All Assessment is Valuable

“Assessment is not a spreadsheet, it’s a conversation”, stated by the late teacher, Joe Bower. I think he is saying summative assessment with a number or letter attached to is not good assessment or depiction of what a student has learned. Instead, he imagines assessment as a lifelong process and it is never finished, hence it isn’t about what is learned but what learning has occurred and how to move forward. I mostly agree however what he is saying is easier said then done, and I think the “spread sheet” isn’t all bad.

I always tell my students there are 3 reasons for what you learn in high school: one, to help you learn ideas about the world, formulate your own ideas, and explore new ideas; two, to inspire interest in certain subjects or ideas; and three, to teach you different skills in the process of learning different things; how to manage time, how to collaborate, problem solve, critically think and so forth. This is just my personal philosophy I have used to make sense or our education system and to explain to students why they are learning what they learn.

Because this is my idea I believe our curriculum does have valuable outcomes and we should assess them, hence we do need summative assessment. Depending on the goal or outcome giving a range of what the student may know at that point and time helps them know how well they learned the topic. For very content-based outcomes this works! Here is an example: “Distinguish between physical and chemical properties of common substances, including those found in household, commercial, industrial, and agricultural applications.” If a student got an 80 % on the assessment for this outcome it tells me and them they get the concepts 80 % of the time. In the world of assessment tools. A multiple choice assessment tool like zipgrade might work just fine for this outcome to determine a students ability to distinguish this. It is an efficient way for teachers sto save some time! Kahoot, blooket and quiz multiple choice programs on socrative are all great to practice these concepts because of hte wide variety of premade quizzes. Time saver for teachers and fun for students. Everybody is hatin’ on this a little, however science knowledge can be objective hence this is a great way for the teacher to assess a students abilities to distinguish this information. Even if we wanted to remove grades for specific concepts it would be difficult.

I do live in the high school world where students need certain classes and certain grades to get into the program of their choice. So removing grades is impossible at this point in education. University, and secondary programs still need numbers on a spreadsheet called a high school transcript to determine if someone is eligible for a certain program. On the other hand I wish there was more options for students, those that know they were not heading to post secondary it would be great to have pass fail courses based on a variety of outcomes that hit these different categories that I believe are most important. Number two is really important hence why choice for students is key.

We need to inspire and motivate our students and studies show grades don’t do that. Relevance does. The problem is some of these outcomes are not interesting to students and have no motivation to learn anything about them. So, if we were to completely change to only formative and remove grades there would need to be more choice for students. This would help build intrinsic motivation. This would help students to be excited about what they are learning and maybe students would be even more inspired! If we remove grades and continue with the curriculum we have it will not work.

In this article, Pendergast et al. goes onto say that objective ideas aren’t as valuable as skills. I agree that, sometimes the content is not as valuable moving forward in life as the process of getting there. However, it is still a duty as teachers to asses the outcome. But is it a duty to summatively assess the outcome? I think so? Correct me if I am wrong. So, should we be assessing their effort, or the skill of just distinguishing and not worry about the content at all? According to this article yes.

I think the third one is what has gotten lost sometimes.   Learning should be exploration, engagement, discovery, analyzation and creation. Hence we should assess these processes. This is where some amazing assessment tools can come in because be honest, formative assessment with personal feedback is the ultimate goal. However, the amount of time given to teachers to assess this way is -1,000,000 hours. That is what it feels like anyway. Although, there is some great tools to help with this. I was very impressed by the Brisk Teaching Chrome Extension. It could give extremely accurate and thorough feedback based on your rubric instantly. It gave positive feedback as well as next steps on how to improve and continue growing and that is exactly what students need.

What we felt like before Brisk Teaching

 All types of assessment is valuable from tests, assignments or questions on content, to rubrics evaluating ones process and opinions, exploration and creation. Some should be assessed by how much effort was put in by the teacher, self assessed, or peer assessed. The means of how we asses should also have variety as well like conversations, projects, observations, questions, team work and so forth. The key is look at the outcome but also look at the big picture and this will guide you in assessment.