Kim Bratcher, Claire Carter, Jeanne
Curran, Brittany Korstjens, Cadie Sly
What is Assessment?
• From Wikipedia: Assessment is the process of
documenting, usually in measurable terms,
knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs.
• It is measuring or judging the learning and
performance of students or teachers.
• Different means of assessment include
achievement and competency tests,
developmental screening tests, informal
assessment, performance and authentic tasks.
How Assessment differs from
Grades
• Assessment is non-judgmental in the sense that
it focuses on learning. In contrast, grades carry
evaluative weight as to the worthiness of
student achievement and are applied directly to
them.
• Assessments usually occur in mid-progress when
corrections can be made. Grades are usually
recorded at the end of a project or class in
order to summarize academic quality.
• Assessment tends to look at specific parts of
the learning environment. Grades are holistic in
the sense that they record academic
achievement for a whole project.
Authentic Assessment
What is authentic assessment?
• Authentic assessment aims to evaluate students' abilities in 'realworld' contexts. In other words, students learn how to apply
their skills to authentic tasks and projects.
• Authentic assessment does not encourage rote learning and
passive test-taking.
• Instead, it focuses on students‘:
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analytical skills
ability to integrate what they learn
creativity
ability to work collaboratively
written and oral expression skills
• It values the learning process as much as the finished product
Benefits
• One of the major benefits of authentic assessment is found in its
fairness toward students.
• This comes from the use of problem based learning in which
students are taught using situations and ideas that exist in the
real world, rather than straight lecture.
• This way, many learning styles are addressed by the different
methods of teaching.
• In addition, authentic assessment activities geared toward a
variety of learning styles can be used to test students on the
concepts learned in the format in which they were learned.
• This means that no student has great advantages over other
students just because of learning styles, and the tests are fairer
for the students.
Why might authentic assessment be
used in the classroom?
• Many teachers are dissatisfied with only using
traditional testing methods.
• They believe these methods do not test many skills
and abilities students need to be successful.
• These educators assert that students must be
prepared to do more than memorize information and
use algorithms to solve simple problems.
• They believe students should practice higher-order
thinking skills, and criticize tests they feel do not
measure these skills.
Traditional Assessment
What is Traditional Assessment?
• Requires students to be in
the same place at the same
time
• Made up of questions with
quantifiable answers, e.g.
multiple choice, true/false,
fill in the blank (restricted
completion)
• Relies more on recall and
recognition and less on
critical thinking
What Traditional Assessment looks
like in the classroom
• Tests (either teacher
created or
standardized)
• Fill in the blank
• Short answer
• Label a diagram
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“Show your work”
Multiple choice
Matching
Paper and pencil
Scrantons
Benefits of Traditional Assessment
• Gives teachers an idea of where the
students are
• Easy to grade
• Right and Wrong answers are clear
• Accurate scoring
• Good when looking for recognition skills
What’s wrong with Traditional
Assessment?
• Does not reflect what the student
actually knows
– Standardized tests
• Increases student stress and anxiety
• Does not involve critical or higher order
thinking, explanations for answers, or
development of one’s own thinking
• Does not incorporate real life concepts
or skills (guessing)
Performance Assessment
What is Performance Assessment?
• Also known as Alternative or Authentic Assessment
• Form of testing that requires students to perform a task
rather than select an answer from a ready made list (
No multiple Choice)
• Require students to show what they can do
• Designed to judge student abilities to USE specific
knowledge and research skills.
• Higher order thinking involved – real life tasks
• Reveal a variety of problem-solving approaches, thus
providing insight into a student's level of conceptual and
procedural knowledge.
Description
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Distinct Parts
Performance Task
Format – student responds
Scoring System- predetermined
Performance Assessment in the
Classroom
• Converse in a Foreign Language
• Open ended or extended response exercises
• Extended tasks – carried out over several hours – ex:
revising a poem
• Portfolios
• Writing Essays
• Solving a math problem
• Oral Performance - speeches
• Teacher- made tests (short answer/ essay- No
multiple choice)
Facts about Performance Assessment
• Used to assess writing ability based on text produced by
students
• Can provide impetus for improving instruction
• Increase students understanding of what they need to know and
be able to do
• Allows students to judge their own work as they proceed
• Helps teachers gain insight that informs curricular decisions
• Needed to measure some of the desired learning outcomes
• Judged by the teacher or other evaluator by previously
established performance criteria
Advantages
• Clearly communicate instructional goals that involve
complex performances in natural settings in and outside
of school.
