Culminating Views on Assessment: Prioritizing Learning, Not Testing

Claims that testing will serve equity very often aren’t true! I will explain why.

I have attended lately a very valuable course "Assessment Strategies" as part of my doctorate degree at ACE, and here are my culminating views on assessment. 

Developing equitable assessment practices requires starting over, with up-to-date research on teaching and learning. I would like to provide a new vision of assessment integrated with instruction for the sole purpose of supporting learning—not ranking students, teachers, or schools. I will explain how ambitious teaching practices, framed by sociocultural theory, are essentially one and the same as equitable assessment practices (Shepard, 2019). I will begin with a summary of the outmoded beliefs about learning and motivation underlying our current accountability systems. At the end of this blog post, I will address what teachers need from district leaders and higher-level policymakers.

Why are Standards Assessment Required?

Countless studies have shown the curriculum-narrowing effects of accountability pressures. In schools worried about raising test scores in reading and mathematics, science and social studies are driven out of the curriculum along with art, music, and PE. Worse still, testing pressure can undermine learning even in reading and mathematics because low-scoring students often receive repetitive drills, using decontextualized worksheets and other formats that closely resemble multiple-choice test items.

I don’t believe that anyone is truly in favor of children receiving such a dull, boring education—so how did we get to this point? To better understand our current situation, let’s look back a few decades.

The cognitive researchers who helped politicians launch the first wave of standards-based reforms in the 1990s had some good ideas. Importantly, they pointed to the evidence that thinking and reasoning abilities are developed (Johnsen, 2013). They sought to make rich and challenging core curriculum available to all students, rather than an elite few, hence the slogans “all students can learn” and “world-class standards.” They already had evidence from the 1980s showing the harmful effects of teaching to basic-skills tests, so they called for performance assessments aligned with ambitious new standards. These would be “tests worth teaching to,” with students writing essays, conducting chemistry experiments, and engaging in other demonstrations of their current competencies. The researchers emphasized that their aspirations for a “thinking curriculum” were unprecedented and would require substantial “capacity building” and resources to help teachers teach in profoundly different ways (Johnsen, 2013).

Unfortunately, the idea of capacity building was replaced almost immediately by a competing theory of change based on incentives that used test scores to mete out rewards and penalties for educators (National Research Council, 1999). Under the new theory of action, it was assumed that with sufficient motivation (from accountability pressure), teachers and other school personnel would find the means to improve instruction and that improvement would show up in students’ test scores. What research over the next decade showed, however, was that many administrators and educators did not understand the instructional changes that were needed or lacked the capacity to make them happen in a sustained, impactful way.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), enacted in 2002, dramatically increased both the stakes and the amount of testing, from milestone testing in grades 4, 8, and 12 to every-grade testing from 3 to 8, plus high school testing. Because of the amount of testing required, the elaborate performance assessments that had appeared briefly in the ’90s were too expensive and were replaced by mostly multiple-choice tests. In addition, because of draconian NCLB performance expectations—all students proficient by 2014—districts began purchasing commercial interim tests to get ready for state tests. Just as “standards-based reform” was hijacked, so was “formative assessment.” Machine-scored, multiple-choice tests are called “formative assessments,” but they are nothing like the curriculum-based, ongoing, interactive processes documented in the literature on formative assessment (Shepard, 2019).

Therefore, we now have a multi-layered testing system that is limited in its ability to document progress toward deep learning goals, much less cultivate deeper learning. State tests must be curriculum-neutral to allow for local control, interim tests purchased by districts have to be generic enough to sell to national markets, and costs preclude portfolios or performance tasks. Although external tests could be useful once-per-year barometers of programmatic trends (if they did not have performance-distorting stakes attached), they are sold as if they have instructional meaning for individual students. Worse, frequent test-score reports give students the wrong idea about the purpose of learning. Feedback about how many additional points is needed to reach proficiency does not help students improve.

In fact, research on motivation shows compellingly that data walls and other types of normative comparisons are harmful to learning. Initiatives for culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy, for example, cannot help if students experience public shaming for their low scores. Simply, test-driven schooling is antithetical to what research on learning tells us about effective teaching and productive learning environments (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

Current Research Supports Integrating Ambitious Teaching with Equitable Assessment Practices

Creating truly equitable and excellent educational opportunities means ensuring that each child has access to rigorous curricular resources and is supported to participate fully in instructional activities that enable deep learning. This “ambitious teaching” centers on each student’s engagement and participation; it requires paying explicit attention to who students are as they enter the classroom, including their prior learning experiences (inside and outside formal educational settings), their family- and community-based funds of knowledge, and their races, ethnicities, gender identities, social classes, and other aspects that influence their identities as learners.

