Assessment

Remember...

• No one, no number, defines you without your permission.  You get to decide who you are!

The FA Process is a habit of mind for teachers.  It is a way of being.  It is our practice.

Shift in thinking from "The answer wrong because it is not the answer in MY head or that I determined to be right." to  "What created this answer? How is the thinking being influenced?  How can the thinking be extended?"

CD's IF:

• 3D: Formative Assessment Process (The Formative Assessment Cycle):
• Assessment criteria - How do you convey important instructional/learning goals to students? How do you help htem understand what it will look like when their learning is on track? Barriers: lack of clarity of LT/SC, inability to tease out the underlying conceptual understanding of the task, inability to generate a learning progression, Unsure of the purpose of value of sharing LT/SC with students (Beginning, Mid-lesson, End)
• Monitoring of student learning (Eliciting and interpreting Evidence)- How does learning evolve? How do you gather and interpret evidence of students' understanding? Barriers: lack of ability to identify what evidence of conceptual understanding looks like/sounds like
• (Formative) Feedback to students (comments, prompts, instruction, RtI) How do you provide effective feedback to students to move their learning forward?
• Student self-assessment and monitoring of progress (Student Ownership and Involvement) - How do you involve students more fully in gauging and communicating about their learning?
• Formative Assessment is also dependent upon:
• PLANNING - Learning Progressions: an articulation of the pathways through which understanding of content evolves from basic to more sophisticated understanding.
• Classroom Environment:  Establishing a social culture that safely supports the sharing of students' reasoning and sense making needed to move learning forward.
• 
  

Assessment:

• Diagnostic Assessments are given to determine where a student's skills are and plan instruction.
• Summative Assessments are given periodically to determine at a particular point in time what students know and do not know as compared to standards.  They are a gauge.
• Formative Assessment is part of the instructional process.  It provides the information needed to adjust teaching and learning while they are happening.  In a sense, FA is pedagogy and clearly cannot be separated from instruction.  This is true if the information gathered is used to inform instruction.  
• "Students and teachers using evidence of learning to adapt teaching and learning to meet immediate learning needs minute-to-minute and day-by-day." M. Thompson and D. William, 2007
• Often seen as "practice"
• Not graded
• Student involvement underpins the effectiveness of FA.  Students need to be involved both as assessors of their own learning and as resources to other students.
• Research shows that the involvement in and ownership of their work increases students' motivation to learn.
• FA should help students ask better questions.
• What is the most important way to raise student achievement?  Answer:  Formative Assessment or so the authors of
• Articles about Formative Assessments:
• "Inside the Black Box" assert.
• Also:  Their follow up article:  "Working Inside the Black Box
• "5 Key Strategies of Formative Assessment" article (math slant, good for all)
• ASCD - Educational Leadership (Same idea of 5 Key strategies but without the math slant): "Classroom Assessment Minute by Minute Day by Day"
• Also:  Dylan Wiliam's follow up book:  Embedded Formative Assessment  (my notes)
• Also:  Interview with Dylan Wiliam.
• Formative Assessment Power Point...(quotes; charts - teacher, students, peer; 5 key strategies expanded)
• Why mistakes are powerful in learning...
• "The Power of Feedback" by John Hattie and Helen Timperley
• Graphic about Formative Assessment (Matt sent this out) ~ Feedback FOR learning

Assessments for ALL:

• Stop Light Assessment - 1 minute Teaching Channel Video

Assessments for LA Teachers - Reading/Writing:

• Teacher's College:  Assessments
• Reading Assessments
• Writing Assessments
• Spelling Assessments
• Benchmarks - includes Assessments for IR and Reading Stamina
• Additional Tools - includes In-Book assessment and reading logs
• Book lists for Classroom libraries and units
• Sample units for reading - sample curriculum maps
• ReadWorks.org - check out books and passages.  You can print passages designed for 6th grade.

Assessments for Math Teachers:

• Mathematics Assessment Project - at this point most are high school level.

Resources:
Notes from Advancing Formative Assessment in Every Classroom by Connie Moss and Susan Brookhart:

Chapter 1:  What is FA?

