Assessing Students’ Learning Needs, Progress, and Achievement

Assessing Students’ Learning Needs, Progress, and Achievement Mamaroneck UFSD School Learning Walks Annie Ward, Ass’t Sup’t for C&I October, 2007

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“Learning is a process—a steady accumulation of knowledge and skill over time—not an event. Therefore achievement should be conceived as a continuum of continuous progress, and assessment helps place a student along that continuum, not on a scale of worthiness or smartness. Assessment tells you where you are in the journey and what you need to do next, not how good a student you are.” -Jon Saphier and Robert Gower The Skillful Teacher

Assessing Students’ Learning Needs, Progress, and Achievement Diagnostic Assessment Formative Assessment Summative Assessment

Diagnostic Assessment • Before teaching a unit or lesson, how do you take stock of students’ prior knowledge and skills? I describe rethinking my approach to vocabulary based on diagnostic assessment.

Diagnostic Assessment • How do you identify pre-existing misconceptions? Which misconceptions are best prevented with pre-emptive teaching? Which do you allow students to have and outgrow as part of the learning process?

Diagnostic Assessment • Do you survey students’ interests, goals, and learning style preferences? How do you use this information? A 6th grade teacher learns about students by surveying them and their parents. Read this parent’s comments about her daughter on the next slide.

The last survey question asks students to name three ways they’d like to improve in English and three things they’d like to learn this year.

Formative Assessment • Do you share and clarify learning goals and criteria for success so that students have clear targets in mind? Are students equipped to monitor their own learning based on these targets? Listen to the way one MHS English teacher empowers students to answer the question, “Is this good?” themselves before she evaluates their Blues songs.

Formative Assessment • Do you “chunk” content into manageable portions and check for understanding after each chunk? • Have you found ways to monitor all students rather than sample the progress of some? • Think-pair-share • Stop and jot • Dipsticking 8th graders demonstrate understanding of Earth Science concepts A 3rd grade teacher listens to partners’ discussions

Formative Assessment While reading Of Mice and Men aloud, an 8th grade teacher pauses at key passages, invites students to talk in clusters, and listens to their conversations. A high school English teacher joins an 11th grade literature circle discussion of Fast Food Nation.

Formative Assessment Exit slips are another efficient way to check each student’s understanding.

Formative Assessment • Do you plan opportunities to watch students and confer with them about their work in progress? • What do you notice about each student’s processes, strategies, and stamina? • Do you keep anecdotal records of your observations? How do you use these notes? A teacher administers the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) to a 5th grader

Formative Assessment The workshop structure enables teachers to watch each student at work, confer with him/her, provide feedback, and take notes to inform future teaching.

Over time, teachers devise conferring processes and forms that work for them.

Kindergarten teachers collaborated to create this form—a class grid with spaces to document what they noticed and complimented as well as what they taught. They have even included a “cheat sheet” at the bottom of the form (enlarged below) to remind themselves of all phases of the conference!

A kindergarten teacher summarizes a conference with a particular student.

Formative Assessment • Do you provide descriptive, useful, and timely feedback that enables students to self-adjust? • Can students tell specifically from your feedback what they have done well and what they can do to improve? A MHS Social Studies teacher assesses whether students understand her comments on their papers.

Not only does this student seem to understand the feedback she received on her essay; she articulates a specific strategy (organizing her notes into sections) to improve her writing next time.

This student recognizes that she hasn’t developed a process for researching, organizing, and writing an essay, but doesn’t know where to begin. If you were her teacher, how would you respond?

Summative Assessment • Wherever possible, do you create authentic assignments and projects that reflect the real-world behaviors of people in the discipline? In a section of Strategies That Work entitled “Beyond Dioramas: Responding to Reading,” Stephanie Harvey writes:

Summative Assessment A high school art teacher explains that he introduces ninth graders to the portfolio and to the institution of the critique because they are authentic to the discipline.

Summative Assessment • Are your assessment congruent with the learning goals you articulated at the outset of the unit? Do they assess things that you have taught and modeled? • Do your assignments channel students’ responses, or do they encourage innovative approaches and ideas?

Summative Assessment • Do you think it’s fair to allow new evidence of achievement to replace old evidence? Does your grading policy reflect your belief? In an e-mail on the next slide, a high school math teacher explains her policy of allowing students to re-take tests within certain parameters.

-MHS math teacher

Summative Assessment • While you are grading students’ work, are you assessing your teaching at the same time? Are you alert for patterns in students’ successes and setbacks that will inform subsequent teaching? Carl Anderson, a writing specialist formerly affiliated with the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, encourages us to look for the “fingerprints of our teaching” in students’ work.

Thank you for your interest! • What issues, ideas, and questions do these slides raise for you? • Please take a moment to talk to your colleagues and/or to respond to me at warda@mamkschools.org. I look forward to continuing the conversation. With respect, Annie Ward

Assessing Students’ Learning Needs, Progress, and Achievement