Assessing Student Learning
As an upper grades elementary teacher, you have used data from multiple assessments and provided different types of assessments to all of your students. At some point you have most likely struggled to measure the achievement and growth of your AIG students. This is because these students often have such high mastery scores of grade level material that it is difficult to know what students do not know about a topic. How can you accurately assess student learning for AIG students if summative assessments do not provide an accurate picture?
Balance
Balancing the types of assessments that you use to inform teaching and learning is vital for realizing growth in AIG students. Using pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment helps to provide a holistic picture of how AIG students grow throughout the year.
Pre-Assessment
You may have noticed that AIG students demonstrate content mastery on a pre-assessment. This could be a result of having excessive background knowledge that helps them make educated guesses. For this reason, one way to increase your awareness of what exactly students know is to provide a rating option for students to identify their level of confidence in their answer on a pre-assessment as well as providing an opportunity to explain what they think they know about a question. Self-ratings and explanations will help you see what your AIG students know and have mastered prior to instruction versus what they were able to make a good guess about but still need direct instruction on. It is a mistake to assume that a correct answer on a pre-assessment means that a student is immediately ready for acceleration. This is especially true in math where a correct calculation does not necessarily translate to a deep mastery of the process and understanding of a problem. Self-rating and explanation options prevent assumptions from informing unit planning and instruction and gives you see which parts of instruction need to be targeted.
Examples: KWL, on-demand writing topic, surveys, anticipatory sets, making connections/webbing ideas.
Formative Assessment
You know that moment during a lesson when a student raises his/her hand and makes an exceptional connection to the content? Tracking something as simple as that is an example of formative assessment. Formative assessment includes not only the paperwork, but also the observations that you make while teaching. As a teacher you are constantly assessing students' thoughts and work. Perhaps in math you explain and model a new strategy, you gradually ask for students to help you model before assigning a problem or task to be completed with a partner and finally an opportunity to assess individual understanding by assigning a problem or task to be completed individually. It is the combination of observations and student feedback that cue you to move throughout a lesson; this is formative assessment.
Because there are so many opportunities for formative assessment, this is a good way to think about the progression of growth of your gifted students. When thinking about providing formative assessment opportunities for gifted learners it is important to be aware of the types of tasks you are assigning.
-->Performance Based Tasks vs. Traditional Tasks
A performance based task is open-ended and provides an opportunity for students to explain their thought process. There is no one right answer because even if a common, say numerical answer is sought, the process by which students think and explain their thinking is open. Beware that gifted students unfamiliar with this format may be initially frustrated because they want an answer that is cut and dry. As an upper grades teacher you have seen the surprised/questioning look gifted students display when told that there is more than one right answer in something that has previously been taught/assessed by traditional tasks that are less open. Performance tasks are preferable over traditional tasks for assessing the learning of gifted students because they capitalize on the growth potential of critical thinking skills while creating a challenging, risk-taking environment. In a performance task students are creating a response versus selecting a response in a traditional task (think multiple choice, true/false, matching, ordering). Assigning students to match definitions of cloud types would be a traditional task while assigning students to create a rap about various cloud types would be a performance task.
Examples of formative assessment: Exit tickets, dry erase boards, performance tasks, quizzes, reflections, notebook entries, problem sets, anecdotal notes.
Summative Assessment
When it is the end of the year and students are taking their EOG tests, they are participating in a summative assessment. A general disadvantage of summative assessments is that they are sometimes administered in mass quantity and as a result are based solely on traditional tasks. As a result, it is more difficult to observe and measure the growth of gifted students. On the other hand, summative assessments that are teacher created and performance based can offer a wide array of information about student growth. It is easy to understand why it is so critical that you provide additional opportunities to administer summative assessments outside of standardized testing. Summative assessment marks the conclusion of learning about a particular topic or topics.
Examples: ClassScape benchmark tests, End-of-Grade tests, unit end projects, final drafts of essays.
Pre-Assessment
You may have noticed that AIG students demonstrate content mastery on a pre-assessment. This could be a result of having excessive background knowledge that helps them make educated guesses. For this reason, one way to increase your awareness of what exactly students know is to provide a rating option for students to identify their level of confidence in their answer on a pre-assessment as well as providing an opportunity to explain what they think they know about a question. Self-ratings and explanations will help you see what your AIG students know and have mastered prior to instruction versus what they were able to make a good guess about but still need direct instruction on. It is a mistake to assume that a correct answer on a pre-assessment means that a student is immediately ready for acceleration. This is especially true in math where a correct calculation does not necessarily translate to a deep mastery of the process and understanding of a problem. Self-rating and explanation options prevent assumptions from informing unit planning and instruction and gives you see which parts of instruction need to be targeted.
Examples: KWL, on-demand writing topic, surveys, anticipatory sets, making connections/webbing ideas.
Formative Assessment
You know that moment during a lesson when a student raises his/her hand and makes an exceptional connection to the content? Tracking something as simple as that is an example of formative assessment. Formative assessment includes not only the paperwork, but also the observations that you make while teaching. As a teacher you are constantly assessing students' thoughts and work. Perhaps in math you explain and model a new strategy, you gradually ask for students to help you model before assigning a problem or task to be completed with a partner and finally an opportunity to assess individual understanding by assigning a problem or task to be completed individually. It is the combination of observations and student feedback that cue you to move throughout a lesson; this is formative assessment.