• FA is a philosophy of teaching and learning in which the purpose of assessing is to inform learning, not merely to audit it.
• FA is an intentional learning process teachers engage in WITH their students to gather information DURING the learning process to improve achievement (13).
• FA is an active and intentional learning process that partners the teacher and the students to continuously and systematically gather evidence of learning with the express goal of improving student achievement.
• FA is a learning partnership that involves teacher and their students taking stock of where they are in relation to their learning goals (13).  Teachers and their students actively and intentionally engage in the FA process when they work together to do the following:
• focus on learning goals  (Where am I going?)
• take stock of where current work is in relation to those goals (Where am I now?)
• take action to move closer to the goal. (What strategy(s) can help me get to where I need to be?)
• ...to be "formative," assessments must inform the decisions that teachers and their students make minute by minute in the classroom (6).  
• FA is focused ont he learning PROCESS and the learning PROGRESS (7)
• Required elements:
• shared learning targets and success criteria
• feedback that feeds forward
• student goal setting
• student self-assessment
• strategic teacher questioning
• student engagement in asking effective questions
• Creates the Goldilocks Principle:  to generate motivation to learn, the level of challenge and the level of support must be just right (8). ... This means that all classroom decisions - those made by the teacher and those made by the students themselves - must be informed by continually gathering evidence of student learning.
• FA influences ....
• Learning factors:  ownership, autonomy, confidence, and capability = resilience
• Motivation (motive means "something that causes a person to act") or motivation is goal-directed behavior combined with the energy and the intention to work toward that goals.  Motivation gets students learning, points them in the right direction, and keeps them engaged (15).  MOtivation needs:
• self-efficacy - a learner's belief in his ability to succeed in a situation
• self-regulation - the degree to which a learner is meta-cognitively, motivationally, and actively participating in her own learning.
• self-assessment - a learner's act of observing, analyzing, and judging his own performance on the basis of criteria and determining how he can improve it.
• self-attribution - a learner's own perceptions or explanations for success of failure that determine the amount of effort she will expend on that activity in the future.

Chapter 2:  Learning Targets

• Rationale for learning targets and unit goals: pg 24
• USE forms on pages 37-49S
• Studio Questions:  43
• Are there classrooms where students understand their goals particularly well?  Conversely, are there classrooms where activities just seem to happen to get "done"?  What are the differences in how students work and how they behave in those two types of classrooms?
• Do some teachers struggle with the concept of a learning goal? With the idea of an activity or assignment tapping into that learning goal in a deep way? for those teachers, what is the level of their own content knowledge and of their knowledge of typical  student learning progressions for that topic?
• Do you observe a range of students behavior in the classroom in your school? Is there any relationship between the number and type of behavior problems in a class and the clarity of student understanding and teacher communication of goals?
• From Work with Jenn 12/13:  LT/SC/Evidence = "The Big 3" (Jordan)
• LT - daily learning goal - WE CAN...
• Description of the daily learning, student POV, stated as mastery of learning NOT grading or activity
• 5 types of learning:
• 1 - comprehension of a concept of term
• I can explain...
• I can give examples of what ___ is and isn't
• I can use ___ to analyze ___ or to solve a problem.
• 2 - demonstration of a discrete skill
• I can (do it)
• 3 - Creation of a complex product OR demonstration of a complex process
• organized on rubric
• I can write an essay according tot he descriptions in the rubric.
• embodied on good example/model
• I can write a paper as good as this one because...
• demonstrated through modeling
• I can ___ just as well as ___ because ...
• 4 - use of critical reasoning or self-regulatory reasoning processes (maximize the quality of a performance/product)
• I can use my best thinking to ___ by asking myself these questions
• SC - What does it look like and sound like when kids are meeting the goal? How will they describe mastery to them so that they will be able to tell when they hit the bulls-eye?  I CAN....
• DEF: descriptions of what it mean to do quality work in today's lesson, students can use them to self-assess, 
• 2 goals:  fit the evidence you will gather AND make effective teaching and meaningful learning visible
• Use blooms words - this is where rigor lies.
• KUD - Know, Understand, Do
• Different from Task Analysis...?
• A set of student look fors
• specific, understandable, and visible
• Students can use the criteria to plan, monitor, and assess their own learning progress
• Evidence (Performance of Learning) - What would they do to prove/show it?
• DEF: A learning experience or task that requires students to actually do, say, write, or make something during the lesson to aim or the target, apply the sucess criteria, deepen their understanding and produce compelling evidence of what they know and can do related to the target.
• You'll know you can when...  
• Independence
• Use blooms words - increase rigor
• Student Self-Assessment
• Be Sure To...
• Our SC should foster meaningful gal setting or critical self-assessment 

Chapter 6:  Questioning

• During formative discussions, strategic questions can both "assist and assess student learning" (97).
• 
  

3/14/12 NWEA Webinar notes - featuring Dylan William:

Big Ideas:

• What children learn is unpredictable….
• Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning….
• Use evidence about achievement to make decisions about our instructions.
• Metaphor:  Pilots navigate (origin, destination, plan the route, monitor progress make adjustments to the course as conditions dictate) VS Teachers instruct/assess 
• Changing classroom practice is more than providing a tips/techniques for teachers.  What kinds of support do teachers need to implement these types of techniques:  Slow down, provide choice, and create accountability.

What is FA?  Research says...

•  long cycle – 4-6 weeks, monitor student progress, “weighing the pig doesn’t fatten it” – are we headed in the right direction?  Grades – improves thinking about learning, but not learning itself.
• shorter the cycle, the bigger the impact!  The closer the measurement is to the learning, the more impactful it will be.  We use the cues, but not systematically.

Most important parts of the FA:

• Engagement (no place to hide) and 
• responsiveness (using the responses to make adjustments or not)….

Unpack FA:  three questions:  Where are we going?  Where are we now?  How do we get there?

