This information can then be used formatively.  I used to give a midterm exam that I used as a benchmark to help plan instruction for the rest of the course.  It is important here to explain that my assessments had to be skill driven and not content driven.  
• Summative Assessments: This is the form of assessments that we dwell in most often in education.  We may term them unit tests, chapter tests, etc. These assessments by design are intended to measure what the student has learned.  There really should be little surprises here if teachers have assessed in different ways during the learning process and adjusted curriculum based on the assessment. The pitfall here is that often summative assessments take on a traditional format of multiple choice, matching, fill in the blank, and short answer.  There is nothing inherently wrong with these types of assessments, but mostly they support a content driven summative.  I came to the conclusion that students have End of Course tests, End of grade tests and they have been tested to death, so I moved toward more alternative assessments and assessments where students could show me that they could apply information and create from learned knowledge.  Again, this is a great place to differentiate products for mastery.

Formative assessment with diagnostic assessment can be powerful.  Take this example:  When I went back to the classroom two years ago to teach a restart English III class (another future post), I began by quickly assessing students' reading levels through a short reading assessment that I administered to students the first two days of class.  I was able to quickly identify and group my struggling readers, my on level readers and advanced readers in the class.  Early on in  the class, I was going to teach the Transcendentalists, so I grouped students based on their reading levels.  I used different strategies with my different levels, but our outcome was the same. As the year rolled on, students moved reading groups as some showed weaknesses in reading literary works but not informational works.  I was able to work with the students and gradually release responsibility.Each passing day, students gained confidence.  Did this work for all students? No. Did it work for most? Yes.

One of the biggest arguments that I get about formative assessment in the classroom is that if we do not grade them, students will not take them seriously, so I want to address this portion a bit because it is important.  I will say that I fell into this trap.  A couple of years ago as an Assistant Principal for Curriculum at my school, I decided to teach a class to test out some of the ideas that I had preached: differentiation, grading practices and assessments.  I began every class with a warm-up- a strategy I learned from my math friends. I took them up and graded them and gave students the paper back the next day-- usually 5 questions, so grades were usually 0, 20, 40, etc. I put them in the gradebook, and moved on.  The catch is that when I placed them in the electronic gradebook, they were weighted as 0 weight, so they did not impact the average.  Of course, as students do they began to compare with one another and some healthy competition arose.  After a while students were checking to see who had the higher grades, and I was using the data to customize instruction- high impact, low stakes.  By the way when I printed progress reports, all of the grades for these warm-ups were there, and I never really said if I was counting or not, because in my classroom- "Everything Counts for something."  I used this strategy a lot, and it did work.

Recently the county I work with implemented Benchmark assessments in the high stakes area of testing. So, off we went with benchmarking.  When we got the results back and I disseminated them to the teachers, and we discussed how to use them, I was surprised at the positive feedback that there was for the assessments.  Teachers felt that the information that they gained from the assessments helped them better hone in on areas of weakness for students.  I will pause here because somebody is out there thinking, "Well, there we go teaching to the test."  I will say again, we always teach to some test, so the information that is on the benchmark is aligned to the curriculum that we teach, and we want students to learn the curriculum, so I am not sure what the controversy is.  Again, high impact, low stakes! I have seen some good things happening with teachers and this information:  teachers are customizing learning goals for students based on data, teachers are able to incorporate some on-line help for students based on results, and teachers are able to assign lunch time help with a focus.  Students are able to work on the areas that they need support in and not continue to work on those they do not.  Back to baseball.  There is a kid on my son's team who can hit the ball like nobody's business, so while my son is having drills in batting, this kid is drilling catching.

Recently the state of NC has implemented common assessments for most courses in high school in Math, Science, English and Social Studies.  This has, as you can imagine, caused a rip current of dissent.  Outcries of let me teach, teach to the test, micromanagement...on and on. Again, I go back to the fact that if we are teaching the curriculum, the test will take care of itself.  It is important to take a look at these assessments.  Are they perfect, no! Is any assessment? What is good about them is that most of them have constructed responses on them which requires students to synthesize information and write responses to explain these outcomes.  The assessments ask students to do something with information.  I hear teachers say all the time that a multiple choice test cannot measure what a student knows, and often these are the kinds of tests that I see teachers give to students.  So what makes my multiple choice test better or more valid than a "standardized test"?  Most teacher I hear complaining about these assessments are the ones who give primarily objective tests anyway.  Some of these common exams are going to actually be better than some teacher made exams.  I will get into validity of assessments later in another post, but teachers are not typically trained in test creation.  The difference is that teacher (I am as guilty) is in control of the teacher made exam up to the  day or even the period it is given.

 I cannot say how many inaccurate assessments that I probably gave. Take for example, a teacher who may count all the fill-in-the blanks as three points each, but clearly 4 out of the 10 questions require a deeper understanding than the other 6.  Most of us do not take the time in our teacher-made tests to rank questions according to difficulty or level of thought (Depth of Knowledge comes to mind here), and we can change the test at the last minute.  I cannot tell you how many times that I have heard (and said myself) that a teacher does not want to use an assessment created by another teacher (usually a bad idea anyway) or an assessment created by a PLC group (a good idea) because "I teach this differently."  This idea I do not understand! How does one teach the standards differently if the assessment is aligned to the standards.  The approach may differ, but if the curriculum requires that students are able to apply historical thinking to explain the impact of the American Revolution, then that is what students should be able to do.  I hearken back to the Backward Design idea.  If a question asks students to look at primary documents to come to a conclusion about how the American Revolution impacted different groups of people on an assessment, then any student taking the same course with any teacher should be able to tackle that question successfully.

I hear all of the banter about state mandated assessments and how we are teaching to the test, and I truly do understand where this is coming from. As I have said before, high stakes assessments are necessary- they should not be the be all and end all of a students' demonstration of mastery (hence, they are only 20%-25% of a final grade in NC), so we are still responsible for 75%-80% of demonstration of mastery of content in our classes. I often hear the argument that the real world is not like this--and we need to prepare students for the real world.  Well, doctors and lawyers have to take high stakes assessments to practice; hair stylists have to pass an exam; teachers have to pass exams to get a license, insurance salespeople have to pass a test to get a license; we have to pass a driver's assessment to get a license and the list goes on.  I think that what has happened in education is that we have allowed the assessment to become bigger and more important than the learning.  Assessments were never intended to take over a classroom.  It all has to do with what we do with them.  Think of  the creation in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein who took over and hunted down the creator.  The assessment is a creation and a measurement that was intended to measure understanding and mastery of content.  It was never intended to become a lesson plan for an entire semester or year, but sadly that is how it has begun to unfold.  As educators, we need to learn how to live with this creation harmoniously. We need to continue focus on powerful teaching and capturing those moments for why we became teachers anyway.  As an administrator I have vowed to stop emphasizing the assessments and emphasize teaching and learning. Will we do benchmarks? Yes.  Are they aligned with the curriculum and designed to support success on the high stakes test? Yes.  As humans, we have extraordinary power to shape how something works for us.  We are in control of this creation, so go forth and teach and focus on solid teaching and learning based on the prescribed standards, and the high stakes assessments will take care of themselves