Differentiated Assessment for Middle and High School Classrooms

Deborah Blaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138475717
• eBook ISBN: 9781317925484
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book shows middle and high school teachers in differentiated classrooms how to integrate assessment into the teaching and learning process. With examples from real classrooms, this book demonstrates how to use a wide variety of assessment to better address the needs of your students with regard to their learning style, level of cognitive ability, skill level, interests, etc. Included are detailed examples of both formative and summative assessments.

1

Why Differentiate?

How diverse is your classroom in terms of the following characteristics?

♦ Cognitive abilities

♦ Confidence in learning

♦ Cultural/ethnic influences

♦ Gender influences

♦ How students value learning

♦ Interest in the subject you teach

♦ Learning pace

♦ Learning styles (visual, spatial, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, etc.)

♦ Readiness

♦ Socioeconomic and family characteristics

Without question, every teacher will, after examining this list, think of many different aspects of diversity present in every classroom. Considering all these different influences, the question is not really, “Why differentiate?” but “How?”

The purpose of this book is not to teach you how to create or structure a differentiated lesson or unit; it is to teach you how to evaluate students before, during, and after a unit is taught, and how to use differentiation when performing this evaluation. It is designed to complement general books on differentiation, which generally concentrate on differentiating the content (presentation) or process (practice) portions of a lesson, and act as a resource for people who have been introduced to differentiation but want to know more about how to integrate assessment into the process.

First, let’s briefly review what assessment is. In an educational context, assessment is a process, not a one-time event. It is a series of episodes in the learning process, part reflection, part understanding of and documenting progress in achievement of learning objectives. Behavior is adjusted based on assessment results.

There are four basic steps to assessment:

The purpose portion usually requires a determination of what students need to know, how to find out if they have learned it, and how to motivate students to want to achieve the desired result. The information portion involves observing, describing, collecting, recording, and scoring knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs. Interpretation, even more importantly, calls for examining the results of the assessment and using it to reflect how to improve both instruction and learning. Frankly, these last two steps are not really assessment (basically collecting data) but are in fact evaluation steps, in which the assessment data is compared to standards to judge their worth or quality, and to adjust instruction accordingly.

In my experience outside higher academic/scientific circles, however, the word assessment is generally used (albeit erroneously) to include both assessment and evaluation. Therefore, in this book those concepts are intertwined and simply referred to as assessment.

Assessment is an important component in any classroom, differentiated or not; and it is my hope that this book helps its readers to better comprehend the potential, as well as the importance of a good assessment, and use a wider variety of assessment to better address the needs of students.

As always assessment should follow several guidelines:

♦ Assess daily.

♦ Be formative whenever possible: a temperature check not just to measure knowledge but to give feedback.

♦ Ask students to apply the knowledge and skills gained in basically the same way they have practiced that knowledge and skills. There should be a clear match between the expected outcomes of a unit and the tasks provided as the assessment.

♦ Be timely, make results quickly available to the student.

♦ Extend knowledge, rather than merely measure it.

♦ Never surprise students. Tell them what they’ll learn, how to learn it, and how they’ll know they’ve learned it. No pop quizzes, no surprise categories. Test what was taught following the same manner in which it was practiced.

♦ Have clear criteria (a checklist and/or rubric) that communicate how students will be assessed.

♦ Be authentic. Students should be asked to perform in as close to a real-life situation as possible in a classroom.

If you wish to improve student performance and not just measure it, students should do the following:

♦ Know right from the start what they are expected to learn.

♦ Study models of high performance and monitor their own progress, much like professional athletes or actors.

♦ Ask each other or the teacher, “How can I improve this?” or “How can I find more evidence to support my conclusion?”

♦ Achieve at their highest possible level.

♦ Have opportunities to learn from the assessment, and show this learning in future assessments.

Why Differentiate?

Once again, in assessing students, we can’t assume that one size fits all The method of evaluation used should be a continuation of the type of differentiation used in the unit. In other words, assessment should be linked to the following:

♦ Method of performance during practice of a skill or concept

♦ Student learning styles

♦ Level of cognitive ability (Bloom’s or another)

♦ Student skill level

Dr. Carol Ann Tomlinson (1995), national expert on and proponent of differentiation, succinctly defines differentiation:

Differentiation allows students multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they have learned. A differentiated classroom provides different avenues to acquiring content, to processing or making sense of ideas, and to developing products so that each student can learn effectively.

What Is Differentiated Assessment?

I’d like to comment on two aspects of Tomlinson’s model of a differentiated classroom that par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• 1 Why Differentiate?
• 2 Preassessment
• 3 Formative Assessments and Giving Choices
• 4 Summative Assessment: Putting Knowledge in Context
• 5 Summative Assessment: Using Variety
• 6 Use Technology in Assessment
• 7 How to Implement Differentiation
• Appendix 1: Useful Lists
• Appendix 2: Differentiated Assessment Terms
• Appendix 3: Checklists
• Bibliography