CHAPTER 13- ASSESSING STUDENT LEARNING AND USING THE RESULTS

Summary

-Norm-Referenced Tests (NRTs) compare the performance of one student with the performance of a comparison group of students. -Criterion-Referenced Tests (CRTs) compare the performance of each student with a particular level of accomplishment. -Teachers need to develop knowledge and skill in constructing different types of objective and subjective test items. -Formative assessment is the foundational perspective for planning, delivering, and adjusting instruction in order to continuously improve learning. -Response to Intervention (RTI) is an organized school- or district-wide three-tier approach to data-based decision making that entails assessing learning, making adjustments in instruction, and monitoring progress for all students.

Response to Intervention or Response to Instruction (RTI)

A multilevel approach for identifying struggling students and intervening to meet their academic or behavioral needs before they are classified as eligible for an Individualized Education Program (IEP).

Accommodating Students With Special Needs

A particularly challenging problem for teachers as well as professional test makers is developing assessments that are appropriate for students with special needs. There is a legal distinction for students who have been formally identified as having special needs. Students with recognized learning disabilities, physical handicaps, and other special needs will have an assigned school district team, including the parents, and an Individualized Education Program, or IEP. A key component of each student's IEP will be information related to any accommodations that must be made in assessments. In developing tests and other assessments, the classroom teacher has a responsibility to be knowledgeable about any and all accommodations that have been specified in student IEPs.

Student Improvement Team (SIT)

A special committee that reviews the performance of individual students. The team includes representatives from all grade levels/subjects, a school administrator, reading and mathematics specialists, one or more special education teachers, and at least one member who is skilled at organizing and displaying student data.

Two Very Different Kinds of Tests

A test score by itself has no meaning. A student could have a test score of 33, or 5, or 357. The score does not make any sense until it is compared with something. One of the interesting and important parts of testing is determining which comparison to make. One way to interpret a test score is to compare it with how other students did on the same test. The other way is to compare the score with a certain level of performance.

Test Security

A very serious responsibility for school administrators and teachers is to preserve the security of high-stakes standardized tests. Test booklets are kept locked in a very secure location. Each test is numbered, counted, and recounted. Each teacher will be responsible for maintaining test security when tests are administered. If a single test is misplaced, or possibly seen/copied by a student, there will be serious consequences. The entire testing session may be abandoned, all students will have to retake a different form of the test, and it is possible an administrator or teacher will lose his or her job.

Accommodating Different Types of Learners

An assessment that is perfect for middle-class suburban students may not be appropriate for poor urban students. The reverse may also be true: An assessment that worked well with an urban high school English class may not make sense with a rural high school English class. And exceptional learners must be considered in all assessment work. Two particularly important student learner populations that all teachers must consider are ELLs and students with special needs.

Subjective test

An assessment that poses a question, problem, or task for which students must construct an original response for which there is no right or wrong answer. The scoring of the responses could vary across reviewers based on their own biases and opinions.

WHAT ARE SOME WAYS TO TEST STUDENT LEARNING?

An important message for beginning teachers is that from the very first day in the classroom, they must have expertise in developing different types of tests. From the first day onward, each of the purposes for assessing must be addressed. Within each lesson and across the school day, teachers need to be engaged in informal assessing of each student.

Opting Out

An initial purpose of the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation was to hold states accountable for increasing student performance as measured through annual standardized testing. A number of threats and punishments in the act placed increasing pressure on schools. As retaliation, there has been an increase of students opting out. More recently, with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the punitive aspect has diminished, but the resistance has continued. For example, in 2017, in a rural Colorado district, only 15 of 500 students took the state test.

ASSESSMENT ISSUES AND CHALLENGES

As with most other aspects of teaching and learning, there are a number of critical issues and challenges that future teachers need to be considering.

Assessing for Different Types of Learning

Asking students to provide facts and figures (Level I, Remembering) they remember is very different from asking students to apply their knowledge of certain facts to solve a problem (Level III, Applying). An even higher level of learning is required to provide reasoned judgment to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses associated with certain phenomena (Level V, Evaluating).

INTRODUCTION

Assessing is a key component of all lesson plans. Curriculum and instruction experts constantly talk about assessing student learning.

Criterion-Referenced Tests (CRTs)

Assessments in which each student's test score is compared with a defined level of performance rather than with how other students have done.

