Donald at first didn’t understand or appreciate all the fuss about what his colleagues called assessment. He just figured they were talking about tests, you know, quizzes and examinations. Donald just thought they were trying to use fancy language for an old-fashioned concept. But gradually, Donald realized that his colleagues had a different way of looking at tests–or assessments as they called them. Indeed, his colleagues were constantly helping students deploy different kinds of assessment to gauge and speed their learning while also constantly assessing their own instructional practices and program success. Donald finally decided to join the assessment bandwagon. He could tell that if he didn’t, he’d be left way behind.
Definition
Assessment is an academic process of gathering, analyzing, and sharing evidence to measure and improve student learning and the effect of instruction. Schools may just do what schools always do. But some methods that some instructors at some schools have traditionally employed have not been the best methods. Dry, hours-long lectures to a theater-style classroom filled with hundreds of students day after day, followed by a single end-of-term exam, is incredibly efficient and inexpensive for the school. It is also a disaster for many struggling and failing students who could otherwise have met rigorous academic standards with better-designed instruction. A school committed to assessment won’t allow ineffective instructional methods to persist. Nor will it allow students to progress when they are not in fact learning enough to meet academic standards. Assessment is a commitment to shared accountability between instructor and student.
Compulsion
Assessment isn’t just an academic fad adopted by elite schools. Accreditors instead mandate that schools conduct rigorous student and program assessment. The school that does not make assessment a core commitment of its instructional program may soon run afoul of accreditors and could lose its accreditation. The school that does not assess in the way that accreditors, lenders, employers, rating services, students, their parents, and other constituents require, to show evidence of the effectiveness of the school’s instructional program, won’t have the data to back up its claims of a quality or at least a competent program. Schools must generally do at least minimal assessment to meet standards and report the data that constituents demand.
Forms
Assessment includes traditional classroom quizzes, tests, and examinations for scores, grades, credit, advancement, and graduation. But assessment also includes preliminary evaluations to determine the knowledge and skills that students already have to see what instruction they still need. Teaching what students already know wastes time and undermines student confidence and engagement in the instructional program. Assessment also includes practice evaluations administered for students to gauge their progress, to acclimate to test conditions, and for the positive testing effect. Assessment also includes other forms of observation, measurement, and analysis of students and instruction, well beyond the traditional quiz, test, or examination, involving video and audio recordings, surveys, interviews, role plays, simulations, and other tools and methods. Appreciate the creativity that educators can show in the forms of assessment they deploy to gauge and promote student progress in learning.
Types
While many forms of assessment exist, educators often speak of two main types of assessment, (1) formative assessment and (2) summative assessment. Summative assessment is the type of evaluation just about everyone associates with schools. Summative assessment measures student performance to determine student advancement against benchmarks. Summative assessment is the dreaded final exam. Formative assessment, by contrast, is the evaluation of students to guide and promote their learning. Formative assessment is the welcome practice test, the one that tells the student and instructor whether the student’s studies are so far effective in approaching the dreaded final exam or instead that the student needs to change study methods and redouble study efforts. Schools must deploy summative assessments to properly benchmark and credential their students. Schools should deploy formative assessments to help students learn. When schools fail in assessing, it is generally a failure in formative assessment, not summative assessment. Schools are traditionally good at benchmarking and credentialing but not always so good at deploying formative assessment to aid instruction.
Benchmarks
Academic standards and benchmarking are important to schools. States pour a lot of taxpayer money into education at the elementary and secondary school levels. State academic standards hold schools accountable for using those resources efficiently and effectively. States publish report cards on schools, using school assessment results against the state’s academic standards. Parents choose elementary and secondary schools for the performance of their students, as the report cards reveal. Standardized tests for undergraduate, graduate, and professional school admission, and for licensure of graduates in professional programs, serve similar roles at the higher education level. Schools generally cannot simply advance students through their programs without accountability to academic benchmarks. Every course cannot be basket weaving. Courses and curricula must teach students what they need to learn. Accreditors, lenders, employers, alumni, students, their parents, and other constituents will eventually hold the school accountable for effective instruction.
Objectives
Instructional objectives serve an important role in helping schools align their courses and instruction to academic standards and benchmarks. Instructors should be able to articulate to students, their institutions, and the school’s accreditors what they expect their students to know and be able to do after instruction. Well-designed courses thus typically have objectives for every unit, describing the expected student performance after the unit’s instruction. Well-written instructional objectives describe the conditions, the performance, and the performance measurement or standard. For example, an instrumental-music course might have as a beginning-level objective that students would, on command, be able to play all notes on the major scale in succession in every key, in quarter notes and without error. Skilled instructors may spend considerable time honing instructional objectives to ensure that they accurately describe what students need to know and be able to do. With instructional objectives for each course, curriculum leaders can further analyze the curriculum map for gaps and overlaps in student instruction, to balance the curriculum. See the example instructional objectives and curriculum map in the appendix at the end of this guide.
