Supportive Assessment

I often talk to teachers and parents about assessment. I simplify assessment into two steps. First you collect information about a student's learning and then you share it with others.

Collect and share. That's it.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, there's a couple caveats. First, any information collected should be done based on what students are learning while doing projects that are in a context and for a purpose.

Second, the collecting and the sharing of this information should be done by the kids and not simply to them. Just like how the best kinds of learning is done by children rather than to them, the same goes for assessment.

Let it be known that teachers don't ever need tests to collect this information nor grades to share it. 

I used to differentiate assessment into two categories: formative and summative. While I still recognize the two categories, I now label them supportive and unsupportive of learning. For too long testsandgrades have been labelled as summative assessment. This label has implied a kind of appropriateness that is entirely misleading - testsandgrades should be more appropriately labelled unsupportive so that educators and parents can rightfully ask "why would we continue to assess in a way that does not support learning?"

Alfie Kohn provides what I believe should be at the heart of any sound supportive assessment practices:

Here are five principles of assessment that follow from this support model: 

1. Assessment of any kind should not be overdone. Getting students to become preoccupied with how they are doing can undermine their interest in what they are doing. An excessive concern with performance can erode curiosity -- and, paradoxically, reduce the quality of performance. Performance-obsessed students also tend to avoid difficult tasks so they can escape a negative evaluation. 

2. The best evidence we have of whether we are succeeding as educators comes from observing children's behavior rather than from test scores or grades. It comes from watching to see whether they continue arguing animatedly about an issue raised in class after the class is over, whether they come home chattering about something they discovered in school, whether they read on their own time. Where interest is sparked, skills are usually acquired. Of course, interest is difficult to quantify, but the solution is not to return to more conventional measuring methods; it is to acknowledge the limits of measurement. 

3. We must transform schools into safe, caring communities. This is critical for helping students to become good learners and good people, but it is also relevant to assessment. Only in a safe place, where there is no fear of humiliation and punitive judgment, will students admit to being confused about what they have read and feel free to acknowledge their mistakes. Only by being able to ask for help will they be likely to improve.
Ironically, the climate created by an emphasis on grades, standardized testing, coercive mechanisms such as pop quizzes and compulsory recitation, and pressure on teachers to cover a prescribed curriculum makes it more difficult to know how well students understand -- and thus to help them along. 

4. Any responsible conversation about assessment must attend to the quality of the curriculum. The easy question is whether a student has learned something; the far more important -- and unsettling -- question is whether the student has been given something worth learning. (The answer to the latter question is almost certainly no if the need to evaluate students has determined curriculum content.) Research corroborates what thoughtful teachers know from experience: when students have interesting things to do, artificial inducements to boost achievement are unnecessary (Moeller and Reschke 1993). 

5. Students must be invited to participate in determining the criteria by which their work will be judged, and then play a role in weighing their work against those criteria. Indeed, they should help make decisions about as many elements of their learning as possible (Kohn 1993). This achieves several things: It gives them more control over their education, makes evaluation feel less punitive, and provides an important learning experience in itself. If there is a movement away from grades, teachers should explain the rationale and solicit students' suggestions for what to do instead and how to manage the transitional period. That transition may be bumpy and slow, but the chance to engage in personal and collective reflection about these issues will be important in its own right.