Sociocultural learning theory builds on important lessons from cognitive research (in laboratory and classroom settings) about sensemaking, prior knowledge, and metacognition; it also attends to the ways that social and cultural contexts shape development, identity, and new learning. Importantly, it explains why motivational aspects of learning—feelings of self-efficacy, belonging, and purpose—are completely entwined with cognitive development (Shepard et al., 2020). Because learning is seen as transforming one’s ability to participate in a community of practice, learning involves developing communication skills and gaining experience with tools for thinking along with an increasing sense of competence and ability to contribute.

Sociocultural learning theory, thus, creates an imperative to deeply know each student—academically, emotionally, socially, and culturally—and to offer a supportive classroom environment where students feel safe to talk together about their thinking and reasoning. That’s why ambitious teaching is only possible when equitable assessment is fully integrated into instructional practice. Unlike our existing testing regime, equitable assessment is almost entirely formative—but not the so-called formative of today’s widely used benchmark assessments (which are mainly another form of test prep). True formative assessment takes many forms, from peer conversations and sharing out of group work to classroom quizzes and exit tickets, but a core feature is that it is grounded in the classroom curriculum and makes visible useful information for guiding day-to-day instruction. Often, students do not know they are being assessed—they are simply sharing their thoughts and participating in activities as a normal part of the learning process.

Assessment integrated in ambitious teaching is equitable in several important ways. First and foremost, it positions students as capable learners and offers helpful information about what next, rather than a sometimes-overwhelming list of all the things not known. Because students are assessed on the specific knowledge and skills they have been taught, questions and expectations are more recognizable and relevant as compared with curriculum-general state assessments. In addition, because the teacher is engaging with the student, the results are more meaningful; problems like bad days, issues at home, or simply misunderstanding a question do not skew the teacher’s understanding of the student’s progress.

Develop a shared understanding of ambitious learning goals and features of quality work.

 According to Bristol and Esboldt (2020) learning goals direct effort and shape thinking. Goals help to explain context and purpose and create a vision for what mature or expert practice looks like. To serve equity, goals must be challenging for all students (instead of reserving ambitious goals only for some students and not others). Equity also requires that challenging goals be accessible and meaningful, which means they are not carved in stone and handed down from on high. Rather, they should be negotiated and connected based on students’ interests and experiences outside of school. Involving students in shaping goals and in monitoring their own progress develops self-regulation capabilities as well as deeper understanding of success criteria. It is well recognized in the formative assessment literature that coming to understand the features of quality work—what it means to be a good writer, a good student of history, and so forth—is an integral part of developing subject matter expertise.

Provide rich and authentic instructional and assessment tasks.

 It follows that ambitious goals require instructional activities and assessment tasks that fully represent or embody those goals. If a goal is for students to be able to develop and evaluate historical claims and arguments, then instructional activities must involve this kind of experience, including reading across texts, examining primary documents, presenting and critiquing arguments, and the like. Formative assessment can occur as part of learning activities, with both planned-for and in-the-moment questions designed to elicit student thinking. To further the activity, some questions can be asked of the group, but individual questions are also needed to check for understanding, possibly as an exit ticket. Reporting back and showing students how their responses have helped shape next steps can enhance trust and demonstrate a joint commitment to learning (in contrast to more typical testing strategies that feel like catching and punishing students for what they don’t yet know).

Draw connections to students’ interests and funds of knowledge

Most teachers are aware of the importance of eliciting and building on students’ prior knowledge. But too often they’ve been told to probe for an inert list of prerequisite school skills. More up-to-date research acknowledges the profound ways that cultural patterns affect all aspects of learning and development. This makes experiences from home and community highly relevant to school learning. The term “funds of knowledge” is becoming widely used to recognize the robust, accumulated wisdom developed in families and communities about daily concerns like cooking, budgets, first aid, and automobile repair and about core cultural values regarding morals and ethics. This knowledge, always there but sometimes disregarded in school, can be explicitly engaged as a resource for teaching. Attending to students’ lived experiences furthers learning in several important ways. It shows respect and helps to counter negative positioning of students from communities that have long been marginalized. Drawing connections and providing scaffolds from everyday knowledge to academic knowledge also support intellectual development while contributing emotionally to a student’s feeling of belonging (Moll et al., 1992).

Present tasks in multiple modes and use artifacts to document thinking

 In addition to talk-based instructional practices that elicit and build on student thinking, presenting tasks in multiple modes and allowing students multiple ways to demonstrate their learning can serve equity goals and affirm a positive learning culture(Shepard et al, 2020).  In addition, representing learning in multiple ways can deepen students’ conceptual understanding by drawing connections and offering more than one way to think about a new idea.

