Insight

Rethinking Assessments

by Maisie McAdoo

Dec 6, 2007 2:58 AM

(They could be a lot less punitive)

Had enough assessment yet?

If your answer is no, you still want more, call 1-800-OPL-EASE. For the rest of us, it is time to halt the madness. Assessment does not have to look like this.

Teachers report that test prep is taking over the curriculum. The consequences of low scores have grown increasingly dire. Meanwhile, results contradict each other. Students and schools that demonstrate outstanding performance on one set of tests get failing marks on another, with the obvious result that the tests totally lose their credibility.

It’s gotten ridiculous. And it has led some educators to call for a moratorium on testing. But assessment is a useful way to know whether each and every student is learning the material. Assessment actually plays a pivotal role in learning, but — and here’s the kernel of a solution — different tests do different things.

The New York State standardized tests, fountainhead of so much recent pain and anger, are essentially tools to ensure that students and schools are making it over an educational baseline. Can each student read and do math at grade level, yes or no?

Such “summative assessments” have a particular purpose. They are not tests of general aptitude, nor are they intended to determine eligibility for some program. They are not supposed to be used to assess teachers, evaluate curriculum or improve instruction. Really, they are a rough measure designed to catch failure. They “should not be used to evaluate teachers and are possibly specious in evaluating schools,” according to Robert Tobias, director of New York University’s Center for Research on Teaching and Learning.

Formative assessments — a solution

But another type of test, so-called “formative” assessments, are designed to improve instruction. Formative tests are classroom-based, designed to tell a teacher where the knowledge gaps are. They are not high-stakes tests at all, nor are they accountability tools. Instead, they give immediate feedback on instruction so teachers can modify lesson plans, regroup students or introduce a new concept. They are sometimes called diagnostic assessments because they tell teachers not just that a student got a question wrong, but why.

For example, a 3rd-grade math test asks students to choose which clock face shows the time of 10:45. There are four faces drawn: A) shows the 10:45 time, B) shows the time at 9:55, C) shows 10:30 and D) shows 10 o’clock. A is the correct answer but the test publisher also provides a “distractor analysis” which shows what students did wrong if they got an incorrect answer. Students who chose B reversed the hour and minute hands; those who picked C picked the closest half hour; while the D answer shows the student read the hour only and overlooked the minutes in the question. In addition, an “item analysis” shows what percentage of students in the class did not answer the question and what percentage picked each of the wrong answers.

Rick Stiggins, founder of the Educational Testing Service’s Assessment Training Institute, in Portland, Ore., calls this “assessment for learning.” “Assessment for learning (as opposed to of learning) has a profoundly positive impact on achievement, especially for struggling learners, as has been verified through rigorous scientific research conducted around the world,” Stiggins wrote in “Five Assessment Myths and Their Consequences” [Education Week, Oct 16].

Taking work off the teacher

Computer-based tools are now available that do much of the data work on formative assessments. They allow teachers to create custom tests from a bank of grade- and subject-appropriate questions, get the test graded right in the computer and provide the analysis on what each student — or what percent of the class — got right or wrong answers and why.

The power of these tools is their ability to let teachers create assessments and then return a helpful analysis of student answers in a fraction of the time. And because they evolve from the combined work of hundreds of educators, a teacher can get new ideas for lessons that he or she might never have considered.

And now for the politics

Formative assessment tests have been nearly bulldozed under by the politically more consequential state assessments, but they are the ones that educators can best use. In fact, they are the educational powerhouses of assessment.

W. James Popham, professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles who spoke about assessment at a UFT forum on Nov. 17 [see “Teach kids what they need” on page 8], said that formative assessments not only help teachers adjust instruction but can actually transform schools. They help students change their learning strategies by showing where their thinking was off on a particular topic. Another level up, he says, formative assessments shift the classroom climate to one where learning is prized over getting the answer right. Ultimately, he argues, it is a schoolwide improvement tool that fosters teacher discussion and professional development.

“Classroom assessment can fundamentally transform instruction,” he told the UFT forum. Yet because it is a process, not a product that can be readily packaged, it has not been widely introduced. As ETS’s Stiggins notes, “[O]ur educators have never been given the opportunity to learn about it.”

But, he says, “As we look to the future, we must balance annual, interim or benchmark and classroom assessment. Only then will we meet the critically important information needs of all instructional decision-makers. We must build a long-missing foundation of assessment literacy at all levels of the system.”

This year for the first time, the Department of Education is requiring teachers to give three formative assessments in the elementary and middle schools, and two in the high schools. (The other two new interim tests that the DOE has introduced are “predictive,” and pretty much mirror the state exams.) Teachers who have used the new formative assessment tools have come away impressed. The tools will be road-tested for the first time in all schools Dec. 3 and 12.

However, while the DOE will not use the results in School Progress Reports or other accountability reports, it couldn’t just leave them in the hands of educators. Taking and doing well on the interim assessments will be one of the measures used for cash awards to 4th- and 7th-grade students in a selection of schools this year under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s experimental Conditional Cash Transfer anti-poverty program. Cash for tests that are supposed to be no-stakes? One step forward …