Teacher-Made Assessments

How to Connect Curriculum, Instruction, and Student Learning

Christopher Gareis, Leslie W. Grant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317681342
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Assessment is not only a measure of student learning, but a means to student learning. This bestselling book guides you in constructing and using your own classroom assessments, including tests, quizzes, essays, and rubrics to improve student achievement. You will learn how to weave together curriculum, instruction, and learning to make assessment a more natural, useful part of teaching.

Find out how to...

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• ensure your assessments are fair, reliable, and valid;

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• construct assessments that meet the level of cognitive demand expected of students;

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• create select-response items and understand technology-enhanced items that are increasingly being used on assessments;

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• use constructed-response items and develop scoring criteria such as rubrics; and

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• analyze student results on assessments and use feedback more effectively.

This second edition features updated examples that reflect the Common Core State Standards as well as other content standards and new, useful samples of teacher-friendly techniques for strengthening classroom assessment practices. No matter what grade level or subject area you teach, this practical book will become your go-to resource for designing effective assessments.

1Why Should I Assess Student Learning in My Classroom?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315773414-1

Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

How do you define teaching?

Take a moment to reflect on how you define this term that we, as teachers, use so often. Chances are that your definition of teaching in some way includes mention of another term_ namely, learning. That's because the act of teaching is not complete until learning has occurred. It's similar to the age-old rhetorical question: “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” We in the education field may well ponder a similar question: “If a teacher teaches but no students have learned, has the teacher taught?” This question helps bring to light an important point: Learning is integral to the act of teaching.

When we learn, we change. That change may be in something we know, something we're able to do, or something we believe or value. Thus, as you consider how to define teaching, you must also consider teaching's results and how teaching brings about those results. With this in mind, we define teaching as the intentional creation and enactment of activities and experiences by one person that lead to changes in the knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions of another person. Note that our definition does not presume that students are blank slates on which a teacher writes. In fact, we view learning as the creation of meaning both by and within an individual. More specifically, we define learning as a relatively permanent change in knowledge, skills, and/or dispositions precipitated by planned or unplanned experiences, events, activities, or interventions. Thus, for the act of teaching to be complete, it must result in learning within another.

Assessment and Learning

As obvious as the relationship between teaching and learning may be, what is less obvious is the evidence of learning. For example, when a young child learns to walk, the evidence of learning may be quite clear: We see the child walking; therefore, we know she has learned. This is true of all physical skills: We can quite literally see the learned behavior. However, in schools, most of our learning objectives for students are cognitive in nature rather than psychomotor. In other words, so much of what we teach in schools and what students are to learn resides in the mind and is not as readily apparent as a child walking.

So if teaching necessarily involves learning, an important corollary follows: How do teachers know what their students have learned? Teachers need some way of seeing learning.

The way teachers see student learning is through a process known as assessment, and assessment, like teaching, is integrally related to our definition of learning. We define assessment as the process of using tools and techniques to collect information about student learning. In other words, assessment is the way teachers see their students’ learning.

Assessment and Teaching: The Light Bulb

There's a familiar image that teachers use to describe one of the most rewarding phenomena in teaching: the light bulb. Perhaps you've used the expression yourself. You're teaching a concept that is difficult for students to grasp. You attempt to get at it one way, and then you explain it in another way. You have the students wrestle with the concept, and you have them try to apply it. Then, you begin to see an almost imperceptible change in the facial expression of a student or two. You scaffold the class's thinking and provide encouragement and feedback. One student says, “Oh, I get it!” Another student's eyes seem to say, “Ah-ha!” The light bulbs are turning on. One by one, students grasp the concept. And you, as the teacher, are relying on your students’ facial expressions, body language, and incidental comments as information about their learning. In other words, you are gathering evidence of student learning in your classroom. You are assessing.

Teachers—at least the truly excellent ones—are teachers because they derive so much personal satisfaction not only from the act of teaching but from their students’ learning. Teachers are driven by a desire to make a positive difference in the lives of others by helping others grow, develop, and constructively evolve into their potential as individuals. Whether it's through teaching a first grader to read, mentoring a middle school student through a personal crisis while still managing to help him master fractions, or engendering a passion for historical research in a high school student, teaching is the conveyance of knowledge, the development of skills, and the fostering of dispositions in ways that become enabling of and meaningful to the learner. It's this motivation for others to learn that seems to be at the core of why effective teachers teach (Stronge, 2007). Central to this relationship between teaching and learning is the ability of a teacher to discern that students are, in fact, learning. Assessment—whether informal or formal—is the means by which a teacher knows what students are or are not learning. Assessment is integral to teaching.

Curriculum, Instruction … and Assessment

In a formal educational setting such as a school, the act of teaching and learning is comprised of two essential components: curriculum and instruction. Curriculum is the set of intended learning outcomes for students (Johnson, 1965). Put more plainly, curriculum is what we intend for students to know, be able to do, and value as a result of learning.

