Assessment

Formative assessment is the evaluation of a student’s progress towards achieving a specific academic goal. They are typically conducted at regular intervals and are administered by the teacher who studies the feedback and uses the information they get to help their students’ growth and progress towards their academic goals.

Teachers can use different methods to perform the in-process evaluation of student comprehension, academic progress, and learning needs during a unit, lesson, or course. Such methods can include summaries and reflections, charts, lists, exit cards, graphic organizers, visual representation of information, and collaborative activities. Using formative assessments, teachers can recognize concepts that students are finding difficult to understand, skills they’re struggling to gain, or learning standards they haven’t yet achieved. All these will help them adjust their instructional techniques, lesson plans, and academic support to help students improve their learning. Such assessments help students identify their weaknesses and strengths and target areas that they’ll need to work upon. Thus, formative assessment stands for tools that help spot struggles, misconceptions, and learning gaps along the way and evaluate ways to close those gaps. The process includes effective tools that help shape learning. It can even strengthen students’ abilities to take ownership of their learning when they realize that the objective is to improve their knowledge, not just focus on the final marks they receive.

If teachers decide to use a formative assessment, a good idea would be to ask open-ended questions to determine how well their students understand the task. Students will respond to the questions differently, with some providing answers eagerly and others opting for silence. As a result, it is common for specific students to dominate the formative assessment period. To combat this, teachers can organize the test so that everyone participates significantly and can be more committed. Teachers shouldn’t forget that the students’ hesitance to answer questions may stem from shyness, not understanding the topic, lack of confidence, etc. They can mold such a situation by rephrasing the question or asking another student to help out.

Formative assessment can be peer-led, tutor-led, or involve self-assessment. Since such assessments have low stakes and usually carry no or low point value or grade, they may, in some instances, put off the students from performing the task or engaging with it completely. Yet, this mode of assessment can support students to become self-directed learners. Additionally, it enables teachers to get evidence of student learning and make the necessary adjustments to help them achieve the intended learning outcomes.

An authentic assessment is a type of evaluation that requires students to provide solutions to real-life situations based on their knowledge and critical thinking skills. These tests are heavily based on problem-solving skills and are usually rooted in a topic that students have previously been taught. A common form of authentic assessment is oral testing which puts students in a ‘hot seat’ situation, where they have to rely on their residual knowledge and cleverness to solve problems on the spot.

Authentic assessment tests integrate content that has already been studied and evaluate a student’s ability to use that knowledge in a real-world situation. Other common forms of authentic assessment include portfolios, which are used to document a student’s learning progress over time and are used as tools to generate consistent and organized feedback. Some additional types of authentic assessment include debating, role-playing, etc. Thus, broadly speaking, authentic assessments can be of two types – real-world assessments that need students to engage in actual situations in their field, and realistic evaluations that are relevant in nature but engage students in situations that imitate the real world (for instance, a case study). 

Before conducting such assessments, teachers teach their students how to “do” the subjects – be it history, math, science, etc., and not just know them. Next, to evaluate what their students had learned, they can ask students to execute tasks that “imitate the challenges” faced by those doing, for instance, historical survey, mathematics, or performing scientific investigation.

Some may wonder what makes an assessment authentic. Here are the main criteria:

·         It’s realistic

·         It requires the students to “do” what they have learned

·         It involves innovation and judgment

·         It simulates or replicates the contexts in which the students are tested

·         It examines the student’s ability to effectively and competently use a range of skills and knowledge to complete a complex task

·         It allows suitable opportunities to practice, rehearse, consult resources, and obtain feedback on and improve performance

Oral tests and essays are the best types of assessment for testing high-level knowledge, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills. First, teachers should consider the type of knowledge they want to test. This should be followed by designing an assessment that’s most appropriate for their students and the curriculum.

With authentic assessments, students get the opportunity to test their knowledge and skills in new and real-life situations. This will help them get ready to be assessed in their professional lives and even show them how relevant their course’s content is outside the classroom.