Because there are so many opportunities for formative assessment, this is a good way to think about the progression of growth of your gifted students. When thinking about providing formative assessment opportunities for gifted learners it is important to be aware of the types of tasks you are assigning.
-->Performance Based Tasks vs. Traditional Tasks
A performance based task is open-ended and provides an opportunity for students to explain their thought process. There is no one right answer because even if a common, say numerical answer is sought, the process by which students think and explain their thinking is open. Beware that gifted students unfamiliar with this format may be initially frustrated because they want an answer that is cut and dry. As an upper grades teacher you have seen the surprised/questioning look gifted students display when told that there is more than one right answer in something that has previously been taught/assessed by traditional tasks that are less open. Performance tasks are preferable over traditional tasks for assessing the learning of gifted students because they capitalize on the growth potential of critical thinking skills while creating a challenging, risk-taking environment. In a performance task students are creating a response versus selecting a response in a traditional task (think multiple choice, true/false, matching, ordering). Assigning students to match definitions of cloud types would be a traditional task while assigning students to create a rap about various cloud types would be a performance task.
Examples of formative assessment: Exit tickets, dry erase boards, performance tasks, quizzes, reflections, notebook entries, problem sets, anecdotal notes.
Summative Assessment
When it is the end of the year and students are taking their EOG tests, they are participating in a summative assessment. A general disadvantage of summative assessments is that they are sometimes administered in mass quantity and as a result are based solely on traditional tasks. As a result, it is more difficult to observe and measure the growth of gifted students. On the other hand, summative assessments that are teacher created and performance based can offer a wide array of information about student growth. It is easy to understand why it is so critical that you provide additional opportunities to administer summative assessments outside of standardized testing. Summative assessment marks the conclusion of learning about a particular topic or topics.
Examples: ClassScape benchmark tests, End-of-Grade tests, unit end projects, final drafts of essays.
Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
Using a balanced assessment philosophy to help students develop a growth mindset can help students begin to address and reach self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
A fixed mindset will limit students because they do not view their intelligence level as flexible. Gifted students with a fixed mindset will avoid taking risks at all costs because they don't want to "not look smart." Using balanced assessment can help change this. When you begin with pre-assessment, include numerous examples of formative assessment, and conclude with summative assessment you emphasize and create a culture of growth. Keep in mind that using a balanced assessment model alone will not create this mindset, but encouraging your gifted students to pause and reflect on their learning through the different assessment models will. Students who previously held a fixed mindset will want to grow and be more willing to take risks in order to grow.
The different types of assessments work to provide the student with an idea of how they have grown as they have learned about a topic, something that could not be achieved if only pre-assessment, or only formative assessment, or only summative assessments were used. Being able to compare a summative assessment to a pre-assessment allows a student to see where they started and where they ended for a particular learning topic, but it is important for students to also have access to formative assessments to reflect on how they were able to get from the pre-assessment to the summative.
When reflection is combined with goal setting, students' critical thinking and 21st century skills are also being developed.
A fixed mindset will limit students because they do not view their intelligence level as flexible. Gifted students with a fixed mindset will avoid taking risks at all costs because they don't want to "not look smart." Using balanced assessment can help change this. When you begin with pre-assessment, include numerous examples of formative assessment, and conclude with summative assessment you emphasize and create a culture of growth. Keep in mind that using a balanced assessment model alone will not create this mindset, but encouraging your gifted students to pause and reflect on their learning through the different assessment models will. Students who previously held a fixed mindset will want to grow and be more willing to take risks in order to grow.
The different types of assessments work to provide the student with an idea of how they have grown as they have learned about a topic, something that could not be achieved if only pre-assessment, or only formative assessment, or only summative assessments were used. Being able to compare a summative assessment to a pre-assessment allows a student to see where they started and where they ended for a particular learning topic, but it is important for students to also have access to formative assessments to reflect on how they were able to get from the pre-assessment to the summative.
When reflection is combined with goal setting, students' critical thinking and 21st century skills are also being developed.
Assessment Examples
Pre-Assessment
Below are two examples of pre-assessments. The anticipatory set provides an opportunity for explanations. The on-demand writing prompt will be administered both before and after the literary essay writing unit. The same rubric is used to evaluate both the pre- and post-unit prompt to look at how students grew throughout the unit and became more proficient in writing a literary essay.
Below are two examples of pre-assessments. The anticipatory set provides an opportunity for explanations. The on-demand writing prompt will be administered both before and after the literary essay writing unit. The same rubric is used to evaluate both the pre- and post-unit prompt to look at how students grew throughout the unit and became more proficient in writing a literary essay.
Formative:
Below is an example of formative assessment that shows a progression of understanding. Parts 1-3 are computation-based. Part four requires an explanation that demonstrates the students' understanding of the process. With an explanation of the process, students explain the choices that they made in order to solve a problem which informs you as the teacher of the students' concept development. Part five requires students to explain content by assessing and comparing two work samples which continues to inform concept development. The rigor of the task increases allowing you to pinpoint where in the concept the student shows proficiency.
Below is an example of formative assessment that shows a progression of understanding. Parts 1-3 are computation-based. Part four requires an explanation that demonstrates the students' understanding of the process. With an explanation of the process, students explain the choices that they made in order to solve a problem which informs you as the teacher of the students' concept development. Part five requires students to explain content by assessing and comparing two work samples which continues to inform concept development. The rigor of the task increases allowing you to pinpoint where in the concept the student shows proficiency.