Enhancing Assessment
Assessment is a hot topic in education. Often when we think of assessment we think of end of year, high stakes testing, where our students are allocated a grade. However, Professor Stuart Kime urges educators to look at assessment instead as a process that is vital for effective pedagogy. Here are my takeaways from Professor Kime's assesment webinar at the Education Hub.
Assessment should not be looked at as a singular event or test. Instead it should be seen as a process that produces information that can be used and that is meaningful. Yes, it will involve some sort of testing, but when teachers make sense of this test data and act upon it, their pedagogy is strengthened.
Testing is often seen as an end goal - we will assess our students at the end of the unit or year and give them a grade. However, the process of assessment can be used throughout the year. We need to know their starting point; to understand where they are at the moment and how/ what we should teach them next. This same process can be undertaken midway through a unit or topic to help us determine
whether or not the students need to recap certain areas, or whether they are ready to move on.
Ensuring Reliability and Validity
To increase reliability we can increase the number of assessment tasks we are giving and compare the results. It is important to triangulate data, however this does not necessarily mean giving our students multiple tests - we can consider our students bookwork, or give them shorter assessment tasks in class. It is most important that we have a clear idea of what we are assessing and that our tasks align with this. Indeed, for data to be valid, it must align with our criteria. If we are assessing against an aspect of the curriculum, it is important that our tasks actually focus on that aspect. It is also important that our questions are clear so that our learners will not interpret them in the wrong way.
Planning for Assessment
Strong curriculum knowledge is paramount when designing an assessment task. It is important when designing an assessment task, as this must align with the curriculum. And, when analysing the results, as we must compare these to the curriculum to identify where our students are at and what their next steps might be. Kime urhru us to view our curriculum as a map , and to see assessment as a compass or tool that helps us to understand where we are and where to go next.
Curriculum knowledge is also important when selecting a tool for assessment. We must be aware of the knowledge or skill that the curriculum describes, and choose a task that suits this. For example, in statistics, the NZ curriculum demands that students are able to undertake their own statistical inquiry. To accurately assess this, teachers must give students the opportunity to inquire and assess them on this task, as opposed to giving them a complete statistical inquiry to comment on. While you may have a favourite assessment tool or favour a specific form of assessment, we need to alter these to match our topic.
Assessment and Distance Learning
You can't expect that all students will learn at the same pace and depth from home as they would in the classroom. Yet if assessment is part of our pedagogical toolkit, it must still have a place in distance learning; it should still inform our planning. So what can we do?
Assigning an online reading test is unlikely to work. If you are doing things asynchronously, you don't know if your students have taken the test or even completed their learning activities on their own. Many may have collaborated or received help from friends, siblings, parents and even Google! So assessment will differ from usual. One method is to take advantage of the time you have with students in video calls. You could give students multiple choice questions (like a kahoot), longer answer questions (using the chat box) or ask students to film video explanations of your topic. These video explanations will quickly show you how well the students understand the topic as they must understand it deeply to be able to teach it to others.
Other Top Tips
If you want to know if students have retained information, assess them after the unit has concluded to see how much they have remembered. It can be helpful to include a couple of questions each week from the previous terms work, to support the retrieval of information.
We can enhance the affect of assessment through feedback. Not by congratulating our students or encouraging them (although this has a place too), but by informing them of their progress. We can give our students information about where they are in the curriculum and their strengths/weaknesses - this will make their own learning journeys clearer for them.
Assessment should not be looked at as a singular event or test. Instead it should be seen as a process that produces information that can be used and that is meaningful. Yes, it will involve some sort of testing, but when teachers make sense of this test data and act upon it, their pedagogy is strengthened.
Testing is often seen as an end goal - we will assess our students at the end of the unit or year and give them a grade. However, the process of assessment can be used throughout the year. We need to know their starting point; to understand where they are at the moment and how/ what we should teach them next. This same process can be undertaken midway through a unit or topic to help us determine
whether or not the students need to recap certain areas, or whether they are ready to move on.
Ensuring Reliability and Validity
To increase reliability we can increase the number of assessment tasks we are giving and compare the results. It is important to triangulate data, however this does not necessarily mean giving our students multiple tests - we can consider our students bookwork, or give them shorter assessment tasks in class. It is most important that we have a clear idea of what we are assessing and that our tasks align with this. Indeed, for data to be valid, it must align with our criteria. If we are assessing against an aspect of the curriculum, it is important that our tasks actually focus on that aspect. It is also important that our questions are clear so that our learners will not interpret them in the wrong way.
Planning for Assessment
Strong curriculum knowledge is paramount when designing an assessment task. It is important when designing an assessment task, as this must align with the curriculum. And, when analysing the results, as we must compare these to the curriculum to identify where our students are at and what their next steps might be. Kime urhru us to view our curriculum as a map , and to see assessment as a compass or tool that helps us to understand where we are and where to go next.
Curriculum knowledge is also important when selecting a tool for assessment. We must be aware of the knowledge or skill that the curriculum describes, and choose a task that suits this. For example, in statistics, the NZ curriculum demands that students are able to undertake their own statistical inquiry. To accurately assess this, teachers must give students the opportunity to inquire and assess them on this task, as opposed to giving them a complete statistical inquiry to comment on. While you may have a favourite assessment tool or favour a specific form of assessment, we need to alter these to match our topic.
Assessment and Distance Learning
You can't expect that all students will learn at the same pace and depth from home as they would in the classroom. Yet if assessment is part of our pedagogical toolkit, it must still have a place in distance learning; it should still inform our planning. So what can we do?
Assigning an online reading test is unlikely to work. If you are doing things asynchronously, you don't know if your students have taken the test or even completed their learning activities on their own. Many may have collaborated or received help from friends, siblings, parents and even Google! So assessment will differ from usual. One method is to take advantage of the time you have with students in video calls. You could give students multiple choice questions (like a kahoot), longer answer questions (using the chat box) or ask students to film video explanations of your topic. These video explanations will quickly show you how well the students understand the topic as they must understand it deeply to be able to teach it to others.
Other Top Tips
If you want to know if students have retained information, assess them after the unit has concluded to see how much they have remembered. It can be helpful to include a couple of questions each week from the previous terms work, to support the retrieval of information.
We can enhance the affect of assessment through feedback. Not by congratulating our students or encouraging them (although this has a place too), but by informing them of their progress. We can give our students information about where they are in the curriculum and their strengths/weaknesses - this will make their own learning journeys clearer for them.
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