Alignment
After articulating instructional objectives, instructors must align both their instruction and their assessment to the objectives. A common failure in instruction is to instruct toward one objective while examining students on a different objective. In that case, the instructor either hasn’t articulated the instructional objective, has taught something other than that which the objective describes, or has tested students on something other than the objective described and the instruction taught. Misalignment of objective, instruction, and assessment is a basic instructional failure. Students know it instantly, when they credibly complain that “I never knew that was going to be on the exam!” and “But I did fine on all the practice tests!” and “None of the exam material was even in the reading, outlines, or notes!” That’s the value of clearly articulated course objectives, to ensure that students know what to learn, practice, and test, and to align all three, while holding the instructor accountable to that alignment.
Testing
Frequent formative assessment, or in other words practice tests, produce several positive benefits. The first has to do with acclimating students to test conditions. Everyone knows about test anxiety. Test anxiety generally has to do with the high stakes and infrequency of testing. Of course students will be anxious when they take only a single final exam with their entire grade riding on it. Wouldn’t anyone be? Practice tests are the opposite, not low frequency/high stakes but instead high frequency/low stakes. With frequent formative assessments, students habituate to testing and do better on summative assessments (the final exam). Students also get to practice the expected performance in its expected form. If you’re supposed to learn to swing a golf club, then practice swinging a golf club. If you’re supposed to learn to pass a final exam, then practice exam problems. Formative assessment is so powerful in enhancing learning that educators call it the testing effect. Students don’t even have to do well on practice tests. Simply practicing test problems enhances student learning. Strong instructional programs tend to do lots of assessment.
Feedback
While the testing effect, meaning that students can enhance their learning simply by taking tests, is empirically proven, assessment becomes much more powerful with prompt, relevant feedback. The sooner the student receives feedback on individual test items, the stronger is the positive effect of practice tests. Feedback in one minute is better than feedback in ten minutes, which is better than feedback in an hour, which is better than feedback in a day. Feedback in a week may be relatively useless. Instructors who complain about all the papers or practice tests to grade and thus don’t get them back in a week need to redesign the assessment. A refined grading rubric, like the example in the appendix at the end of this guide, may enable an instructor to evaluate a student’s practice test in a fraction of the time. Indeed, a refined grading rubric may enable the student to self-grade the paper or test as soon as completing it. Or an instructor might have students swap work to instantly grade as soon as complete. Better yet, an automated program may grade answers instantly, as soon as the student enters them, giving the student instant feedback. Improving the timing and enhancing the quality of feedback is low-hanging fruit for instructional improvement.
Empiricism
Assessment is most powerful when empirical in its form. Instructors should observe students for the actual effects of their own instructional practices. Instructors should not teach to satisfy their own preferences. We all fall prey to the illusion of superiority, presuming that we have skill in areas that we do not. Teaching is so naturally authoritarian in its traditional form that it can accentuate the illusion of superiority. Empirically measuring the consequences of instruction eliminates the illusion. When a student fails a test, the failure may be both on the student and in the instruction. Frequent failures of large numbers of students may highlight defects in instruction. Instructors need the confidence, freedom, accountability, and support to examine, vary, evaluate, and adjust their instructional practices, based on the actual results they produce.
Scholarship
Fortunately, a voluminous body of empirical literature exists on instructional practices. See, for example, the teaching research abstracts in the appendix at the back of this guide. A school’s instructors don’t have to be skilled instructional designers. They can instead explore the empirical literature demonstrating the practices and techniques that tend to improve learning. Doing so collaboratively, in pairs and teams of instructors, can speed the research and spread the enhancements. Professional development of this type is key to a strong instructional program. No instructor should feel that the instructor is a complete work with nothing more to learn about instruction. Continual exploration and enhancement of the teaching craft is necessary to maintain a vital instructional program. Identifying, celebrating, and empowering inspired instructional leaders can enhance instructional improvements. Teaching and learning is a school’s mission. Continually assess and refine your school’s instructional methods.
Reflection
Does your school have a visible commitment to assessment? What do your school’s accreditation standards require your school to do about assessment? What forms of assessment do you see instructors using at your school? Would instruction be more effective with greater diversity in instructional forms? Do instructors at your school use frequent formative assessment? What academic standards must your school’s instruction meet? Do your school’s instructors articulate and share with students course and unit objectives in measurable terms? Do your school’s instructors expressly align instruction and testing to those course and unit objectives? Are instructors using well-developed grading rubrics to score papers, practice tests, and exams, and sharing those rubrics promptly with students? Do students get prompt feedback on practice performances? Do you have instructional leaders who explore the empirical scholarship on instruction? Does your school encourage instructors to form teams to study and enhance instruction?
Key Points
Assessment gathers evidence to measure and improve learning.
Accreditors mandate that schools have rich programs of assessment.
Assessment can take several forms beyond the quiz, test, or exam.
Formative assessment instructs, summative assessment credentials.
Schools benchmark student performance against academic standards.
Course and unit objectives describe measurable goals of instruction.
Sound instruction aligns testing and instruction to the objective.
Practice testing can have the effect of enhancing student learning.
Faster and better feedback enhances learning from taking tests.
Instructors should evaluate their methods empirically for actual effect.
Instructors should value empirical teaching and learning scholarship.