DESIGN FOR INSTRUCTION
Assessment Plan
As part of your Design for Instruction, you must create a plan for assessing your students.
It is unlikely that you will have time to administer a more formal assessment, such as a
test or extended essay. Therefore, you will probably rely on observing your students,
listening to their comments during a discussion, or collecting a small sample of their
work, like a worksheet, a short quiz, or a short essay. Below are 5 different types of
assessments you might consider for your assessment plan.
1. Selected Response: multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blanks
2. Writing: essays, essay questions, journaling, short answer, lab reports, poetry
3. Performance-based: painting, gymnastics, playing the trumpet, conducting a science
experiment
Teacher/ Student communication: class discussion, interview, group work, oral
presentations, reporting for a group, choral response, or observations.
Self-Assessment: KWL chart, exit ticket, self evaluation instruments (any activity that
asks students to evaluate their own learning).
Here are some tips for creating your assessment plan.
1. Whenever possible, utilize multiple modes of assessment. The more different
perspectives from which you assess student performance, the more insight you
will have into their learning.
2. To assess student performance, you must create a lesson in which students can be
active. So in your Design for Instruction, include some activities in which
students will have an opportunity to show what they do and do not know.
3. When you create your assessment plan, number each different form of
assessment so it is easy to see how many and what different types of assessment
you are using.
As part of your assessment plan, you will also have to identify a sample size for each
type of assessment. The sample size refers to how much student work you will examine
during the lesson. You are probably used to thinking about assessment as taking a test.
However, teachers assess students constantly as they are teaching. This is known as
formative assessment. Since formative assessment takes place during the act of teaching,
there often isn’t time to ask a question of every single student or to look at every single
worksheet to see if everyone understands. So teachers often ask a few students questions
or look at a few papers in order to decide whether the class understands the material
before moving on to a new concept.
The sample size is simply the number of students whose work you will examine. You
should specify a sample size for each form of assessment you plan. For example, you
may plan on getting responses from 5 students during a discussion, you may plan to look
at 10 student papers while they write a short essay, and you might collect and examine
everyone’s worksheet at the end of the lesson.