Initial Thoughts About Assessment

As educators, we are engaged in assessing our students all the time. Some assessments are pre-planned and formal, such as when we give tests and quizzes or assign projects, and others are more informal efforts to collect evidence of what students know and can do. Many of these informal assessments are based on questions students ask, snippets of conversations overheard between learners, or an observation of students' body language as they embark on a new task. Still other assessments are highly controlled and mandated "high stakes" sessions designed to be used mostly by others to judge the effectiveness programs and rate schools. 

I believe that assessment is most useful when it is used at the classroom level to shed light on the status and progress of individual learners. Prioritizing classroom assessments over larger scale measures places the emphasis on the people who have the most influence over students' learning: the students themselves, their families, and their teacher or teachers.  

I also think assessment must be an ongoing process that makes use of different techniques to paint a more complete picture of a students' thinking. This approach acknowledges the individual nature of the process of learning and takes into account the fact that no one measure can capture the entire breadth of a persons' understanding.

Finally, I think that the most effective assessments are ones that result in feedback which can be acted upon by both students and teachers. This last item may sound easy, but is probably the most difficult to carry out. For an assessment to lead to actionable feedback, it must be carefully crafted to reveal evidence that makes sense to students and teachers, and then must be aligned with available resources that somehow pick up where the learner left off along a progression which is not necessarily the same for all. Tricky indeed!

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