Book: Focused Assessment

Gwen Doty ISBN 9781934009291

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Introduction

Why Should We “Focus Our Assessments”?

The primary reason to assess student learning should be to improve student learning and teacher effectiveness.

It should be a purposeful and natural process that happens in conjunction with instruction…

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Assessments need to flow naturally from classroom instruction and involve activities that make sense to the students.

Before creating or implementing a focused assessment, it is also helpful to answer the following questions:

• What knowledge or skills are students expected to achieve, and to what degree should they learn them? this is usually determined through an analysis of the state standards. Both teacher and student need a clear understand of the learning target.
• What are the performance criteria – the guidelines, rules and attributes – that will be used to judge the quality of student performance?
• Why is the assessment taking place? Both teacher and student shoudl bhave a clear understanding of the purposes behind it – for example, the need to gather information about how well individual students understand a portion or benchmark of a lesson or unit, or what students know prior to the content instruction. Or it may be to determine how well students understand essential knowledge before you convey more advanced concepts.’
• Based on your purpose for assessing, which format (such as multiple choice, essay, portfolio, presentation) should you use?

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… an effective focused assessment should have these characteristics:

1. It should be onegoing and coincide with instructions.
2. It must be varied, so that students with different learning styles have oppertunities to demonstrate their understanding in ways that make sense to them
3. It should appropriately reflect the content standards and the information that was actually taught.

The Spectrum of Formats

Think of focused assessment as any purposeful activity that provides information to be used as feedback for modifying teaching and learning. In a typical lessons or unit, you might give a pre-assessment prior to the lesson, keep an observation checklist during it, and assign an essay, presentation, or project at the end.

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Chapter 1: Valuing the Continuous Learning Cycle

Preassessment

…determines what students already know as you begin instructions on a new skill. Used diagnostically, it informs both you and the student about the student’s current level of understanding.

Never record the scores from pre-assessments in a grade book, as this tool is meant only to inform and guide your instructional practices.

In brief, there are three instructional layers:

1. The essential knowledge layer, in which students are expected to konw the basic or general concepts of the target
2. The application layer, in which students know the concepts and can utilize them
3. The complex thinking layer, in which students know the concepts and can also apply them in high-order thinking situations

Informal Assessment

…should occur in conjunction with all stages of learning. During direct instruction, you can stop ever few minutes to assess how well students are learning. You might say “now turn to a partner and explain this concept in your own words” As students are talking to their partners, walk around listening for their level of understanding.

• Do i need to reteach this content
• Do i need to approach this differently or tray another teaching strategy that might make more sense to students
• Do i need to work with a small group of students who need additional teaching
• how should I inform students of their progress or specific areas needing improvment

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Growth Assessment

…measure degrees of learning as students gain more skill and higher levels of understanding. What distinguishes them from information assessment is the expectation for the learning: Students are now expected to have some skill and knowledge regarding the learning target.

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Student Involvement in Assessment

… students respond well to specific teacher feedback.

…communicate to students that not only are they expected to learn, but they also have some optoins regarding how they will demonstrate their knowledge.

Students should use the self-assessment chart throughout the focused assessment learning cycle of pre-assessment, informal assessment, growth assessment , and final student product.

Reproducables

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