Using Differentiated Classroom Assessment to Enhance Student Learning

Tonya R. Moon, Catherine M. Brighton, Carol A. Tomlinson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429841361
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Architecture
• Sous-sujet: Architecture Essays & Monographs

Using Differentiated Classroom Assessment to Enhance Student Learning introduces pre- and in-service teachers to the foundations, data use, and best practices of the DCA framework. As differentiated instruction practices increasingly enable K-12 educators to individualize learning in their classrooms, it is important that this framework be extended to assessment as well. This concise yet comprehensive book explains the science and rationale behind DCA as well as principles and strategies for both formative and summative assessments. Replete with vignettes, sample outputs, and recommendations, this is a lively and much-needed guide to understanding, enacting, and analyzing grouped and individualized assessments.

1

Why Differentiated Classroom Assessment? Why Now?

Consider these classroom scenarios:

1. Miss Apple works with and designs lessons for 30 or more students who differ in age, ranging from 5 to 17 (grades 1–8) but who otherwise are very similar in terms of race, ethnicity, and English language proficiency. Rather than organizing the students by grade level, she identifies the needs of students in specific areas (reading, writing, arithmetic, history, and geography) and they work together to learn and complete necessary tasks. In front of the teacher’s desk is a bench where groups of students are called to read aloud to the teacher or solve specific problems to evidence their developing understandings. From this, she noted students’ progress.
2. Mr. Barnes is assigned to work with groups of students organized into grade levels by age, and the lessons are characterized by lectures delivered to the entire group at once. Most students share common racial and cultural backgrounds, although there are some recent immigrants who have joined the class. Students complete examinations to demonstrate their progress with the expectation that all students will move together to the next grade-level assignment upon completion of the year’s lessons.
3. Ms. Conner teaches fifth grade in a class of 25 students ranging from 9 to 11 years old. The class is diverse with students identifying as Caucasian, African American, Latinx, and multi-racial. Several students who are English Language Learners (ELLs) receive English as Second Language (ESL) services, and others have designated support needs noted in 504 Plans and individual education plans (IEPs). One student has a documented physical disability that can present challenges in certain classroom activities. Several students participate in the federal free and reduced lunch program. The 25 students not only vary in terms of cultural and language characteristics, but also in terms of their interests both within and outside of school, their readiness to learn, as well as their individual preferences for interacting with academic materials. Ms. Conner’s principal expects her to use data to inform her classroom instruction in ways that acknowledge, value, and support students with a broad array of learning preferences and needs.

The descriptions of the classrooms above provide a brief glimpse into the shifting characteristics of American education. The first, from a one-room schoolhouse, embodies a multi-age, multi-level classroom where addressing student variance was a given and the teacher planned instruction based on students’ current points of entry into a topic or skill-set. Students collaborated in a variety of teacher-guided learning groups designed to help all students progress from their current points of development while the teacher instructed individuals and small groups of students with the same goal in mind. Assessment at the recitation bench was an organic part of Miss Apple’s classroom, helping her determine when students were ready to progress to the next set of skills and topics. In this classroom, and others like it across the United States, there was no illusion that students of the same age would fare well by doing the same work, at the same time, with the same support. What we now call differentiation was simply how teachers planned and how students learned.

The second scenario is typical of 19th-century American classrooms, and it reflects the influence of America’s rapidly changing economy, the shift from agriculture to industry, and an increasing number of immigrants joining the new workforce. Schools were changing to prepare young people for the new world of work they would enter and to which they would need to contribute. Perceived efficiency was the order of the day, and classrooms now contained students of the same age. The assumption was that all six-year olds, for example, could successfully pursue learning in a lockstep progression. Also during this time, single examinations determined whether students progressed to the next grade level, and there was scant, if any, provision for students who were outliers. In many ways, schools mirrored the factories for which their students were being prepared.

