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The purpose is so important! I feel like sometimes we test just to test...and then send the results off to someone else. The kids need to understand the purpose as internal motivation is not always there.

So important! I think about myself and the hoops we need to jump through in our lives without understanding the purpose. That purpose definitely leads to motivation.

The purpose has to be tied to helping the students discover information about himself. How to improve? What has been learned? Then move forward.

All teachers know that they have choice in the types of assessments to give students but I wonder if we all really think through what type we are giving every time. Do we just give what we did last year? Do we give what is easiest? The fastest to grade? Things to think about...

Feedback can be challenging as we all know. I tend to get frustrated when I have taken the time to provide detailed feedback and the students could care less about it, they just want to know a grade and move on.

so true...

This would go along with students taking ownership for their own learning....we would WANT them to want to know where they are at for individual purposes!

Most of my formative assessments have been multiple choice or short answer quizzes. After learning more about rubrics, I would like to start using rubrics in two ways for formative assessments. One the students will do a self assessment on where they feel they are at. Then a teacher to student-conference with the rubric to see where they are at. With the end goal of making the assessment portion less stressful for my students, because they know where they are at.

^^^ Love this idea! I hope I can get there also with some projects!

I was thinking the same thing about rubrics that you wrote here. Students would hopefully see themselves moving on the rubric as they improve their skills /learn. This should be motivating and students would know exactly what is expected.

which leads to frustration...

Although I would say this is definitely still true in the courses we teach (we still emphasize bigger, summative assessments), I think we have changed how we view student progress. Our summative assessments aren't all tests, some of them are projects or performance assessments. Those assessments are also no longer considered "one-and-done" opportunities. Students can retake assessments or make corrections, etc. to show progress in their learning even if they didn't get it right the first time. It's less focused on the final grade and instead, assessing what students have learned.

This is great. However, when juxtaposed with having 200 students like I do, it is not always feasible to have numerous projects and reassessments. How do we change the change the way that teachers spend their day so this is possible?

I find this distinction between summative and formative assessment interesting. In our freshman group of teachers, we have a category for both formative and summative assessment. Formative is weighted at 20% and summative is weighted at 80%. So although in my courses we were taught not to grade formatives, we still assign a score to it and put it into the gradebook. Also, if formatives weren't graded, I wonder how much of them would actually be completed by students?

This has been a goal of mine this year, to use formative assessments to help make instructional decisions in my class. It has been a work in progress, but I have seen some success. I use the information from the formative assessment to decide is it a small group that needs reteaching or is it an entire class that needs reteaching. I don't normally grade my formative assessments, but I go give them completion points. For the most part if a student sees they are not getting something, they appreciate the reteaching opportunity.

Too often I see teachers not fully use the formative assessment data they have to intentionally inform instruction. If done properly formative assessment is very powerful. I also like the idea of giving participation points for formative assessments.

Some teachers give 0% for formative assessments at my school. The Science department has figured out a way to have labs count as a way to assess a standard. I think practice is important and should have some weight.

My school has increased its emphasis on learning targets this year. We are all using a 5D+ template to write unit plans and the learning targets are similarly broken down into knowledge targets, academic targets (transferable skills), and performance targets. I think that writing unit plans and sitting down and thinking about the individual types of targets has really strengthened the types of instruction teachers are carrying out in their classrooms. They are more familiar with the targets they want students to meet, and in turn, students are also more familiar with what's expected of them.

I like the specific targets here. I guess I have been generalizing them for awhile. My plans would be better defined for myself and students if I focused on them more.

Our middle school is beginning this work as well. We are trying to get a system wide learning plan template developed and going. Our goal is to help all teachers fully understand their learning targets and how they relate to student understanding. I know that all teachers look at them, but I'm not sure how many break them down to fully understand them and what students outcomes should be.

I also do this on other assessment types such as short answer. I've gotten into the habit of bolding things that I want to make sure students don't forget to do. For example, they may be required to answer a question but then they need to follow that with explanation or justification. I often bold the second half so that they don't forget to include the explanation, which often highlights their thinking, which can be more important than the first half of the answer.

