Using
Assessment to
Improve Student
Learning
There are two main types of
assessment:
Summative assessment
Formative assessment
Summative assessment is used to make a final
judgment about a student’s learning achievemen
Examples: final examinations, college entrance
examinations, credentialing exams, state
achievement tests, exit exams.
Other types can also be considered
summative if they culminate a course
of study or are used to make a
decision about a student’s status or
future.
Summative assessments are called
high-stakes assessments, meaning
that an important consequence
hinges on the results of the
assessment.
Key questions: how generalizable are they to other
situations and tasks? Do they measure authentic
learning?
Formative assessment: an
assessment of a not-yet-completed
learning experience, designed to give
the teacher information about the
student’s learning needs and to
pinpoint for the student the efforts
that are needed to reach mastery of
the learning outcome.
Formative Assessment
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Low-stakes;
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Useful for “just in time teaching;”
✦
Can help develop self-assessing and
self-adjusting abilities in students.
An emphasis on the improvement of student learning
has naturally led to greater interest in the use of and
possibilities for formative assessment.
Its main purpose is to produce feedback about student
learning that will be used by the teacher to focus on
areas where further instruction is needed and by the
student to focus on areas where further effort is needed.
Types of formative
assessments
✦
Quizzes
✦
Journals
✦
Learning logs
✦
Oral questioning of students
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Pre-assessments
✦
Interviews and conferences
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Comment-only marking of student work
So Skeptical Sammy says, “So how
is this newfangled formative
assessment different from the
quizzes, journals, classroom
discussions and exercises that I’ve
been using for decades?”
Well, it may not be that different
after all.
“Using classroom assessment to improve student
learning is not a new idea. More than 30 years ago,
Benjamin Bloom showed how to conduct this process in
practical and highly effective ways when he described
the practice of mastery learning. But since that time, the
emphasis on assessments as tools for accountability
has diverted attention from this more important and
fundamental purpose.”
T.R. Guskey (2003)
To determine whether you have
already been using formative
assessment to improve student
learning, ask yourself:
Have I systematically used the
information gleaned from these
assessments to adjust and refine
instruction?
Have I kept written records of
students’ learning problems and the
specific areas in which improvement
is needed?
And most importantly, have I deliberately involved
students in decisions about their progress, thereby
encouraging ownership of their learning, spurring their
motivation to try to improve, and developing their selfassessing and self-adjusting abilities?
Some basic assumptions behind the
use of formative assessment to
improve student learning:
1. All students can progress and
improve;
2. All students can develop their self-assessing
and self-adjusting abilities;
3. Teachers must make clear to students the
standards and criteria for success in order for true
learning to take place.
4. Effective teaching cannot take
place in the absence of learning, so
teachers must endeavor to promote
student learning in their classrooms
if they want to be considered
effective teachers.
“An assessment activity can help learning if it provides
information to be used as feedback by teachers, and by
their students in assessing themselves and each other,
to modify the teaching and learning activities in which
they are engaged. Such assessment becomes
formative assessment when the evidence is used to
adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs.”
Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, and Wiliam, Assessment
for Learning: Putting It into Practice
Quizzes
✦
Journals
✦
Learning logs
✦
Oral questioning of students
✦
Pre-assessments
✦
Interviews and conferences
✦
Comment-only marking of student work
✦
Self-assessment metaphors for students
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Checklists
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Quizzes: used as formative assessments, selectedresponse type quizzes can be used to quickly check
student learning and to allow students to correct
misunderstandings.
To be useful, quizzes should be deliberately targeted at
common student misunderstandings rather than merely
used to test for recall of memorized information.
Journals and learning logs: When used as formative
assessments, these tools can serve to encourage and
foster students’ self-assessing and self-adjusting skills
and to give the teacher information about the areas
students are struggling in the most.
Oral questioning of students: To make questioning a
formative assessment tool, take care to frame questions
as open-ended ones that will elicit both student
knowledge and student misunderstanding. Try not to
encourage rote recitation of textbook material as
answers to questions.
And be ready and willing to tell students when they have
got the answer wrong, or simply when their answer
reveals an aspect of the material they haven’t mastered
yet!
Pre-assessments provide information about students’
skills and knowledge at the outset of instruction. The
results may influence a teacher to:
1. Add a remedial lesson before teaching new material.
2. Shorten or skip a lesson or portion of a unit.
3. Recommend additional help for an individual student.
4. Quicken or slow the pace of the curriculum.
5. Flag certain skill sets or knowledge areas for more
intensive practice and work.
