Educators frequently conduct assessment activities, such as developing or selecting assessments to administer to their students, in order to determine what the student knows and can do. What do we mean by "assessment"? Broadly, assessment is defined as “the process of collecting, synthesizing, and interpreting information to aid (educational) decision making” (Russell & Airasian, 2011). In this guide, the terms “assessment” and “test” are often used interchangeably to denote an instrument used in assessment, such as a performance exam or a paper-and-pencil test.
In order for teachers, specialists and support professionals, building administrators, and central office administrators to effectively use systems like ET&L for assessment and reporting to make educational decisions, a basic level of understanding regarding assessment construction and use (“assessment literacy”), as well as a level of comfort with the use of technology (“technology literacy”) is helpful for getting the most out of the process.
W. James Popham, author of many books and articles on testing, teaching, and what teachers and administrators need to know about testing, offers the follow definition of assessment literacy:
Assessment literacy consists of an individual’s understandings of the fundamental assessment concepts and procedures deemed likely to influence educational decisions.
W. James Popham, 2012
Whether the focus is on making instructional decisions for individual students or program decisions for schools of districts, educators use assessments to gather data to support those decisions. High quality assessments and reporting practices provide relevant and accurate data that enable teachers and specialists interacting with students to
- diagnose student needs prior to instruction,
- check in on student learning in the midst of instructional lessons or units,
- evaluate student learning at the end of instructional lessons or units, and
- determine how well individual students are progressing through the curriculum.
Building and central office administrators may be more focused on the interpretation and use of aggregated assessment results to
- monitor student progress across classrooms, grades, and schools,
- monitor the proportion of students attaining designated benchmarks,
- gauge the effectiveness of specific instructional or curricular programs, and
- evaluate academic policies.
Form Follows Function
Assessments that provide relevant and accurate data for one purpose might not provide the data needed for another purpose. The state assessment that produces estimates of a student’s level of proficiency may produce data needed to support administrators’ decisions about the effectiveness of a particular program, but might provide little information useful to diagnose an individual student’s specific instructional needs. Similarly, an assessment designed to provide diagnostic information to inform instruction for an individual student is not likely to provide the breadth of information needed to evaluate academic policies or measure progress toward school and district goals.
Basic assessment literacy provides educators with the understandings needed to develop and select, from a range of practices, assessment tools that match their intended purposes.
Assessment literacy information is grouped, in Section 2 of this guide, into three categories:
- Developing and selecting assessment items
- Developing assessments
- Working with assessment results (producing, reporting, and interpreting)
Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.
—Steve Jobs, Rolling Stone, June 1994
Assessment literacy alone is not sufficient for an educator to effectively produce quality work and results using an assessment system. The educator also benefits from having an understanding of best practices associated with assessment and reporting, as well as a basic understanding of each system's available functionalities and a willingness to access and use them effectively.
We use the general term assessment to refer to all those activities undertaken by teachers—and by their students in assessing themselves —that provide information to be used as feedback to modify teaching and learning activities. Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet student needs.
—Black, P. & Wiliam, D. 1998. Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment
Throughout this guide, we view assessment as integral to a feedback process that incorporates planning, instrument selection or development, data collection, and data use to support decision-making pertaining to student learning—in the classroom and beyond. The data gathered may be quantitative (numbers) or qualitative (words, pictures, or other non-numeric information). Assessment may involve tests and other tools or more informal methods for gathering data on students, but the process is one that always invokes the cycle of inquiry.
The distinction between viewing assessment as a process and as an instrument is more than simply wordplay. When assessment is viewed as a single instrument like a test, or even a single item, the likelihood of misinterpretation and misuse of the assessment results increases significantly (for example, when scoring well on the instrument or item overshadows the reason or purpose for conducting the assessment in the first place). The process of assessment always involves the cycle of inquiry (Means, Padilla, Gallagher, SRI International, 2010).
In the cycle of inquiry, educators use assessment practices to answer specific questions about student learning. The assessment instrument itself is simply a tool in this process, as any number of instruments may be used to yield various insights into student learning and educational effectiveness.
The cycle of inquiry enables educators to integrate results from most assessments into teaching and instructional planning (formative assessment uses) and curricular planning and evaluation (interim/summative assessment uses).The cycle is iterative, and also flexible. Educators can enter the cycle at any point and often repeat the steps with students several times in a week or even in a class period.
- The cycle begins with planning and implementing instruction.
- Next, assessments are administered.
- Assessment results are then examined, reflected upon, and used in the next round of planning and implementation.
In the case of formative assessment, the cycle has a short time-frame, sometimes spanning only a day or a single class period. Interim and summative assessment cycles have longer time spans that can extend over a curricular unit, a term, a semester, or one or more school years.
Table 1 below illustrates a common classroom situation: how assessment quality and the cycle of inquiry work together for a short cycle.Here, the teacher must decide whether to continue to teach content in a specific area or move onto the next set of content. This decision is based on how well students have learned the material. The table compares a basic-quality assessment to a better-quality assessment.
Table 1. Basic v. Better Short-Cycle Assessment
[short cycle of inquiry] (https://github.com/WirelessK19/Assessment_Literacy/ShortCycle.PNG "Short Cycle of Assessment Literacy")