This method of assessment has been generally favored by teachers in comparison to norm-referenced assessment. Here, students are evaluated to determine their levels of expertise by displaying their knowledge levels in those areas.  Instead of conducting a peer-to-peer assessment, students’ results are graded against their previously displayed knowledge levels.

Teachers use this mode of assessment to find out which particular concepts the student has learned. For example, an elementary school teacher can use criterion-referenced assessments to evaluate how well her students have learned the concepts of adding fractions or using the parts of speech.

Since such tests determine the students’ grasp of particular skills and concepts, they are likely to be lengthy. For instance, a criterion-referenced test can be designed with 100 total points where students receive points for every item they complete correctly.

In their regular classroom work, teachers use criterion-referenced assessments as the most common type of evaluation method. They create these tests based on their school’s curriculum and the expected learning outcomes in a specific subject area.

Criterion-referenced assessment acts as a significant basis for engaging students with the learning process. If done well, such tests can:

·         identify what’s valued in a curriculum and ensure what’s measured by the test is the same as the knowledge, skills, and understandings defined by the anticipated learning outcomes

·         provide a shared language between teachers and students

·         enable assessment of how well students have achieved the targeted learning outcomes

·         pave the way for the identification of learning, teaching, and assessment practices that may require review

This mode of assessment can also make students understand what’s expected from them through valid, transparent, and reliable judgments about their test results. At the same time, teachers can help them understand what’s required for improvement on their future assessments by providing students with relevant feedback about the quality of their work.

The process involved in criterion-referenced assessment is transparent for students, and the grades they get for a unit can be traced to their exact performance on each of the scheduled tasks. Additionally, such tests enable reporting of student progress or achievement based on a series of key criteria rather than as a solitary percentage or grade. However, to make such tests effective, the assessment criteria for every task must be aligned with both the planned learning outcomes of the unit and course, along with the type of assessment the task involves.

Refers to an extremely traditional evaluation type where the standard is norm-referenced assessments and students’ results are compared to one another. Typically, the ‘norm group’ or larger group is a massive sample representing a diverse and broad cross-section of students. Such a group could include students of the same class, students who took the same course last year, or students from other colleges and universities. Schools, districts, students, or even states are compared or rank-ordered with respect to the norm group. The goal of a norm-referenced assessment is generally to sort students and not assess their achievement toward some performance criterion. In other words, a norm-referenced assessment aims to compare an individual’s performance to what is normal for other people like him or her.

A norm-referenced assessment can be considered similar to a race. When a runner finishes third in a race, the result doesn’t tell anything objectively about what the runner did. It doesn’t tell if the participant completed the race in 30 minutes or 30 seconds. What’s known is that the runner finished the race after two other runners and sooner than every other participant. Now, if a teacher decides to conduct a norm-referenced math test in her class, she will need to compare students to what is normal for that class, grade, or age. Some examples of norm-referenced tests are the IQ tests, SAT, and tests graded on a curve. Whenever a test evaluates the participants based on a percentile rank, it’s a norm-referenced test. Thus, if candidate A scores at the 80^th percentile, it means that A scored better than 80% of people in his group.

With norm-referenced assessment, it’s possible to compensate for any mistakes that could have occurred while designing the measurement tool. For example, what if the math test in the example discussed above was too easy, and everybody did well in it? In case it’s a norm-referenced test, it wouldn’t be a problem as the teacher won’t be looking at the students’ actual scores but how well they did with respect to other students in the same class, grade, or age.

Based on the construct of norm-referenced assessments, it’s expected that 50% of students rank below average. It is, therefore, not surprising that norm-referenced assessments have been subjected to severe criticism over the years.

Although they may provide some important information, norm-referenced assessments don’t significantly help students in their quest for academic excellence. Instead, they are more accurate at predicting a school’s socio-economic strata than the real academic potential of students or the efficacy of their educators.  

This gives students the chance to display their mastery of very specific skills. In many performance-test settings, students are asked to carry out very detailed procedures or create certain products to prove that they can apply their expertise. The educator usually monitors the performance of the students and assesses them based on this. While performance assessments could take a lot of time, are exhausting, and are subject to bias when grading, there are methods of addressing these problems.  

For example, students who are learning foreign languages can be evaluated via an oral presentation, while students who are in science classes could be requested to carry out experiments under preset conditions, with teachers observing the presentations being made. One good way of dealing with the probable bias introduced during performance assessments is to have these sessions recorded and either use a group of educators or an external evaluator to assess them, before a decision is made about the student’s grade. A universal scoring guide should be used in the grading process.

A comprehensive performance assessment system should consist of these three basic components (in some variation or the other):

Developmental Checklists: They cover domains like mathematical thinking, language and literacy, and physical development. They’re planned to reflect developmentally appropriate practices. Teachers use such checklists all through the year to create profiles of their students’ individualized progress in acquiring knowledge, developing skills, and mastering vital behaviors.

 Portfolios: These depict the students’ work that reveals their progress, efforts, and achievements over time. Students can compile their work from the classroom in their portfolios, either on their own or with the help of their teachers. When both teachers and students work together, they can talk about the latter’s interests and progress, which can help teachers plan and develop new activities for their students to focus upon.

 Summary report: This includes a brief narrative summary of each student’s classroom performance. It’s rooted in a teacher’s records and observations that are kept as part of the system. To complete this summary, teachers should review the checklists and portfolios cautiously. Next, they should make overall judgments to report to administrators, parents, and others about each student’s activities and progress.

Each of these three components of performance assessment is necessary. Without ongoing checklists, teachers can’t keep track of students’ progress toward the planned curriculum goals. Without portfolios, differences in a students’ quality of work over time won’t be easy to assess. In the absence of summary reports, there won’t be any easily comprehensible information for school administrators, parents, and teachers.

I define student growth as academic progress that is accomplished over a period, as assessed at the onset and end of a specified time. It can be calculated for countries, states, cities, schools, or students, and many variables and strategies can be used to determine if “growth” has occurred. Sounds easy, right. Not exactly. Many school districts and even state departments of education have difficulty measuring student growth. If you fall into this category, don’t worry, we have your back. In this article, we will discuss seven ways to measure student growth.

The Computer-Adaptive Approach

This approach allows educators to view student growth over a single year, as opposed to multiple years, on the same scale. Computer adaptive assessments will adjust their difficulty based on a student’s performance.

The Student Growth Percentile Approach

This approach compares a student’s growth to students with similar test scores. The benefit of this approach is that it allows us to fairly compare students who start at different levels with similar students.

The Value-Added Approach

This approach measures the teacher’s effectiveness in a given year by comparing the current test scores of their students to the scores of those same students in prior school years. Value-added models are considered fairer than other models since it takes confounding context variables like past performance, student status, or family income status into consideration.

The VAM – Covariate Adjusted Approach

In this approach, student academic growth is calculated by juxtaposing students’ predicted scores with their genuine scores. One of the drawbacks of this approach is that you will need several years of “matched” data for accuracy.

The Gain Score Approach

This approach measures year-to-year change by subtracting the year before an (initial) score from the current year (final) score. The growth of a teacher is averaged and compared to the overall average growth for other teachers. It’s easy to calculate and can be used with local assessments. The issue is that it doesn’t make accommodations for initial achievement levels; it’s just a run of the mill calculation of the change in score for students.

The Effect Size Approach

The effect size approach allows you to compute the amount of the difference between two groups. With this approach, if a teacher gets an effect size of +1.0, their students grew one standard deviation.

The Progress Monitoring Approach

This approach is different from your usual criterion-referenced assessments because they are not normed. They’re easy to administer, and the data can be shown to explain the difference between where the student is performing relative to the expected target or level.

Can you think of any additional ways that we can measure student growth?