The teachers that parents and principals had identified as exemplary teachers of African American students held multifaceted conceptions of assessment and engaged students in work reflecting multiple forms of excellence (Ladson-Billings, 1995). In one example, a teacher helped her students choose the standards by which they would be evaluated and what evidence or work products they wanted to use as proof of mastery of specific concepts and skills. Another teacher emphasized questioning as a recurring pattern in classroom interactions, asking “Why are we doing this problem?” This invited students to interpret tasks and respond in ways that played to their particular strengths—it also created greater access to the content and the classroom discourse. As students’ various answers and approaches were shared across the class, much more robust understandings developed about how targeted knowledge and skills were to be explained and used.

Foster student agency and self-regulation. 

Fostering student agency and developing self-regulation capabilities are broad, overlapping categories of practices that sum up several of the specific strategies and intentions addressed above and below. Self-regulation, which emerged from cognitive theory, and student agency, which emerged from sociocultural theory, are closely overlapping constructs having to do with both cognitive and affective aspects of learning. They are about developing the awareness, self-confidence, and skills to take responsibility for one’s own learning—and they are critical for motivation.

In summarizing the vast research on motivation, the recent milestone report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, How People Learn II, concluded that, “Motivation to learn is fostered for learners of all ages when they perceive the school or learning environment is a place where they ‘belong’ and when the environment promotes their sense of agency and purpose.” The report also summed up what educators can do as follows (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

Educators may support learners’ motivation by attending to their engagement, persistence, and performance by helping them to set desired learning goals and appropriately challenging goals for performance, creating learning experiences that they value; supporting their sense of control and autonomy; developing their sense of competency by helping them to recognize, monitor, and strategize about their learning progress; and creating an emotionally supportive and nonthreatening learning environment where learners feel safe and valued.

In reflecting on how all the equitable practices in the figure above fit together, notice that they all attend to the identity and feelings of students as members of a learning community. Equitable assessment is not about offering false praise or lowering expectations. Rather, engaging students with specific information about how to improve their work conveys respect (because of the teacher’s confidence that the student is able to do this higher-level work), and it invites students to take greater ownership and thereby have a greater sense of control. I have said this many times before, but it is worth repeating feedback that helps students think about how to improve their work requires substantive insights and is, therefore, more often qualitative (e.g., written comments or a discussion) rather than quantitative (e.g., a score).

Using Figures (Tables, Graphs, Etc.) Aid In the Assessment Process

In the subsequent curriculum-embedded assessment, students investigate what happens to population levels when relative starting numbers of particular organisms are varied: see Figure 1. The interactive simulation allows students to conduct multiple trials to build, evaluate, and critique models of balanced ecosystems, interpret data, and draw conclusions. If the purpose of the assessment is formative, students can be given feedback and a graduated sequence of coaching by the program. Figure 1 shows a feedback box for this set of activities, which not only notifies the student that an error has occurred but also prompts the student to analyze the population graphs and design a third trial that maintains the survival of the organisms. As part of the assessment, students also complete tasks that ask them to construct descriptions, explanations, and conclusions. They are guided in assessing their own work by judging whether their response meets specified criteria, and then how well their response matches a sample one, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 1: Screenshot of a curriculum-embedded assessment of student using simulations to build balanced ecosystem population models (with feedback and coaching); part of Example “Ecosystems.” SOURCE: (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2014)

 

The SimScientists assessments are designed to provide feedback that addresses common student misconceptions about the ecosystem components, interactions that take place within them, or the way they behave, as well as errors in the use of science practices. The simulation generates reports to students about their progress toward goals for conceptual understanding and use of practices, and it also provides a variety of reporting options for teachers. Teachers can view progress reports for individual students as well as class-level reports. The SimScientists assessment system was also designed to collect summative assessment information after students complete a regular curriculum unit on ecosystems (which might have included the formative assessment modules described above).

Figure 2: Screenshot of a curriculum-embedded assessment of student comparing his/her constructed response describing the mountain lake matter and energy flow model to a sample response; part of Example 8, “Ecosystems.” SOURCE: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, (2014).

These task examples from the SimScientists project illustrate ways that assessment tasks can take advantage of technology to represent generalizable, progressively more complex models of science systems, present challenging scientific reasoning tasks, provide individualized feedback, customize scaffolding, and promote self-assessment and metacognitive skills (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2014).

Conclusion: What Districts Can Do to Support Ambitious Instruction and Equitable Assessment

Sociocultural theory helps us understand why personal relationships—between student and teacher and among students—are critical for academic achievement. It helps us see how to create affirming classroom environments by attending to students’ identities and sense of belonging and, at the same time, how to ensure rigor by explicitly structuring and scaffolding students’ participation skills to cultivate higher levels of thinking. Equitable assessment practices are themselves ambitious teaching practices and are entwined with additional instructional practices that together lead to high levels of engagement and deeper learning.