I do this too. I find this is very helpful for kids. Sometimes in rubrics when going through them, I'll have kids underline or circle key words instead just to force their attention a bit. It does help.

It is SO important that our feedback is more than a score or letter grade if we want to emphasize progress and the ability to improve for our students.

Agreed! And if the targets are clear and communicated to students, they should know what steps they need to take to grow! It shouldn't be a mystery!

"Do the results provide clear direction for what to do next?"

I see some teachers more hopeful that ISASP, with its better alignment to state standards, will be a truer indicator of success. Other teachers, however, are still so jaded toward standardized testing.

Good point! ISASP should be a better indicator of student achievement.Some of the best indicators are teacher formative and summative tests. These are still the most useful for teachers.

This is a helpful breakdown of learning targets for me. In a core discipline area like history, it's easy to forget about performance skill and product targets. But there are definitely areas where these type of learning targets are present, and knowing those areas can help me decide how best to assess.

Easy to forget about bias! So many other things take our time and attention when we write tests, that it's easy to forget about spelling, formatting mistakes, and other unintentional things that give students a clue as to the right answer in ways that don't truly test mastery of content.

One of our school's frustrations with the new ISASP format is that no itemization or further guidance is provided at the building/district level as to how our students performed on specific components of the test. Perhaps this will change, or maybe we're missing it, but it's difficult to program evaluate without this breakdown.

I think this is an important thing to think about. How often do we really use assessments to make changes in our instruction. When I was a student I was thankful for tests. I could cram the material into my head and once the test was over, I could forget it and move on; clearing the way for new information. As a teacher, I realize that isn't the intent, but I wonder how often we still get caught up the type of thinking. Are we assessing so we feel better about moving on or are we assessing so we can make course corrections to support student learning and understanding?

This reminds me of self-reported grading. Hattie says self-reported grading has an effect size of 1.33 but it seems that it is rare for teachers to actually use it.

This article focused solely on formal assessment, but I also think it is important to discuss the role and value of informal assessment opportunities and how powerful immediate feedback based on informal assessment can be in a F2F setting.

One of the easiest ways to ensure that students respond to feedback is to design opportunities that require them to engage with the feedback and do something with the feedback, but this is frequently dismissed due to the quantity of standards and learning required of students at each grade level. Many teachers feel like they need to prioritize "covering" all the standards over students truly engaging in their learning.

This is detrimental to English Learners-Kanost

Using data from multiple assessments can help determine where exactly a student is at in their learning. Kanost

This can really hurt our students with that lack background knowledge obtained in white, christian, middle class society. Kanost

It is especially important that students know what the intended learning is! Unfortunately, too many students think grades are given to them by their teacher instead of earned by their work. When they don't know what is being assessed, this adds to that narrative.

This is where it is important to have a clear rubric with student language. Students, even learning adults, need to have guidance on why they are learning so they can be assessed accurately.

This is an area I feel like we don't capture as much as we should as teachers. It's the process over product idea!

I'm glad to see a number of items for each target instead of just one or two in order to get a better understanding of the learning.

This is something that I have been improving on and is not something I knew about when I first started teaching. I actually used to think that a good test was a simple repeat of information that I told the students during the unit. I wrote tests over the "facts" that I taught them. Wow, have I learned a lot. Now in my PLC we take the time to organize the learning targets and make sure that our assessments match the learning targets in our curriculum.

My administrator and I were just talking about something similar. We are trying to work on grading practices in our building. We both agree that students need multiple opportunities to show what they know and that assessments shouldn't be viewed as a one a done item that is checked off. We even got into the idea if a student is assessed once and gets a 58%, a second time and gets a 78% and third time and gets a 98% do you average all those scores, or do you think to yourself, "It took them three times but they finally go it, let's celebrate, here's your A"?

What does quality and balance look like compared to the instruction?

In a data driven world, which I totally agree with, the data is only valid if the reason for the data is clear and understood.

