Types of Assessments (EDUC 320/339)

• Assessments should focus on curriculum goals and objectives.
• Assessments should improve curriculum and instruction.
• Assessments should measure both content and process.
• Assessments should be instructional, diagnostic, and prescriptive.
• Assessments should reflect fairness to all people and groups.

Types of Assessments

• Rubrics identify teacher expectations, making learning and evaluation seamless.
• Practice tests teach test-taking skills and alert students to major material, prior to instruction.
• Assessment progress reports offer feedback at checkpoints during projects.
• Informal feedback is part of the daily routine
• Discussions are crucial for assessing students' logic application and value decisions.

Alternative Assessments

• Alternative assessments are often graded by rubrics
• Authentic assessments involve student-created products like essays, maps, timelines, and graphic organizers.
• Products such as posters, journals, letters, and pictures are collections of student work.
• Performance assessments are observation-heavy of behavior, demonstrations, routines, discussions, etc.

Traditional Assessments: Essay

• Essays are easy to construct, eliminate guessing, require recall, and support language arts goals
• Essays take longer to score, are subjective, and take longer to administer.
  • Advice: create a rubric, score one question at a time across all students, and deduct points for grammar, spelling, and handwriting.

Short Answer

• The mixed vocabulary approach involves weaving a story or response from 10 alphabetical vocabulary words.
• Short answer responses can use a lead phrase approach:
  • Evaluation leads start with "The best event was..." or "The worst event was..."
  • Synthesis leads begin with phrases like "What if..." or "I wonder..."
  • Analysis leads use "It's like..." or "Compared to..."
  • Application leads start with "Based on..." or "If..., then..."

Fill-in-the-Blank and Complete Texts

• Fill-in-the-blank questions are easy to construct, eliminate guessing, require recall, and support spelling.
• It takes more time to administer and score compared to true/false questions
  • Advice: create a rubric, define the term in question, use no more than two blanks per question, deduct points for spelling and handwriting, and avoid copying sentences from the source text.

True/False Tests

• True/False can cover a lot of material in a short period of time and are easy to score, providing quantitative data
• True/False questions can encourage guessing, be poorly phrased, confusing, and fact-based.
  • Advice: Use no more than one idea per question, avoid double negatives and giving clues, and do not take wording directly from the text.

Multiple Choice Tests

• Multiple choice tests work well for concepts with closely related potential correct answers, reducing guessing
• Require less recall since key terms are options and the construction of plausible wrong answers require skill
• Avoid using "All of the above" or "None of the above"
• Four possible answers is a good amount

Matching Tests

• Matching tests focus on key ideas, reduce guessing, and use less paper
• Require little recall and creating columns takes time
  • Number the left column and use letters for the right one
  • Keep the test to one page (no more than 15), and keep responses short

Purpose of Common Core

• Common Core is a list of learning standards that prepare students for college and careers
• There are two major goals:
  • To achieve national consistency in standards.
  • To develop adequate literacy skills in students.
• A plausible third goal of the CCSS is to enhance teachers' formative assessment (FA) practices.
• Formative Assessment is a continuous process used by teachers and students that provide feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning.

Connecting Social Studies and Literacy Using Formative Assessments

• The connection between literacy and social studies is grounded in the principle that reading, writing, listening, and speaking are crucial tools in exploring and understanding various subjects

Formative Assessment Model: Three Goals for Teachers

• Establish where students are in their learning
• Establish where students are heading
• Establish how students can close the gap between what they know and what students are supposed to know

Depth of Knowledge

• When teachers ask "What does depth of knowledge look like on these new, more rigorous assessments? How do we prepare students for this kind of thinking?"
• Known models like Bloom's Taxonomy, with its six cognitive process levels-remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create (Armstrong, n.d.)
  • Guidance based on such models has often been too general in nature, and sometimes even misleading.

Level 1- Recall

• Tasks at this level require recalling facts and locating information in the text to answer questions about who, what, when, where, why, and how.
• Students either know the answer or they don't:
  • The answer is either right or wrong.
  • What is the meaning of trudged as it is used in paragraph 10 of the folk tale?
  • Which sentence from the folk tale helps the reader understand the meaning of trudged?
• Recall and reproduction are components of all depth-of-knowledge levels because all reading comprehension must be based on textual evidence.

Level 2 - Skills and Concepts

• Assessment tasks ask students to make some decisions about how to approach the problem or activity.
• Questions still tend to have one correct answer, although for openended questions the responses might be stated in different ways.
  • What is the meaning of the quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind"?
  • Which words best describe the character _____?
• Rigor lies in achieving independence with the skill
• Teachers provide explicit instruction that gradually releases responsibility.

Level 3 - Strategic Thinking and Reasoning

• Assessments ask students to use logic as well as evidence and to think more abstractly about a text
• Questions have more than one possible answer, and students must justify their responses, like:
  • What is the theme of the passage?
  • What effect does the author create by using the phrase ________?
  • What is the most likely reason the author included a map of ________?
  • Which details from the text are irrelevant to the author's claim?
• Students will need to infer, look for theme early, think like an author, and understand external/internal structures of a text.
• Rigour is closely reading complex texts, reducing worksheets to encourage conversations.

Level 4 - Extended Thinking

• Assessments ask students to integrate information from multiple sources:
  • Explain what Source #1 and Source #2 say about _____, putting ideas into your own words to avoid plagiarism
  • A central idea of these articles is _____.
  • Which source most likely has the most useful information about _____?
  • Which source explain better? Provide three peices of evidence.
• Need to plan more lessons that ask students to make connections among different sources
• Teachers need to invent the best connection points to bring students deeper which may inspire a call to action.