Some teachers already exemplify ambitious teaching and equitable assessment. After all, the science and math partnerships and the teachers succeeding with African American students described here are all grounded in observing teachers who had been identified as highly effective. Many teachers have implemented some but not all of these ideas. An especially familiar pattern is when teachers are able to implement one set of ambitious practices, such as discourse-based instructional practices, but then maintain more traditional, multiple-choice quizzes and tests instead of show-your-thinking, authentic assessment tasks. For other teachers, both ambitious teaching and equitable assessment practices are new; this is particularly likely in contexts where districts have not had the resources to invest in professional development or curricular materials connected to topics and problems of particular interest to local communities.

Learning to teach or improve one’s practice in the ways described in this article can be daunting. Support for teacher learning is just as important as an equity-focused vision for student learning. In our “Classroom Assessment Principles” (Shepard et al, 2020), there are five identified recommendations as to what school and district leaders could do to support equitable assessment practices in classrooms: 1.  Implement coherent curricular activity systems that integrate curriculum, instruction, and assessment based on well-founded theories of learning. 2.  Build collaborations between assessment and curriculum department staff to inform the design and implementation of coherent curricular activity systems in schools. 3.  Provide professional development and coaching structures (e.g., time, supports for educator collaboration) that help to coordinate all of the different new things that teachers are being asked to learn, including learning and motivation theories, asset-based pedagogy, disciplinary practices as part of content standards, and classroom assessment principles. 4. Develop or adopt district-level assessments that embody the full range of desired learning goals. 5. Establish grading policies in support of grading practices aimed at creating clear success criteria, while avoiding the use of grades as motivators. The single most important idea here is that district leaders must understand the research base informing these recommendations and themselves hold a coherent vision of how equity-focused assessment practices fit within commitments to asset-based pedagogies, rigorous subject-matter standards, and culturally responsive and sustaining teaching. The theories of learning (whether implicit or explicit) that govern district-level decisions matter: unhappily, districts are sometimes the cause of impediments to best practice. This happens when district leadership applies intense pressure to raise scores on accountability tests at the expense of other considerations, when districts invest in multiple-choice “formative” test products instead of substantively rich curricular and assessment resources, and when the rules for data management systems emphasize quantizing information rather than substantively describing progress. It also happens when districts create incoherence. Many districts, with the best of intentions, launch multiple worthwhile initiatives, but they do not coordinate among those initiatives, leaving educators struggling to make connections and to find time to squeeze in each mandated activity. Even under the current, highly counterproductive federal and state testing regimes, districts can and must do better.

As we emerge from the pandemic and take stock of our values, I hope we will fundamentally rethink how we approach teaching, assessment, learning, and youth development. The vision offered in this article would be one way to conceptualize how new monies and all the many reform ideas—about rigorous content standards; diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; social-emotional learning; culturally sustaining pedagogy; and equitable assessment practices—could be coherently aligned and mutually supportive. If not this particular vision, then the important thing is that a coherent plan be devised that is grounded in what research on learning has taught us about equity.

References

Bristol, T. J., & Esboldt, J. (2020, February 26). Systems for instructional improvement: Creating coherence from the classroom to the district office. Travis J Bristol and Joy Esboldt - Academia.Edu. https://www.academia.edu/37766536/Title_Systems_for_Instructional_Improvement_Creating_Coherence_from_the_Classroom_to_the_District_Office

Johnsen, S. K. (2013). Standards And Balanced Assessments. The Roeper School, 175–192. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6209-419-2_16

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice, 31(2), 132–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405849209543534

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2018). How people learn II [E-book]. Amsterdam University Press. How People Learn II Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (informalscience.org)

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2014). Developing assessments for the next generation science standards. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18409.

National Research Council. (1999). Testing, Teaching, and Learning: A Guide for States and School Districts. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9609.

Shepard, L. A. (2019). Classroom assessment to support teaching and learning. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 683(1), 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716219843818

Shepard, L. A., Diaz-Bilello, E., Penuel, W. R., & Marion, S. F. (2020). Classroom assessment principles to support teaching and learning. Boulder, CO: Center for Assessment, Design, Research and Evaluation, University of Colorado Boulder. https://www.colorado.edu/cadre/sites/default/files/attached-files/classroom_assessment_principles_to_support_teaching_and_learning_-_final_0.pdf

Shepard, L. A., Penuel, W. R., & Pellegrino, J. W. (2018). Using Learning and Motivation Theories to Coherently Link Formative Assessment, Grading Practices, and Large-Scale Assessment. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 37(1), 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/emip.12189

By: Asmaa Mohamed                                     Illustrations by: Angela Hsieh