This must be the purpose for data. What direction will come from the results? Otherwise, it becomes busy work.

Intersting it is not the same the same sampling of students.

I think too often we are told what data to take but do not know why and don't have a genuine investment in the collection. How many teachers have been involved in taking data from an IEP goal and have no idea what the actual goal says.

Begin with the end in mind.

Making this understandable to students is key. I ventured out and taught my own children a series of swim lessons (I usually teach other people's kids) and when I talked to my daughter about being able to go off the diving board this summer, she stayed more focused on improving.

A clear learning target contributes to better measurement and incentive for improvement.

We've come a long ways technologically speaking in the ability to use real-time data to instruct students since the publication date of this article, but unfortunately a lot of the decisions (as far as policy goes) are to still completed on an annual basis.

I agree. A perfect example of that is with Iowa Assessments. In my school district, teachers usually don't see the results until the end of the school year when those students will no longer be in their class.

Technology tools within LMS platforms can allow for better "real-time" feedback from assessments

We're working on self-assessing and setting goals for our adult learners, which is leading to a higher persistence rate in continuing in the program. 

It is so important for all stakeholders to be assessment literate - and far too often, that doesn't happen.

match the assessment method to reflect intended learning 

So important in science with the move to NGSS. You just can't assess a performance task with a multiple choice test (unless the performace task is taking multiple choice tests, of course)

Really, in all the NGLM, you need to be able to assess performance tasks. I hated that there was less focus on actually speaking a world language when I taught Spanish than on the assessments of vocabulary. If I were to go back in the classroom, my classes would look a lot different now.

multiple types of assessments AND both formative and summative

This statement is SO true. Administering multiple measures does not necessaarily mean that educators will make data-driven decisions. The assessment results must be used well.

Time - this is my biggest issue with Iowa Testing. This year districts had to wait months to get their results back. By the time they arrived teachers were a bit dismissive because they felt the measure of student performance had already changed too much. Districts I work with that were Spring testers will not even be sharing results until the end of August or Sept. because they did not have time at the end of the last school year.

This is very important that students take responsibility for their learning. As educators, we are responsible for making sure the learning targets are clear and students understand.

How do you set up procedures that facilitate this process? I don't see much of it happening.

Standardized test only give a certain amount of information for teachers to see.  Often times, it's a guessing game for kids.  In the classroom, students can be creative and add their style to the assessment with different opportunities to present the information.  

I like seeing teachers use a combination of testing approaches. I think kids get burned out filling in ovals, students like to be creative and can show that better through other means beside multiple choice or darkening ovals.

This entire realm is both challenging and time-consuming. In order to have a high level of confidence, assessments usually need to be used many times and checked for validity and reliability…especially if they are being used as a summative assessment.This entire realm is both challenging and time-consuming.

As obvious as this statement is, and even though "doing science" has been an expectation in the Iowa Core (and now the NGSS), there is a general lack of 'performance assessments' in science - especially at the elementary level.

I'm not typically in the classroom, so I'm asking... why is that? Is it because performance assessments aren't readily available, not easy to score, not easy to administer, messy to set up, time consuming? If these are true, I see lots of barriers in the way of performance testing. Even though they may be more authentic and reliable.

I have found many districts concentrate on reading and math at the elementary level...as a result, science is on the back "burner".

Mary, I absolutely agree! The publishers of the elementary reading series' are caught up in trying to include the required amount of non-fiction reading material for the students and so they have focused on material that is also grade level appropriate to what should be studied in the science and social studies curriculum at each grade level. Teachers are beginning to use the reading series' material as a substitute for real science and social studies lessons as a way to "save time" in their day and still cover all the required material. This does not bode well for the science and social studies learning of our younger students.

Figure 1& 2: can be seen in this version of this article: ( http://goo.gl/9S26Q )

Thanks Clair!

Strange that only "Number Sense" has 4 items worth 10 points! Could one question be weighted or did they really assign each correct answer 2.5 points?