• Measure complex learning outcomes that cannot be
measured by other means (Speech – test vs. oral
presentation)
• Provides a means of assessing process or procedure and
the product from a task
• Uses students background knowledge
• Engage students in active construction of meaning
Limitations
• Time Consuming
• Unreliability of ratings of performance – ex :
Essays
• Inappropriate for measuring student
knowledge of facts
Formative Assessment
What the purpose, benefits, goals and examples
of formative assessment are in the classroom.
Goals
• To gain an understanding of what students know and don’t know
in order to make receptive changes in teaching and learning.
• To use observations and classroom discussions as an analysis of
tests and homework.
• For teachers to use questioning and classroom discussion as an
opportunity to increase their students’ knowledge and improve
their understanding.
• Formative assessment should be focused on the task, not the
student.
• For students to fully succeed, they must learn to self assess so
they can understand the main purpose of their learning and
grasp what they need to do to achieve to reach that goal.
Purpose
• The primary purpose of formative assessment is to support high
quality learning.
• Assessment become formative when the information is used to
adapt teaching and learning to meet students needs.
• When teachers know how students are progressing and where
they are having trouble, they can use this information to make
necessary instructional adjustment such as:
– Re-teach subject material
– Tying alternate instructional approaches
– Offer more opportunities for additional practice
• Formative assessment occurs when teachers feed information
back to students in ways that enable them to learn better.
Benefits
• Formative assessment helps support the
expectation that all children can learn to high
levels.
• Students can play an important role in formative
assessment through self-evaluation.
• Students with disabilities who are taught to self
assess can relate their understanding to reading
and writing tasks and show performance gains.
Examples of Formative Assessment
• Invite students to discuss their thinking about a
question or topic in pairs or small groups.
• Present several possible answers to a question , then
ask students to vote on them.
• Have students write their understanding of vocabulary
before and after instruction.
• Ask students to summarize the main ideas they’ve taken
away from a discussion or assigned reading.
• Interview students individually or in groups about their
thinking as they solve problems.
Additional Methods of
Assessment
Some Informal Methods of
Assessment
• Self-Assessment
– Where students are encouraged to appraise
the development of work and academic skills.
– Student’s evaluate their own progress
– Keep records of their own performance
– Helps students accept responsibility
– Increases understanding of subject matter
(constant self-reflection)
Some Informal Methods of
Assessment (con’t)
• Peer-Assessment
– involves students assessing the performance of other
students
– often in assessing group work
• Group-Assessment
– Benefit the development of a range of important skills,
such as, team and leadership skills, communication skills
and organizational skills
– teams or groups can achieve more than individuals
Summative
• Used to summarize student learning at some
point in time, such as at the end of a course,
end of a lesson or end of semester.
• Most standardized tests are summative, not
designed to provide immediate feedback that
can be useful for helping teacher and students
during the learning process.
Portfolio
What is a Portfolio?
• A portfolio is not a random collection of observations or student
products; it is systematic in that the observations that are noted
and the student products that are included relate to major
instructional goals.
• For example, book logs that are kept by students over the year
can serve as a reflection of the degree to which students are
building positive attitudes and habits with respect to reading.
• A series of comprehension measures will reflect the extent to
which a student can construct meaning from text.
• Developing positive attitudes and habits and increasing the
ability to construct meaning are often seen as major goals for a
reading program.
Why Use a Portfolio?
• Portfolios are multifaceted and begin to reflect the
complex nature of reading and writing.
• Because they are collected over time, they can serve
as a record of growth and progress.
• By asking students to construct meaning from books
and other selections that are designed for use at
various grade levels, a student's level of development
can be assessed.
• Teachers are encouraged to set standards or
expectations in order to then determine a student's
developmental level in relation to those standards.
Measures of Literacy
• Portfolios are extremely valid measures of literacy.
• A new and exciting approach to validity, known as
consequential validity, maintains that a major
determinant of the validity of an assessment measure
is the consequence that the measure has upon the
student, the instruction, and the curriculum.
• There is evidence that portfolios inform students, as
well as teachers and parents, and that the results can
be used to improve instruction, another major
dimension of good assessment.
Portfolios Bring Assessment
in Line with Instruction
• Portfolios are an effective way to bring assessment
into harmony with instructional goals.
• Portfolios can be thought of as a form of "embedded
assessment"; that is, the assessment tasks are a part
of instruction.
• Teachers determine important instructional goals and
how they might be achieved.
• Through observation during instruction and collecting
some of the artifacts of instruction, assessment flows
directly from the instruction
Rubric
What is a rubric, how is it developed,
why it is used and how it is used as
both motivation and assessment
What is a rubric?
• A rubric is a set of ordered categories to which
similar pieces of work can be compared.