1.  Where are we going?  
1. Clarify, Share and Communicate  (Learning Target)  This is essential BUT consider these cautions:
1. Not always possible to be that clear….reacting to poetry!  A whole horizon of goals that are OK. 
2. Telling them where they are going can ruin the journey/problem.  
3. Uninspired teaching/teacher if start every class period with a learning objective
2. LT:  all students benefited, but the lowest students benefited the most from LT and reflective feedback.  Sharing learning intentions (codes of success/ what good work in a subject looks like) closes the achievement gap.
1. When they find mistakes in other people’s work, they are far less likely to make those same mistakes in their own work.
2. Provide students the chance to design their own tasks/tests.  More effective form of test preparation
2. Where are we now?
1. Engineering effective questions, discussions and tasks to find out where students are right now.  Sometimes a statement will lead to more thoughtful discussions than a question.
2. The RIGHT questions are hard to create on the spot - we need to spend time planning these.
1. When we ask a question and we get the answers we are looking for, we are tempted to assume it is for the right reasons.  What assumptions are we making?
2. You cannot give effective feedback unless you ask the right questions in the first place.  It’s hard to come up with these questions…that’s what we should spend time planning!
3. No Hands Up – more important – (if hands – 2 classrooms:  1) volunteers who are getting smarter and 2) avoiders that are missing out on getting smarter!  Creates bigger and bigger gap.) 
1.  Random picking,
2. “IDK” – “Great I’ll come back to you.” Get 3 answers and then say, “Which of those did you like more and why?”
3. Every 20 – 30 minutes – get response from every student.  (clickers, dry erase boards, etc…)
3. What will we need to do to get there?
1. Providing feedback that will move learning forward is essential.  Goal:  not feedback about what happened in the past, but feedback about how to improve in the future.  Students should be able to use it in future learning/efforts.
1. Tells learners what they need to do and HOW to do that.  Causes thinking  - as soon as feedback causes an emotional reaction, learning has stopped.
2. 4 Responses to feedback:  A) change behavior, B) change goal (increase or decrease level of complexity), C) abandon goal ("math is stupid"), D) reject feedback
3. Do grades result in the response we want?
1. If there is a grade, students don't read comments.  We have to stop doing the things that take too much time and don't produce the results we want.  What is that?  Grading!  We grade too much and it doesn't impact learning in a positive way.
2. How do we get students to read comments? 
1. Write comments and give them to groups.  Have groups match the comment with the paper/project.  Explain why.
2. Vague comments:  5 problems are wrong - find them
3. Feedback should be more work for the recipient than teachers! Make sure your feedback causes them to do something!!  This means there has to be time allotted to respond to feedback.
4. Give the same amount of feedback to all students.  How to improve and how to get even better.  "There is no there!"
5. Goal:  less feedback, high quality feedback, and time to respond to the feedback.
2. Create students as learners and resources for each other.
1. When students are involved in their own learning and the learning of others, they have better retention both in the long and short term.
2. Activating students as owners of their learning (independence and autonomy, increased freedom of choice and personal responsibility):
1. Doubles the speed in student learning
2. Idea:  Learning portfolio (shows your journey, effort leads to progress, smart is not something you are, it is something you become.  Looking back reinforces this idea.) – not performance portfolio (latest and best work)-
3. What did you find + easy / - hard, challenging / Interesting or weird
3. Training students to pose questions after a piece of learning.  Encourage students to ask questions, “In your group, find out if anyone has a question that you cannot answer in your group.”  Or “Put a question on a slip of paper and then sort questions and answer them.”  “We went over complex material, you must have at least one question.”
1. **Making students ask questions as they are learning has a lot of research backing it.****
4. Resources for each other:
1. Idea:  always have a "pre-flight" check list - buddy is responsible and held accountable for signing off on checklists....

·         Keeping Learning on Track – NWEA resource.


"Rubrics and Formative Assessment:  Feedback and Student Self-Assessment" in How To Create and Use Rubrics by Susan Brookhart:

• Rubrics are a good framework for feedback!
• "Yellow and Blue make Green" - student highlights where they think they are on the rubric, teacher highlights where they think they are - if they both are the same, GREEN emerges.  If they are different, TEACHING emerges.
• Paired-Peer Feedback
• When you are Giving peer feedback:
• Read or view your peer's work carefully.
• Talk about the work, not the person who did the work.
• Use terms from the rubrics to explain and describe what you see in the work.
• Give your own suggestions and ideas, and explain why you think these suggestions would help to improve the work.  Connect your changes to improvement on the rubric using terms from the rubric.
• Listen to our peer's comments and questions.
• When you are Receiving Peer Feedback:
• Listen to your peer's comments.  Take time to think about them before you respond.
• Compare your peer's comments to the rubrics, and decide what comments you will use in your revisions.
• Thank you peer for the feedback.
• Look Fors:
• How are students using the rubric?
• How clearly can they describe the work?
• How useful are their suggestions for improvement?
• How supportive are they?
• How did they respond to feedback about their work?