After being in the classroom for nearly 20 years, I have an abundance of opinions on assessments. In general, I feel assessments, when utilized by teachers appropriately, drive and guide curriculum and instruction. It is also my opinion that testing just for the sake of testing is tedious and pointless. From students, parents, and teachers alike, our current methods of assessment are under fire and I, personally and professionally, couldn’t agree more. So many teachers, including myself over the years, feel like they are bound by assessments, and lacking creativity. Teachers are spending so much time teaching to the test that they are doing an adequate job teaching students the content related to the test and getting to chapter XYZ by a certain date, that they cannot get students to “mastery” levels. This is none more apparent than in my district as we spend so many hours of valuable instruction time testing our students instead of diving into deeper more critical thinking. A usual spring, unlike this one, sees us CMAS testing, PSAT 8/9 testing, PSAT 10 testing and then the ever important SAT (the latter having the most value). Coupled with our monthly NWEA, MAPS and, of course, unit tests, among several others. The question I raise is: what is the nice balance between learning and testing? As a coach this becomes more apparent, if we don’t have minutes and hours of practice each week and we play game after game after game, how are students able to learn the concepts that they need for the big game? Trial by fire only works every now and again. I have a saying that I tell people when they ask about the sophistication of my offense, “we can throw a whole bunch of crap at the wall and hope some sticks, or we can simplify and be great at the few things we do.” While conducting research about the amount of time that our students spend testing, I found some eye-opening numbers. Across the nation, states are spending over thirty to forty hours on standardized testing, throw in an additional twenty to thirty hours per student on district and class summative assessments, added together that is seventy hours of testing time (Konen, 2017). In the State of Colorado, we require 1056 hours of instructional time, of that, nearly 7% of our time in the classroom is devoted to testing instead of teaching, learning and mastering the content (Instructional Time Requirements, 2019). This doesn’t really allow time for them to teach other important concepts, like soft skills and life skills that are required to be a functioning member of society.
I do feel that assessments are necessary for evaluation and feedback in the classroom; however, I think there are major flaws within our state assessment procedures. We need to hold ourselves, as well as students, accountable by utilizing the data we garner from these assessments. Ruminating on my experiences, only the last two years in my career have we really dove into the assessments to make instructional decisions for our students. We are focusing on ELL, SPED and GT students at a district level and utilizing data meetings to increase the level of learning on each student within our classrooms to set up learning plans. I can only cringe when I think of the thousands of students that have graced my classroom and the school in general for the prior eighteen years. Through my years in education, I have found several ways to check for understanding. Beginning with soda pop quizzes in my first couple years of teaching and evolving into other types of formative assessments like Venn diagrams, exit tickets, bell ringers, KWLs, and daily student journals. When I was in my latter years of teaching, I began wondering, could there be different ways for students to show mastery of the content? Being in Career and Tech Education, where we always pride ourselves in hands-on learning, I always struggled to justify and create a piece of paper that measured students by asking them to simply memorize and regurgitate their learning for a class. In most content areas, our students spend the majority of their time creating projects to show learning - which is the highest level of Bloom’s - then turn around to prove it by a monster 100 multiple choice question test. For example, science classes spend the majority of the year conducting labs and discovering through dissections, art classes paint, sculpt, mold, and draw to show learning, social studies assigns projects creating entire civilizations and governments, and in English, student essays are used in school publications, like yearbooks. Utilizing assessments that challenge students and engage critical thinking is much more valuable than memorizing and reciting methods (Goodwin & Hubbell, 2013). Thinking about project-based learning always reminds me of Albert Einstein’s quote, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Lastly, I would like to mention the grading, how can worthy positive feedback become useful when it is simply laid out with one simplistic letter? We simplify this too much in education, you receive a C on an assessment, then get a C for the semester, then it gets mixed and formulated with a number and all the sudden you're a 2.5 student. “That GPA won’t get you into a good college, you better settle for community college.” Wait, how is that reflective feedback to better a student? Apply that to any job, our jobs for instance, if we simply got a number or letter to describe our performance as employees without explanation or criteria to come to that number we would be reasonably upset, good or bad. Humans need to know what they are doing well and what needs improvement. Letter grades are not going away anytime soon, until the university ranks do away with admissions based on grade point averages we are stuck. As teachers we don’t have to stop there, we can utilize rubrics to outline our expectations and provide real feedback based on t
hose rubrics to help students achieve higher expectations for themselves while learning. While reading, I came across mastery-based grading or standards-based grading prompting me to dig deeper. It is a method based on students showing signs of mastery or understanding of lessons and skills that should be entrenched with standards. It considers many types of evidence of learning and is a more holistic representation of learning taking place (Davis, 2020). Again centralizing around using rubrics and concrete numbers for assessing. This method also takes into account growth within a student on certain standards. This can be seen in pre and post assessments. This approach to grading allows for intrinsic motivation, ownership of learning, more relevant instruction, effective teacher feedback and that pesky word accountability for teachers and students. Turning to standards-based grading will need to be a cultural shift within our schools, districts, states and country; a shift that we should all embrace.
References:
Davis, L. (2020, January). Standards-Based Grading: What to Know in 2020. Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.schoology.com/blog/standards-based-grading
Goodwin, B., & Hubbell, E. (2013). The 12 touchstones of good teaching: a checklist for staying focused every day. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Instructional Time Requirements. (n.d.). Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.cde.
state.co.us/standardsandinstruction/instruc-time-req
Konen, J. K. J. (n.d.). Using Assessment in Instruction. Retrieved April 1, 2020, from https://www.teacher.org/daily/using-assessment-instruction/
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