• Explicitly specifies the quantities or processes
that must be exhibited in order for a
performance to be assigned a particular
evaluative rating; helps distinguish the criteria
that classifies exemplary from good, good from
fair, etc.
Developing a rubric
Identify the type and purpose of the rubric:
Holistic- Provides a single score based on an overall impression of learner
achievement on a task. Ex. Course grade (A, B…)
Analytic- Provides specific feedback along several dimensions. Ex. Assignment
broken down into separate components (description, analysis, grammar,
references, etc.)
General- Contains criteria that are general across tasks. Ex. Giving general
guidance/ expectations of an assignment. (I.e. writing assignment)
Task-specific- criteria unique to a task/assignment. Ex. Detailed guidance
regarding a specific task.
– Identify the particular criteria to be evaluated.
– Determine the levels of assessment.
– Establish criteria levels and clearly differentiate between them.
Provide anonymous examples of all levels for the students.
– Involve learners in the development of the rubric.
– Pre-test, retest, and adjust your rubric as needed.
Why use a rubric?
• Makes assessment more reliable and valid.
• Specifies the specific traits one needs to
perform proficiently on the task.
• Advantages: Rubrics help your students better
understand the standards that they are
accountable to achieve. It is also a great tool
for helping students self diagnose their own
strengths and weaknesses. In essence, they
become more responsible for their degree of
success or failure.
Feedback
Techniques to improve quality and
quantity of feedback, purpose of
feedback, and How feedback helps
students
Techniques to improve quality and
quantity of feedback
• Use classroom interaction to generate rapid feedback:
• The more questions you ask, the more opportunities you have
to see what students think and respond to in detail.
• Ask follow up questions.
• Assign activities to small groups during class, this allows you to
observe their discussions and problem solving skills in progress.
• Look for patterns of errors in assignments and tests.
• Ask students directly for feedback:
• Use open ended questions.
• Invite a fellow teacher to observe your class and
provide you with feedback.
Purpose
• Feedback helps students to improve and
prevent them from making the same mistakes
again.
• People can not learn without feedback.
• High Quality Feedback consists of:
• Clear criteria.
• Comments that are detailed and related to specific
aspects of their work.
• Comments that are improvement focused.
How feedback helps students
• Students need to know what they are doing correctly
and incorrectly in the classroom. By explaining what
is correct and incorrect, there is a greater effect on
the students to continue their work until it is
successful.
• The longer the delay between assignments and
feedback, the greater the chance improvement will
NOT occur.
• Feedback is most effective when it is specific to the
criteria the teacher is targeting and has described
exactly what the student did or did not learn.
Feed forward
• These following principals work hand in hand
with feed back.
• For effective feed forward you must….
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Identify student misconception
Use feed forward in the context of work
Integrate it into the learning process
Creates future clear objectives…what, why and how
Cont. feed forward
• Feed forward involves the students.
• For effective feed forward to work in the
classroom,
– Be timely, immediate feed back provides students
an opportunity to correct what was not known.
– Be specific.
– Be positive, point out what they did know or do
correctly.
– Be realistic, have they do only what they know
what to do.
Motivation & Assessment
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Assessment motivates more learning in the intrinsic sense. In
essence, students with intrinsic motivation are more driven
than students with extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation- when students are seeking intellectual stimulation
from their studies.
Extrinsic motivation-when students are more concerned about their
grades than their future employment prospects.
Extrinsic motivation interferes in a harmful way with intrinsic motivation.
There is a strong link between self-esteem and intrinsic motivation.
Motivate for success: Instruction must be interesting, relevant, provide
expectations of success, and produce satisfaction in the learner.
How to do it: guide students into a process of inquiry, utilize team work,
provide clear requirements and constructive feedback.
Assessment activity should be properly understood by both learners and
assessors.
Extrinsic motivation =
Motivation
Resources
• Assessment vs. Grades
– http://www.siue.edu/~deder/assess/cats/gradesv.html
• Formative Assessment
– http://oit.montclair.edu/documentation/camtasia/black
board/assessment/formative_assessment_online.html
• Traditional Assessment
– http://www.amatyc.org/old/proceedings/saltlakecity29/h
tml/bassarear/tsld030.htm
• Higher Education Academy
– http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/resources/assessment/group.ht
ml
More Resources
• Portfolio
– http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/literacy/assess6.html
• Authentic Assessment
– http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/whatisit.htm
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http://www.teachervision.fen.com/teaching-methods/educational-testing/4911.html
Performance Assessment
http://www.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/perfasse.html
http://www.ascd.org/portal/site/ascd/menuitem.4427471c9d076deddeb
3ffdb62108a0cl
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as8/k5.htm
Linn R.L. (1995). Measurement and Assessment in Teaching 7th edition.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall