Balanced Assessment Systems

Leadership, Quality, and the Role of Classroom Assessment

Steve Chappuis, Carol Commodore, Rick Stiggins

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781506354200
• eBook ISBN: 9781506354217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Build a balanced assessment system and support ESSA implementation!

It has never been more important to develop balanced assessment systems that can provide meaningful information, improve teaching practices, and help students learn. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) increases assessment flexibility and responsibilities for states and districts—an opportunity to change assessment for the better.

Authors Chappuis, Commodore, and Stiggins have helped thousands of teachers, principals and other educational leaders in becoming assessment-literate and developing assessment systems built on quality assessment. This comprehensive new guide provides clear steps and strategies for developing an assessment system, and includes many interactive exercises designed for professional development and system implementation. Readers will learn how to:

• Create a balanced assessment system and analyze the progress being made within your school or district toward it
• Develop and implement assessment systems that are both formative (measuring learning in progress) and summative (verifying learning that has taken place)
• Take specific leadership actions that advance the balance and quality of assessment systems
• Help teachers integrate formative assessments into classroom instruction
• Empower students by involving them in the assessment process

Take action now to make proactive, positive changes in your school or district's approach to assessment!

1 Balanced Assessment Systems and Student Learning

What does it look like when assessment is done well in the classroom? The good news is that many teachers can already answer this question. They know that sound assessment practice asks them to do the following:

• Establish clear learning targets that form the basis for both instruction and assessment.
• Ensure that their assignments and assessments match the learning targets that have been or will be taught.
• Select the proper assessment methods to match types of learning targets.
• Create and/or select assessment items, tasks, and scoring guides that meet standards of quality.
• Use the results of the assessment in ways that are aligned with the purpose for the assessment. In other words, they balance formative and summative purposes to meet the information needs of all users of the results, including students.
• Provide students descriptive, useful feedback during the learning process, not just at the end of a unit in the form of a grade on a test.
• When appropriate, involve students in the assessment process as both an instructional strategy and a way to increase student motivation by developing students’ ability to self-assess, set goals for further learning, and self-regulate.

Educators who do these things are assessment literate. Assessment literacy is, in part, having the knowledge and skills needed for effective use of assessment practices and results to both promote and measure learning. Our shortcut for that definition is “Doing It Right—Using It Well.” Assessment literate teachers can fold assessment results back into instruction, integrate formative assessment strategies into daily instruction to improve learning, appropriately use different types of data for the decisions they make about teaching and students, and use sound grading practices to help communicate about student progress and learning.

The not-so-good news is that there are still far too many teachers who, through no fault of their own, assess the way they were assessed as students. Through a lack of exposure to sound assessment practice in both preservice and in-service, assessment practice in many classrooms remains what it always has been. It isn’t that unsound practice is simply the opposite of what assessment literate teachers do; it goes beyond that. The reality is that when assessment is done poorly, students are harmed. Yes, inaccurate results from a poorly constructed test will lead to a faulty score and eventually to a report card grade that may also be inaccurate. A confused or unclear understanding on the student’s part of the intended learning and acceptable performance can cause a mismatch between what the student delivered and what the teacher expected. But worse damage can be done: Student confidence and motivation can be harmed, possibly ending the desire to learn or even try. A faulty grade can be repaired, or a student might get a second chance on a test. But for students who have chosen to stop learning, those things no longer matter.

And when we as school leaders are not assessment literate, we also pay the price. Most of us have dealt with something like what follows, maybe more than once: a crying student in the office upset about an “unfair” test, the confused and angry parent believing his or her child has the short end of the stick when it comes to a certain grade, or the perceived need to defend a teacher in a public setting even if some of the assessment or grading actions appear questionable. Most school administrators have spent way too much time in these situations, sorting through the weeds of detail trying to find what, if anything, was wrong with the test items or precisely how an assigned grade was reached. Or, assuming a district policy on assessment and/or grading exists, if there was any violation from expected practice. It’s rarely easy or straightforward. But it need not be that way.

Assessing learning is one of the most important jobs of any teacher. We’ve already stated that we know exactly what to do to ensure that assessment is done right and the results are used well. But if that is so, why isn’t that common practice in all schools and all classrooms?

Today’s Assessment Environment

Assessment in schools continues to be a bumpy ride. The politics of testing seem to overwhelm its potentially positive role in teaching and learning. Debate continues about the federal government’s role in education and the punitive measures of accountability testing. Concerns about the costs and impact of over-testing, the instructional time lost, the uneven playing field, what the written (and tested) curriculum should consist of, where it should come from, who should define poor performance, whether parents should opt their children out of testing programs, the cultural responsiveness of assessment practices, and the role of assessment in our schools in general are all real issues, and they play in most of our communities almost daily.

Furthermore, to achieve what began as a need for adequate yearly progress and what is now in many states pass/fail accountability grades for schools with attached rewards and punishments, districts and states have added more and more layers of both mandatory and voluntary testing. The desire to generate the data that is believed to be needed to improve schools has become a double-edged sword: What if we have more data but don’t really know how to use it? What happens if we provide teachers item banks, but they either don’t know how to use them effectively or the banks themselves are poorly aligned to what is taught in the classroom? Could the increased testing also increase pressure on teachers and schools to chase improved test scores at the expense of well-balanced learning? Or what if the increased amount of data we might now have isn’t reliable, but we continue to make decisions about programs and students as if it is? And what happens if all our energies and resources are spent in pursuit of data at levels above the classroom, ignoring the clear research about the positive effects of day-to-day formative assessment at the classroom level?

Recognition of these problems is growing: The new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) wants states and districts to examine their testing programs and instruments to decrease the amount of testing overall. But it’s a bigger issue than that: Unless we are able to align a new, different framework for assessment’s role in schools with the overall expectations of what schools are now asked to accomplish and produce, this testing turmoil is likely to continue.

Assessment and the New School Mission

The mission of the schools most today’s adults grew up in was to begin the process of sorting students into the various segments of our social and economic system. Assessment’s role in those days was to provide the evidence upon which to rank those who remained in school at the end of high school based on academic achievement. However, we have come to realize that many students who drop out or finish low in the rank order fail to develop the academic and lifelong learning skills needed to succeed in an ever-evolving world of work. And so schools were required to become accountable to leave no child behind; schools and all students were expected to meet high standards, narrow achievement gaps, reduce dropout rates, and make all students ready for college or workplace training. Schools have recently been released from the requirement that ALL students reach proficiency in math and reading, and although the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) cannot be mandated by the U.S. Department of Education, the commitment to rigorous standards and success for all students remains.

But as the mission of schools has changed, then so, too, must the role of assessment change (Stiggins, 2014). Instead of just providing evidence for grading and ranking students, assessment must go beyond tests and tools to include processes and strategies that encourage and support greater student achievement, especially for struggling learners. This can be done while also accurately measuring and certifying student achievement. To do this we need to understand how to effectively use and balance both formative and summative uses of assessment. Doing so will help link assessment in the minds of educators and the public to something beyond test scores and reports. The concepts we introduce and describe in the following are not time-bound; they can cut across shifts in legislation, educational policy, and implementation strategies. To us they are commonsense ideas that can weather the storms of a changing mission and in fact can help it succeed.

Building Local Assessment Systems for Balance and Quality

A balanced assessment system serves a variety of purposes, uses a variety of measures, and meets the information and decision-making needs of all assessment users at the classroom, building, and district levels. High-quality, accurate assessments provide these users with the dependable evidence of achievement they need to do their jobs and improve learning. And recent research has shown us learning can improve when students are involved in the process and included atop the list of key assessment users—in a new school mission, assessment should no longer be regarded merely as something students passively receive.

Assessment balance can best be achieved at the local school district level, because only local educational agencies have schools, classrooms, students, and teachers. For example, formative assessment is most effective in improving student learning when it is a process conducted by classroom teachers designed to help students learn more—it is not a function that can be served well by the U.S. Department of Education or state departments of education. Local school districts are best positioned to coordinate all the various levels of testing, including classroom assessment, and in doing so balance their assessment systems to serve both formative and summative purp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• About the Authors
• 1 Balanced Assessment Systems and Student Learning
• 2 Five Assessment Actions for Balance and Quality
• 3 Individual Leadership Actions for Balance and Quality
• References
• Index
• Publisher Note
• Publisher Note