This is my contention with MAP testing. As an AEA consultant, I think it's wonderful for tracking student progress, and making instructional decisions for students, but I have found in more than one school I work with that the teachers receive this data from the testing and then have no idea what it means or what to do with it. It is so sad! They have received training on how to use the results, but by the time the test takes place and they receive the data, they have forgotten how to access it and what to do with it, so in essence the test was a waste of time because it's not going to bring about instructional change for the students in the classroom

I once read a study where students with behavior disabilities saw an improvement in their behavior when they began to track and chart their actions in a spreadsheet. When they could see the change in a chart it became a positive goal to make improvements and watch the trendline go up. Monitoring and taking responsibility.

It is difficult to think we are betting on these practices.

Great point. I have always said, when we are assessing, we are not instructing. I have found as an educator, it's during the test that students will ask the most questions. I consider it low stakes testing when I can tutor them one on one and as a result, some of the best learning takes place.

I have found it interesting that we give semester tests, yet very few supervisors, parents, administrators, or students want to know the overall level of student performance....they just want to know the "grade". As a result, I see a need for doing summative testing a bit differently.

How would you do summative testing differently? This makes me think about the cumulative projects I have my students complete. Very rarely do students come in to find out how they did. I think I need to move the end date of those projects up a couple of days so I can sit down with the student and go over the project before the last day of class.

As an educator, I have found that having students self-assess is a lesson in itself. So many students think they are excellent, even after seeing many of their peers doing the same task with varying degrees.

I agree that we must teach our students how to self-assess. In some classrooms we have never asked them to do this, so we can't expect them to fully grasp the concept unless we provide ongoing support while they learn to self-assess.

I give a lot of written assessments in science, but have failed to make goal setting explicit. I think this could be really effective at getting students to view the feedback differently, especially if the student had to talk with the teacher about the goal.

How do we get our students to care when taking these tests (i.e. Iowa Assessments) so we can truly monitor their knowledge?

Is it possible to over-assess? If new assessments are being added, will students get burned out from being tested?

Yes! I definitely think students get burned out from testing. My district did away with a few non-required standardized tests and the students did better on what they were required to complete, because they felt it was more necessary and appreciated that they weren't being forced to do all of it.

I think this is key - writing the learning targets in student/parent friendly language. I have started to transition mine into "I can" statements.

I would have liked to see more specific discussion about the creation of selected-response format questions. I know "concept inventory" type questions that were developed using student misconceptions from previous written assessments are extremely valuable at assessing student learning, especially when compared with traditional questions from a textbook publisher.

I wish this were the case. So often I work with schools that are giving multiple forms of assessments in an attempt to insure that students are learning the core material and will do well on the Iowa Assessment only to find that the teachers have no idea how to interpret the scores and data they receive from the tests. This leads to no instructional decisions being made for the student after taking the tests and the testing being nothing but a waste of time.

This is so true!! Unless a teacher provides feedback in some way - whether in a conference style or a written style - the student will have no idea how to improve. Too often high school students receive a composition paper back with a letter grade and no comments or only spelling corrections underlined. This does not help the student to know what it is that was done poorly - other than the spelling - or how to improve on the next paper. I firmly believe that even papers that are considered to be "A" papers need to have feedback given - what was done well, what areas might the student extend themselves in next time, what areas could be better even though they were sufficient for this assignment.

Better - ask the student, "How could this statement be more complete? Are you missing something in this component of the rubric?

Resource: "The Power of Feedback" by John Hattie & Helen Timperley (2007) in Review of Educational Research.

This seems necessary if we are to achieve the highest level of assessment making sure we are actually assessing the learning targets appropriately, but I struggle with the fact that teachers have the time in their busy schedules or will take the time to create a test plan for every assessment they give.

Sadly, I feel assessment literacy is lacking in education. We not only need to focus on the assessments we give our students but also on training our educators and classroom teachers on assessment creation and effective use of assessment results.

It's too bad that these tests are being used to make so many decisions in the education system when they are not fully assessing the students learning and mastery of skills.