The third scenario reflects typical classrooms across the United States today. An obvious marker of today’s classroom is the rise of diversity in many forms. School systems around the nation are experiencing rapid growth in the number of culturally and linguistically diverse students, while about 13% of school-age students receive special education services (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgg.asp) for identified exceptionalities. About 6% of students are identified as academically gifted (https://www.nea.org/assets/docs/twiceexceptional.pdf); about 1 in 59 students are identified with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html); and parents’ reports of approximately 64% of children aged 2–17 having a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder at some point during their school careers (https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/data.html). Some students, of course, have learning issues that cross multiple categories and may be English language learners as well. Further, there are students who come to school from both privileged and economically disadvantaged environments, and they manifest diversity in less evident ways as well (for example, different levels of motivation to do school, varied world views, a great range of personal interests). It is also the case that students come to the classroom with a wide array of experiences, both inside and outside of school, a variety of ways in which they approach learning, and varying social identities. All of these sources of learner variance, of course, have considerable bearing on learning success. This sweeping range of diversity, perhaps more than any other characteristic, defines 21st-century classrooms. Challenging as it is to effectively teach each learner in classrooms typified by such a degree of diversity, these classrooms also provide a considerable opportunity to prepare young people for life in a 21st-century world in which the ability to appreciate and work harmoniously and productively with people from many different cultures and exceptionalities whose perspectives, proclivities, and talents are sculpted, at least in part, by those exceptionalities and cultures.

The challenge of teaching in academically diverse classrooms is amplified by the nearly two-decade, single-minded emphasis on high-stakes testing—a second core reality in U.S. public school classrooms. A baseline assumption of high-stakes testing is that all students should be ready to succeed on the prescribed tests at the same time in the school year, with accommodations available only in documented need instances. Building administrators and teachers are held accountable for student outcomes on the tests, without regard to student language, economic status, adult support, and life experiences—and sometimes even without regard to learner exceptionality. The resulting pressure to prepare all students to master an over-abundance of content by a specified date causes many teachers to feel they have no choice but to steamroll through their curricula so they will have “covered” massive amounts of rigid and prescriptive content prior to the test date. This inclination is reinforced and amplified by pacing guides and/or required lesson plans that must be carried out in a specific sequence according to a rigid timeline.

This kind of accountability policy is paradoxical in at least two ways. First, it encourages teachers largely to ignore the student variance they continually observe in their classes, and results in one-size-fits-all instruction at the very point in our history when individual student-focused instruction is most needed. Second, the policies that were intended to yield primary benefit for students from low-income and minority groups appear to serve these students particularly poorly (though the policies appear to serve few students well). Since the implementation of high-stakes accountability testing in public schools was mandated by No Child Left Behind (2001), a great deal was documented about the unintended consequences of such legislation. Although the law’s intent was to reduce on-going achievement gaps, there exists little to no evidence that there has been any closing of the gaps (Nichols & Harris, 2016). Rather, evidence of high-stakes testing practices indicates that teachers’ instructional and assessment practices follow a narrow curriculum where students are not exposed to non-tested content and, instead, engage in a steady diet of test preparation activities (e.g., Herman, 2004; Koretz, 2017; Moon, Brighton, & Callahan, 2003; Moon, Callahan, & Tomlinson, 2003).

While the testing accountability policies’ intent is to increase student learning, according to recent government reports (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/), only about one-third of U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students read at a proficient level as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Many scholars and policymakers point to the combination of demographic shifts in U.S. classrooms and annual testing policies as root causes of the stagnation. For students leaving the K-12 educational system, national rates of remediation in post-secondary institutions indicate that many students are underprepared to engage in college-level work, with 40%–60% of students entering the first year requiring remediation in English, mathematics, or both (http://www.highereducation.org/reports/college_readiness/CollegeReadiness.pdf). The problem is more acute for low-income students and students of color, with 56% of African American students and 45% of Latinx students enrolling in remedial post-secondary courses nationwide, compared to 35% of white students. The renewed emphasis on accountability policies found in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015) does little to lessen teachers’ conclusion that “one-size-fits-all” teaching and assessment is their only instructional option.

Re-creating the Classroom: A Different Approach to Instruction and Assessment

Excellent teaching is both an art and a science. Our two-decade-long experiment with achievement via test-driven pedagogy, rigid, often de-contextualized and low-relevance curriculum, and classrooms in which young human beings take a back seat to test scores, is clearly anything but artful. That approach is also inconsistent with our best knowledge about the science of teaching—as we will see in Chapter 2. Further, we have ample evidence that in one-size-fits-all classrooms few, if any, students have their needs met.

Differentiated instruction (Sousa & Tomlinson, 2018; Tomlinson, 2014, 2017; Tomlinson & Imbeau, 2010; Tomlinson & Moon, 2013) provides a framework for re-designing classrooms to place individual students in the center of learning, uses curriculum that enlivens learning, provides instruction that reflects both the art and science of teaching, and creates learning environments that enhance the development of both students and teachers. Central to Tomlinson’s (2001) original model of differentiation is the role of formative/on-going assessment as a v...