It follows then that instruction is how we bring about learning. Instruction is comprised of the planned and unplanned experiences provided by a teacher that are intended to result in the acquisition of a set of intended learning outcomes for students. In short, for teachers in schools, curriculum and instruction are the stuff of teaching and learning.

However, curriculum and instruction alone represent an incomplete model of teaching and learning in the classroom. In addition to knowing what to teach and how to teach it, a teacher must also be able to discern the nature and degree of student learning at any given point in time. Figure 1.1 represents these three elements in a simple visual metaphor: a stool.

This representation of curriculum, instruction, and assessment illustrates the integrated nature of the teaching and learning process. Teaching is not a singular event that perfectly and inevitably leads to learning. Rather, teaching is a recursive, interdependent activity that relies on teachers to determine accurately what students are learning, to what degree they are learning, and what they are not learning. Teaching relies on teachers’ ability to collect information about student learning to make decisions about what to teach and how to teach next. In other words, assessment is integral to decisions that classroom teachers must make about both instruction and curriculum.

Figure 1.1 A Model of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

Understanding the integrated nature of curriculum, instruction, and assessment is one of the important foundations of effective teaching (Marzano, 2003; Stronge, 2007). However, it seems that assessment in the classroom is oftentimes unintentionally devalued. Consider some of the common misconceptions about assessment made by classroom teachers, shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Teacher Voices: Common Misconceptions about Assessment in the Classroom

Such common misconceptions about assessment in the classroom illustrate how the seemingly intuitive relationship among curriculum, instruction, and assessment (see Figure 1.1) can falter when teachers fail to grasp the various roles of assessment in the classroom. Without assessment, the act of teaching becomes a process focused only on the teachers’ inputs of curriculum and instruction, as illustrated in Figure 1.3. Without assessment, student learning becomes absent from the teaching-and-learning process. If assessment is the means to discern student learning, then, in its absence, teaching becomes all about teachers and their decisions and not about the students and their learning. As illustrated by the two-legged stool in Figure 1.3, teaching without assessment—that is, some means of determining the nature and degree of student learning—is about as dependable as a two-legged stool.

Figure 1.3 Teaching and Learning in the Absence of Assessment

We do not fault teachers, though. In our experiences both as teachers and in working with teachers, assessment in the classroom is most often misused not for want of a conceptual understanding about the need to determine student learning but for want of a practical understanding about how to appropriately create and use assessments in the classroom. We begin to explore this next. Indeed, the focus and intent of this book is to help teachers create and utilize high quality assessments through better understanding the basic principles and techniques of assessment.

The Roles of Assessment in the Classroom

There are three fundamental roles of assessment in the classroom, and they are oftentimes distinguished by when they occur in relation to instruction:

1. Pre-assessment is the assessment of student learning prior to teaching.
2. Formative assessment is the assessment of student learning integrated into the act of teaching.
3. Summative assessment is the assessment of student learning at the end of some period of instruction.

Figure 1.4 provides a side-by-side comparison of pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment across a number of facets, including why to assess, when to assess, what to assess, and how to assess. This overview is intended to provide a comparison of the roles of assessment in the classroom and to distinguish each of the roles from the others.

Figure 1.4 Comparison of the Three Roles of Assessment in the Classroom

Although this type of overview can be helpful, we caution teachers about interpreting Figure 1.4 too literally. In the day-to-day life of teachers, the fact is that the roles of assessment in the classroom oftentimes overlap. A 7th grade teacher, for example, may decide to use a discrepant event, such as students’ observation of a three-leafed clover and a four-leafed clover, as a way to begin an inquiry-based model of instruction for a unit on genetics. During the portion of the activity when students are following their observations with possible ways to investigate the phenomenon, the teacher may informally assess students’ abilities to generate hypotheses (Joyce, Weil, & Calhoun, 2015; Dean, Hubbell, Pitler, & Stone, 2012). In this situation, the teacher is using an activity that serves as both a pre-assessment of students’ prior learning as well as a formative assessment to make decisions about the direction of the day's instruction.

By way of a second example, consider the classic term paper in a 10th grade English class. Clearly, a term paper—as suggested by the very name itself—is a comprehensive assessment of knowledge and skills developed over the course of an academic term. In this regard, a term paper is a summative assessment, and it often carries great weight in determining a student's grade for a marking period. Of course, the process of researching and writing the term paper is typically undertaken over a considerable period of time, with much direction and feedback from the teacher as each student completes various stages of the project, such as identifying a focused topic, conducting research, and developing a theme, followed by drafting, composing, and editing the paper itself. These processes and intermittent deadlines—as well as the teacher's close oversight, direction, and feedback to each student—constitute a series of formative assessments through wh...