Assessment Philosophy: How to Make CQ+PQ>IQ a Reality

For me, over-assessed students look a lot like what I did in high school and a lot like what my friends looked like in high school too.

Over-assessed students look like students who complete work just to get the work done and not to garner insight into their own understanding.

Over-assessed students look like students who will take the “L” on a homework assignment or project because they need to use class time to work on a different class.

Over-assessment looks like the prioritization of one class over another simply because the other class “looks better on a resume” even if it doesn’t matter to the student.

Over-assessment looks like severe stress and pressure on young students.

Over-assessment looks like the poor allocation of resources to assist students who struggle with testing environments and pressures.

Over-assessment looks like the normalization of test anxiety, the abuse of prescription drugs like Adderall just to make it through the next assignment, and the prioritization of school over individual well-being.

Over-assessed students looks like an entire generation of students who are not able to perform creatively on assessments because they are accustomed to prescribed, formulaic tests written by people they will never meet.

These beliefs are not merely anecdotal but are instead a reflection of the belief that “excessive testing may teach children to be good at tests, but does not prepare them for productive adult lives” (Bronson & Merryman 2010). Over-assessing students does nothing to prepare students for productive adult lives and only succeeds in causing undue stress and mental harm to students across the country.

I wrote this speech in May of 2014 - my junior year of high school.

I delivered it to my classmates, just days after AP exams had ended and just as college recommendations and applications were beginning to ramp up for us. 

One way that educators can involve students in the assessment and evaluation process is by offering students the opportunity to create and determine the criteria on which they will be assessed.

Student-Created Rubrics give students power over what they will be assessed on while also encouraging them to think about the materials and content they have studied and determine what they think is the most significant.

Below is an example of student brainstorming for the categories and criteria of a rubric.

From this information, teachers are able to create organized and “formalized” versions of this criteria. In giving students this power and in formalizing their ideas, teachers can get students involved in the assessment process beyond the work and creation portion of the task.

Data gathered from assessments will be used to provide insight into what students are learning, how they learn best, what strategies I use as an educator are effective or ineffective, as well as a way to garner additional support from administrators and departments to either provide additional resources or as evidence of how a particular strategy or lesson is succeeding with students.

(Lenski et al 32)

The best way that students can demonstrate their learning in the ELA classroom is through product/performance assessments in which students have the opportunity to apply and display their understanding of ELA skills and content. Examples of these types of assessments include essays, presentations, performances, and projects in which students are able to apply skills to a product that displays their knowledge and their abilities. The ability to navigate ELA content and structure and format arguments through the use of skills is essential to ELA learning and performance based assessments enable students to display their navigation and thought processes in an authentic manner.

While I may not be the biggest fan of Common Core State Standards, I understand and respect them to a degree. That being said, as an educator I can appreciate the vagueness of the standards for the opportunities they offer in originality and differentiation when it comes to assessment. It is the ambiguity and looseness of the CCSS that allows educators to work in the system as well as work the system to best suit the individual needs of a district, school, department, and classroom.

A “bellringer” where students are asked to reflect on their reading of The Color of Water and their understanding of the text’s characters.

After a lesson on integrating quotes, students were given quotes and tasked with writing their own sentences with properly integrated quotes.

Assessment is not an end of the unit task. Instead, assessment is something which should be on-going throughout the entire school year, before, during, and after instructional learning. Assessments are both measures of learning and for learning and this occurs throughout the learning process in different patterns and ways. Assessments should reveal student learning and thinking so that at any point in the period of instruction, educators can adapt and evolve along with their students instead of “parking and barking” and moving on without checking for understanding.

Assessment Before: diagnostic tests, surveys, graffiti walls, “pick-a-side,” speed debates

Assessment During: Checking in with students individually or in groups during lessons, short written responses/1 minute essays, exit-slips, bellringers

End-of-unit/culminating assessments are not more significant than formative checks because the goal of learning should be the process rather than the outcome.

As educators, we must “take deliberate steps to select and organize multiple artifacts representing student learning” and we must recognize that “collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources over time can provide a more powerful tool for understanding students’ interests, abilities, needs, and values” (Edwards et al 683).

The skills students are learning and engaging with through their course work is just as important if not more so than their ability to complete and submit a cumulative assignment that may or may not include and make use of those skills.