Considering the Quality of Assessments

Careful and thorough assessment work is absolutely necessary when it is time to report progress or to make gatekeeping decisions. When tests are used to gate-keep, there is likely to be little room for interpretation or accommodation of special situations or unique individual differences.

Preserving Confidentiality Versus Appropriate Access

Depending on need, many different people have access to certain data elements. Determining who has access, and to which elements, is a major challenge. Having systems and procedures that preserve confidentiality, block unqualified access, and at the same time have ease of access for those with a need to know is not easy, or even likely possible

HOW DO TEACHERS AND STUDENTS USE FORMATIVE ASSESSMENTS TO ADJUST INSTRUCTION AND IMPROVE LEARNING?

Developing tests and evaluating student assignments are important tasks. One way of thinking about these tasks is to aim everything toward making the end-of-term summative decision about the grade to be placed on the report card. There is an alternative way of thinking. Instead of focusing on the grade, more effective teachers focus on the learning. Each assessment provides information about how much each student knows now. Each assessment also becomes the baseline for measuring learning from here. This approach begins with analyzing each student's work and determining how instruction needs to be adjusted in order to move each student's learning forward. This is what formative assessment is about.

Checking for Understanding Within Lessons

Expert teachers continually assess by using informal ways before, during, and in follow-up to each lesson. For example, when teachers employ the all-too-familiar "Q&A" tactic during a lesson, their intent is to use short questions that require lower-level student responses as a way to spot-check understanding across a number of students.

Two Ways of Thinking: Formative Versus Summative

Formative Evaluation: -When the purpose is purely to provide feedback on student progress and to guide preparation of tomorrow's lessons. Summative Evaluation: -When test results are used to make conclusions about how much a student has learned or to decide whether a student is ready to move to the next grade level.

WHY IS ASSESSING SO IMPORTANT?

Good teachers are always checking for student understanding through observation and listening to student discourse.

Group Work

Group projects add a challenge for the teacher when it comes to evaluating the contributions of each student individually. One way to accommodate this challenge is to assign each student an individual grade as well as a grade for the group. Another approach is to have each student grade the other members of the group in terms of the effort and/or the extent of their contributions to the group's product.

Testing Individual Learning Versus Group Work

In 2015, one of the major international studies, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), tested 15-year-olds in 50 countries and regions. The test was of collaborative problem solving. U.S. students ranked 39th in math but 13th in collaborative problem solving. In 2018, for the first time, PISA has assessed global competence. This concept entails individuals being able to examine issues of global and cultural significance, and to understand and appreciate different perspectives. Additionally, the assessment tests the extent to which students are able to engage appropriately and effectively across cultures. The first-time assessment asks students to examine news articles and to recognize outside influences on perspectives and worldviews.

Multiple assessments

More than one type of evaluation instrument used to determine student learning and needed support for improving learning.

Checking for Understanding After the Lesson

Once the lesson, unit, or series of assignments related to a major topic have been taught, assessing student learning has a different purpose. At these times, the purpose is most likely summative; grades will be determined. Therefore, the form and quality of the test take on more importance. Even though the test is probably teacher made, there is an expectation that it will be fair and without bias.

A Caution

One important caution for teachers to keep in mind is that all of their assessments can face close scrutiny if someone challenges one of their decisions (like a parent or student).

Characteristics of Effective Assessments

One important question is "How hard should the assessment be?" If the test is too easy, then it will not discriminate between those students who understand a lot and those who have limited understanding. A test that is too difficult will lead to student frustration and the teacher having little information about how much students have learned. Finding a balance between too easy and too hard is preferred.

Four Levels of Formative Assessment

Popham's four levels: Level 1- Teachers' Instructional Adjustments: Teachers collect evidence by which they decide whether to adjust their current or immediately upcoming instruction in order to improve the effectiveness of that instruction. Level 2- Students' Learning Tactic Adjustments: Students use evidence of their current skills-and-knowledge status to decide whether to adjust the procedures they're using in an effort to learn something. Level 3- Classroom Climate Shift: Teachers consistently apply formative assessment to the degree that its use transforms a traditional, comparison-dominated classroom, where the main purpose of assessment is to assign grades, into an atypical learning-dominated classroom, where the main purpose of assessment is to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Level 4- School-wide Implementation: An entire school (or district) adopts one or more levels of formative assessment, chiefly through the use of Professional Development and teacher learning communities.

