Involving Students in Assessment

In teacher prep and during the first few years of teaching, I used the texts, the teaching masters, and the canned tests. Creativity was coming up with review activities and projects, writing study guides, and mixing up the prescribed lessons with partner or group activities. Students participated in class, in activities, completed study guides and took tests and quizzes.

In retrospect, this is the way I was taught and the way I learned while growing up. I was doing what I knew, what I’d been taught, and I was bored. I remember giving students low scores and retakes for tests, not realizing, at the time, that I was failing them as a teacher.

Fast forward a few years… changes in curriculum came around.

The textbooks were no longer aligned and weren’t immediately replaced. The basal readers were put away for novel studies. Only the math series remained. 

Though it was scary at first, this teaching without a net, it was also a pivotal moment in my career. It enabled me to develop into a teacher who had a better understanding of what the students needed to know and made me, scary as it was, develop lessons, activities, and assessments. It was about this time that my principal started talking about someone named Grant Stiggins and his ideas about assessment.

THAT was a game changer.

Sure I’d given quizzes in the past to figure out what students knew, but I hadn’t used them as a tool. And other than showing students their score and having them make corrections, I hadn’t used the information to drive instruction.

As hard as it was, this change in practice, it made teaching and helping students succeed so much more effective. 

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One of the greatest benefits of engaging students in the assessment process is the gradual understanding that getting good/bad grades isn’t something that happens to them, but something they can control. (I know, I know, there is always that outlier- but there are usually other issues at play in those situations). Ann Davies (2007) describes these specific strategies for involving students in the assessment process:

• Provide an informed focus for learning
  • Make students partners in the process by explaining the expectations and goals, discussing relevant and unknown vocabulary, and using formative assessments.
    • Formative assessments are essential tools for driving instruction and providing students with information about what they’ve mastered and where confusions still lie.
• Provide opportunities for students to develop criteria
  • Show students examples of acceptable work and work that is lacking. 
  • Discuss criteria for this work together so students can see and verbalize expectations for work quality and completion.
  • Develop together so students have ownership in what they are doing and a better understanding of how the points for each set of criteria are achieved.
• Provide frequent feedback.
  • In addition to working with students, discussing formative assessments and developing criteria, informal discussions and questioning can provide valuable information about student progress.
  • Specific feedback related to the content of the work (“Your introductory paragraph is well written. Can you provide more details to support your ideas in the second paragraph?.”) is more effective than general comments (“Good job. Keep it up!”).
  • Try to refrain from using symbols, numbers, or letters in feedback as anything less than good is viewed as such. Using descriptive words tells students where they are succeeding and where they need to work a little more in a less threatening way.
  • Consider letting students work together to review work based on feedback and before final submission. Peer-review and reflection can be valuable tools and provide additional opportunities for learning.
• Provide students the opportunity to review completed work, reflect on the required criteria, and give evidence of learning.
  • By collecting a portfolio of work, students can read see, through comments and artifacts, where they began with their understandings and where they are ending. This evaluation of progress made is more powerful and beneficial than a paper marked up in red.

(Davies, 2007)

OK, I’ve just re-read what I’ve written so far and realized that I did not address the elephant in the room-  high-stakes assessments. And I didn’t say a THING about tests. 

I assure you that I do not live in a bubble- that concern is genuine... and genuinely terrifying. The general principles I described can still be used and applied if a test is a final assessment. (Not all learning can be assessed through projects, WebQuests, or papers- I get it.)

Even if you’re giving a test (or prepping for THAT test)…

• Students need a clear focus for learning- break down the standards complete with understanding the final expectations.
• Frequent formative assessment is needed to drive instruction. You will know how to best meet the needs of students and they will know what they do/don’t yet understand.
• Descriptive, not evaluative, feedback will provide non-threatening information.
• Talking with students about the final written test may reveal that errors were not due to not knowing the information, but due to poorly written questions or unknown contexts within questions (especially important for English Language Learners).

The bottom line is that all teachers want their students to succeed, to learn, and to be the best they can be now and in the future.

Doesn’t it make sense, then, to involve them in learning to give them an understanding of what they need to do?

References

Davies, A. (2007). Involving Students in the Classroom Assessment Process. In Editor T. Reeves. Ahead of the Curve: The power of assessment to transform teaching and learning. (pp. 30-57).

Stiggins, R. J., & Chappius, J. (2012). An introduction to student-involved assessment for learning. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall.