Multiple Assessment Methods

1. Multiple Assessment Methods • Jeremiah Connell

2. Stiggins, R. (2007). An introduction to student-involved assessment for learning. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

3. Stiggins’s four categories of assessment methods: • Selected response • Essay • Performance assessment • Personal communication

4. Let’s imagine an example of each: Selected response • Of the following choices, pick the item that is not a result the Industrial Revolution: • a) increased urbanization b) Marxism c) Romanticism d) the likelihood of finding a piano in a middle-class family’s home e) the Age of Enlightenment

5. Let’s imagine an example of each: Essay • Do you think that student protests against the Vietnam War were effective? Why or why not?

6. Essays • If you care about the quality of your writing, it’s easy to go overboard and spend much more time on an assignment than an instructor expects. Conversely, if you don’t care about the quality of your writing, or never developed strong writing skills, it’s possible for your writing to get in the way of demonstrating how much of the content you have understood. • Writing rubrics can help to ameliorate this. (Perhaps cover rubrics on another staff development day?)

7. Let’s imagine an example of each: Performance Assessment • Two students are asked to act out a short skit from their Spanish textbook (or better yet, speak and listen to each other without relying on a script from the textbook).

8. Let’s imagine an example of each: Personal communication: • A teacher asks a student to clarify a point that he or she made in a paper. The student re-states his or her opinion in the conversation and uses information from the coursework to back it up. The paper may need more work, but in his or her conversation with the teacher, the student reveals a decent grasp of the material.

9. Personal communication • Being able to assess reasoning is “the real strength of personal communication as a means of assessment” (p. 203). You can ask a student how he/she arrived at a conclusion. You can ask him/her reasons for an opinion. You can follow along with his/ her train of thought, and unlike evaluating written responses, you get your information right away. Stiggins calls the “assessment of oral communication skills” personal communication’s “great strength” (p. 204). Facility with language is something I want to encourage wherever possible, but I think that a student’s deficit in oral communication skills must be considered when using personal communication to assess learning. This is just another reason to make sure that you use a variety of assessment methods and are clear about matching assessment methods to what you really want to measure.

10. How do we choose which of these classroom assessment methods is the most appropriate? • This depends on a lot of different things. What age group are you working with? Stiggins states that “in the primary grades, before students have become confident readers and writers, selected response or essay methods cannot be used, as they require competence in those modes of communication” (p. 76). What kind of knowledge or reasoning are you assessing? “Evaluative reasoning … cannot be tested using multiple-choice or true/ false items because this kind of reasoning requires a presentation of a defense. Answers are not merely right or wrong –they vary in quality” (p. 76). Other methods of assessment may be the best choice insofar as testing fidelity goes, but, “sometimes limited resources make it impossible to assess the actual skill” (p. 87). For example, a teacher may wish to have all students perform a piece of music or a soliloquy from a play to show an understanding of the material as well as to demonstrate their performance ability, but time constraints or other factors may make doing this impossible.

11. Assessing student affect • We want to assess student disposition because it has such a strong effect upon learning. Way back in chapter one, Stiggins writes about students’ “expectations of themselves” (p.19) and tells us that “students decide how high to aim based on their sense of the probability that they will succeed. … “No single decision … exerts such influence on student success” (p.19). • Stiggins re-states this idea in chapter nine when he writes about academic self-efficacy. He tells us “it is the evaluative judgment one makes about one’s possibility of success and/or productivity in an academic context” (p. 225). Student attitudes towards school will influence how hard they will try and how much risk they will take in ‘putting themselves out there.’ The link between effort and success when it comes to learning is not always clear for many young people. (It’s not always clear for more mature people, either.) It is something that teachers need to help develop.

12. Assessing student affect • When it comes to addressing student disposition, it is important to keep it professional, keep it related to school, and know when to involve the school psychologist, counselor, principal, or other professional. Stiggins tells us--and it should be considered common sense--that “you can do great harm if you fail to respond appropriately” (p. 223). Empathy, sympathy, and a desire to help are not appropriate substitutes for the specialized knowledge of a trained, certified, social-worker or psychologist.

13. Assessing student affect • Richardson, Morgan, & Fleener’s “Reading to Learn in the Content Areas” tells us that “negative emotions can impede learning” and that “the brain does not function at its best or at its highest level in a threatening environment” (p. 448). We may have no problem calling to mind plenty of anecdotal evidence to support those statements, but if we examine the literature we find research and hard evidence about how positivity, negativity, stress, and comfort can influence learning. Research tells us that non-threatening and emotionally supportive classrooms are they way to go, but even still, they may not be the norm in some districts.

14. Assessing student affect • How can a teacher assess student disposition/affect? Beyond personal communication and a thoughtful examination of the more subtle cues that a student gives off, there are the options of group interviews or questionnaires. Stiggins suggests Likert scale type questionnaires to assess feelings about specific academic subjects and school related issues. • Just like with other assessments, sample size, fidelity, and the collection of only useful information must be considered when assessing student disposition.

17. Managing assessment data • How and where we store information, if we should summarize or keep detailed notes, as well as method of communication about our assessments, all depend on the kind of assessment and the target audience (i.e. parents with a specific questions about their child’s progress vs. academic policy makers). • Stiggins tells us that our four main “communication options” are: “report cards, portfolios, conferences, and test scores.”

18. Managing assessment data • There comes a point when we start to see diminishing returns on time spent testing and managing assessment data.

19. Why should we use multiple assessment strategies? • No, really, I’m asking all of you: why should we?

20. Why should we use multiple assessment strategies? • There is assessment for learning (formative), and there is assessment of learning (summative). • Diagnostic assessment or pre-assessment (McTighe & O’Connor), formative assessments, and summative assessments (Stiggins), all have their place.

21. Why should we use multiple assessment strategies? • Selected response quizzes or tests, essays, performance assessments, and personal communication (Stiggins), as well as culminating projects and work portfolios (McTighe & O’Connor) can all be used at different times; a teacher should pick whatever method is most congruent with the learning styles of the kids he or she is working with, the lesson or unit’s learning goals, and what’s going to be done with the assessment information.

22. References McTighe, J. & O’Connor, K. (2005). Seven practices for effective learning. Educational Leadership. 63(3), 10-17. Richardson, J., Morgan, R., & Fleener, C. (2006). Reading to Learn in the Content Areas. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning. Stiggins, R. (2007). An introduction to student-involved assessment for learning. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.