To gain another measure of student
progress in a course, a preassessment can be paired with a
post-assessment, either at the end of
a unit, a section of the term, or at the
end of the term.
Comment-only marking of
student work
The Assessment Reform Group’s study found that
comment-only marking of student work led to the
strongest gains in student learning.
“Feedback given as rewards or grades enhances ego
rather than task involvement - that is, it leads students to
compare themselves with others and focus on their
image and status rather than encourages them to think
about the work itself and how they can improve it.”
“A culture of success should be promoted where every
student can make achievements by building on their
previous performance, rather than by being compared
with others. Such a culture is promoted by informing
students about the strengths and weaknesses
demonstrated in their work and by giving feedback
about what their next steps should be.”
While a grade has to be given at the end of the term,
student progress during the term does not always have
to be measured by a grade or a score. Giving students
feedback about the quality of their work without grades
or scores can increase motivation to improve.
You can also give a grade for an assignment but still
emphasize the feedback rather than the grade by writing
a commentary on the work that explains problem areas
in the work and gives students specific directions for
how to improve.
Granted, most of us give scores and grades for every
assignment because we believe that they will motivate
students and alert them to learning problems. The trend
has been more towards point systems and concrete
measures of how students are doing, such as grade
point averages being available at all times during the
term.
Once, we thought that this kind of constant monitoring
would make students more accountable and
responsible.
Has it? When you give students points rather
than grades, is their ownership of their learning
increased?
Do they become more self-motivated to learn and
to improve?
Do you see much improvement after a student
receives only a low grade or low score without
feedback?
While you may not be able to do comment-only marking
on major assignments, think about how you might
supplement numerical scores and letter grades with
narrative descriptions of strengths and weaknesses of a
performance or project.
Self-assessment metaphors for students
Help students to self-monitor their learning by offering
them metaphors they can use to describe their level of
mastery. Start with a simple metaphor with three levels.
Some examples: traffic lights (green, yellow, or red);
windshield (clear, buggy, muddy).
Another choice is novice, apprentice, expert.
Students are asked to identify the one that matches their
level of understanding of a lesson or concept.
They then use these metaphors to focus on areas in
which they need to work harder and to identify those
that they don’t have to worry about.
Teachers can use the self-assessment metaphor
choices to create groups or even different
exercises based on the different levels of
understanding, so that all students are working to
their highest ability.
Checklists
Checklists should include “specific indicators that
describe the skills, action, or behaviors that are
expected in terms of a criterion.” Kay Burke, How to
Assess Authentic Learning
“Checklists show teachers and students the areas of
concern early enough to be able to help students before
they fail the test or the unit. They also provide teachers
the opportunity to ‘change gears’ in a classroom if a
large percentage of the students are not doing well.”
Example of a checklist for an online discussion forum:
___ Student shows consistent effort in posting
sufficiently complete answers regularly.
___Student demonstrates comprehension of course
concepts and materials in answers.
___Student exhibits mastery of course concepts and
materials through appropriate application to discussion
topics.
___Student exhibits independent thought through
addition of new information and insights to discussion.
Anecdotal Records
Anecdotal Records: good for observing small group work.
Table with one column for activity and amount of time observed.
One column for each student in the group. Brief description of
significant behaviors. At bottom of record, summarize
implications of observation, including any planned changes.
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ABC Observations
Good for recording conference information. Table with
“antecedent” in first box: teacher’s questions or
information. Second box, behavior: student’s
responses. Third box, consequence(s): what the
student or the teacher (or both) will do in the future.
“Formative assessment is a process,
one in which information is evoked
and then used to modify the teaching
and learning activities in which
teachers and students are engaged.
Few of the changes introduced for school
improvement have such compelling research
evidence in their support as does formative
assessment.”
Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, Wiliam
Assessment for Learning: Putting It into Practice
Now, self-assess your own level of experience and
familiarity with formative assessment:
Are you a novice?
Are you an apprentice?
Are you an expert?
Share with a colleague sitting near
you your self-assessment and try to
explain why you selected the one you
did.
If you consider yourself a novice, do you have any
desire to become an apprentice? Why or why not?
If you consider yourself an apprentice, do you have any
desire to become an expert? Why or why not?
If you consider yourself an expert, how might you share
your expertise with your colleagues who want to reach
experthood?