Data-Based Decision Making

Principals and superintendents talk about data-based decision making. Teachers are placed in "data teams." Schools, districts, and states post displays of data and encourage "deep" discussions that are based in "evidence." The intent is to encourage teachers, and principals, to study the available data and make instructional decisions based on the analyses.

Comparing Norm-Referenced Test (NRT) and Criterion-Referenced Test (CRT) Scores

Some simple examples can be helpful in clarifying the differences between NRTs and CRTs. In high school track meets, one of the standard events is the high jump. Athletes run up to a horizontal bar and attempt to roll their body over the bar without knocking it off its brackets. In a norm-referenced view, the height that one athlete is able to clear would be compared with the heights reached by a sample of other students. If the average 10th-grade girl can clear 48 inches and Malinda cleared 60 inches, her performance is far above average.

Test

Structured opportunities to measure how much the test taker knows and can do at a particular point in time. The test conditions should be consistent for all test takers, and there is an expectation that each individual will make a maximum effort.

THE WHYS AND HOWS FOR ASSESSING

Teachers need to keep in mind why they are testing and/or assessing. Often forgotten is that there are a number of purposes for assessing that are of direct benefit to the students. Teachers need to think carefully about why they are assessing, and they need to pay particular attention to how the assessment activity will contribute to increasing further student learning. The test score has little meaning until the assessor interprets it and compares the results to how the student has done earlier.

Objective tests

Test items that can be scored as right or wrong without the influence of a scorer's bias. (T/F, multiple choice, fill in the blank)

High-stakes testing

Tests that are used for gatekeeping, such as passing to the next grade or being qualified for a job.

Balanced Assessment Systems

The critical question is how to balance all of these different assessments. The first is that assessments should be coherent. That is, they should be related to and integrated with the curriculum, not isolated from it. Second, assessments should be grounded in a model of learning. In other words, assessments should be based in shared models of teaching and learning that take into account motivation, relevance, relationship to learning goals, and equitability.

Normal curve

The distribution of test scores in which the largest number of scores are in the middle with few test takers achieving the highest and lowest scores. (Think of the curve Mark draws in class)

Norm-Referenced Tests (NRTs)

The test score of one student is compared with the scores of other students who have taken the same test.

Purposes for Assessing

There are many reasons between Summative and Formative for assessment. Examples below: Summative- Decisions about pass/fail, promotion/retention. Formative- Understanding students learning difficulties, spot checking, seeing what has been learned, determining growth, and providing grades.

Connecting Student Test Scores to Educator Evaluation and Pay

Under the Barack Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Education launched a major multistate program titled Race to the Top. A key component of that program was that teacher and principal evaluation and pay should be tied to test scores. This caused many complications, since every school district tests in different ways.

Test Cheating

Using a test score, especially from a single test, to make a high-stakes decision about graduation, licensing, pay, or keeping one's job is bound to have consequences. One of the recent examples unfolded in Atlanta, Georgia, where 35 educators were indicted. Under the intense pressure of the then-superintendent and administrators, teachers changed responses on test sheets, which inflated scores for whole schools. Eleven former teachers, principals, and administrators were convicted of racketeering, and most were sentenced to prison.

Don't Forget the Achievement Gap

Whether we are talking about NRTs versus CRTs, or testing versus assessing, or summative versus formative, or RTI, it is imperative that as a teacher you continually be thinking about all of your students having opportunities to learn. Examine your formative assessment notes, the results of tests, and your reports of summative grading to see if any categories of your students are not making satisfactory progress. Often, teachers are not aware that they are treating girls, or boys, or ELLs, or some other category of students differently. Disaggregating your assessment information by category of student will tell you a lot about how well you are matching instruction with the needs of all your students.

Accommodating English Language Learner (ELL) Students

With their continually increasing number, there is additional pressure on schools and school districts to do all that they can to ensure a fair opportunity for ELL students to demonstrate what they have learned. The following are useful guidelines for making accommodations for ELL students: -Do not change the purpose of the test -Do not change the content of the test -Do not provide the student with an unfair advantage -Continue to allow the testing contractor to be able to score the test -Do not violate test security -Do not change the focus of what is being assessed

Assessing

the process that entails interpreting test results and developing a plan for what will be done next.