ASSESSMENT: USES AND FORMS

Assessment is the process of collecting, synthesizing and interpreting information about individuals or groups of students in order to understand their learning and help them continue to grow. What we assess communicates what we value­the things worth learning. Our assessments must focus on important science; the understandings, capabilities and caring defined in this document. They must take place in classrooms where teaching is student centered and active, where learning is inquiry based, where criteria for judging the quality of student work are clear and known in advance, and where students have opportunities to show their learning in a variety of ways.

Good assessments help students grow to know and understand their strengths and to clearly see the areas where they need to improve. Good assessment helps teachers enrich and adjust their instruction. Good assessments help parents and community get clear and detailed pictures of their children's learning.

Classroom Assessment

Classroom assessment is about gathering information to get a rich and detailed portrait of student learning, to help us answer questions about what our students are learning and how well, and to serve as the basis for communication with students, parents, and others. Classroom assessments take place every day: in our informal questioning and observations of students as they work; in the ways we monitor student's reactions to classroom activities to see if they understand; in the paper and pencil tests and assignments we use; and in the tasks we set up for students to perform.

Assessment is also about communication; it is about using information gathered from a variety of activities and tasks to help us talk with our students, with their parents, and others about their learning. The quality and usefulness of our conversations depend on the quality of the assessments. Without good assessments, we guess about learning and we face the possibility of making faulty judgments about student work.

Forms of Assessment

When we gather information about our students' learning we choose and use a variety of forms of assessment. Some are formal and some informal; some are individual and some group. The following are some of the common forms of assessment:

• Essay. This form of assessment requires students to create an extended written answer. Essay assessment enables teachers to present students with tasks that are similar to complex real world writing tasks. Essay assessments can give teachers useful insights into students' reasoning and inquiry skills. In addition, essay assessments give students opportunities to communicate about their learning. With essay assessments, we can examine their ability to pick out key ideas, generalize, demonstrate deep understanding, make connections among the things that they are learning. Because there is no single correct response or right-wrong answer for an essay, making judgments about the quality of student essays requires clear criteria. These criteria should be known in advance by students and used consistently to provide useful feedback.

• Paper and Pencil Tests and Assignments. This type of assessment includes quizzes, written tests that teachers prepare, tests that come with textbooks and worksheets, and tests that are given to all students at a specific grade level. Such tests have traditionally been used to measure whether students can think convergently, i.e., can come up with a specific right answer. Multiple choice questions, true-false, short answer, and matching questions are examples of this form of assessment. Typically they are used to learn whether or not students can recall specific information.

• Performance Assessment. Performance assessment is based on observation and judgment. Students must use their knowledge and demonstrate their skills as they deal with tasks that call for thinking, applying and reflecting on the quality of their work. At their most powerful, performance assessments are an integral part of instruction. Quality performance assessments include a task that results in a performance or product and clearly defined criteria that are used to describe and judge the quality of student's responses. Examples include experiments, projects, exhibitions, and portfolios. Performance assessments open the process to students as well as teachers. Students become self-assessors, using the criteria that describe levels of quality to examine and make judgments about their own products and performances.

• Personal Communication. Personal communication with students is an often overlooked opportunity for assessing learning. The more instruction and assessment are integrated, the more important are the questions used by teachers and students. For example, the questions that teachers ask during class can be powerful tools for focusing student attention, stimulating thought; the responses of students provide information about their learning. Personal communication tools for assessment include oral questions, interviews, informal conversations, conferences, and group discussions.

Types of Assessment

The mathematics and science knowledge, capabilities, and values to be assessed will determine the types of assessment used. For example, to answer the question, "What do my students know?" all four major forms of assessment can be used: selected response (paper and pencil), essay, performance assessment and personal communication. When the assessment question is, "How well can my students apply what they know and extend their knowledge?" educators need to select forms of assessment that enable them to get clear pictures of the students" capabilities, such as mathematical reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving and scientific inquiry. Various forms of assessment provide different kinds of information about student learning. The tasks and activities educators use to gather assessment information about complex learning are frequently open ended­having many quality answers. To get a rich, deep view of student problem solving and thinking, educators need to design tasks that require students to think and problem solve in complex, real-life situations. The following table illustrates how various types of student outcomes link with various forms of assessment:

* This table has been adapted from Stiggins, Richard J. Merrill (1996) Student-Centered Classroom Assessment second.edition.

Uses of Assessment

We use assessments to decide about students, teaching, the effectiveness of the programs and materials we are using, and about how best to encourage students to learn. Teachers use assessment data to assign grades, check whether their lessons are working, and adjust their teaching. They also may decide which students have potential for future study, and which do not. We make decisions about grouping, about which things to reteach, about which materials and teaching strategies really work, and about how successful we are as teachers.

Our students and their families use assessment information also. Students decide day-to-day what they should study, what courses to take, or even whether to study at all. They judge their teachers and their ability to learn based on assessment information. As they move up through the grades, students use assessment data to judge their probable future success. Frequent "failures" begin to affect the way they see themselves as learners and can have lifelong effects on their belief in their ability to learn and grow.

Parents may judge their children's abilities and future, whether to praise or scold, the effectiveness of the teacher, and their own skills on the basis of assessment information. We must be sure that our descriptions of student learning, our judgments about the quality of their work, and our decisions come from high quality assessments.