Using Assessment to

Improve Student Learning

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

achievement.

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

✦ Low-stakes;

✦ 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

✦ Pre-assessments

✦ Interviews and conferences

✦ Comment-only marking of student work

✦ Self-assessment metaphors for students

✦ Checklists

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 self-assessing 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

✦Checklists

Quizzes: used as formative assessments, selected-response 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 pre-assessment 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.

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, WiliamAssessment 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?