One of my favorite books about assessing student learning is Common Formative Assessment: A Toolkit for PLCs at Work by Kim Bailey and Chris Jakicic.
In 140 pages, Bailey and Jakicic succeed in making a process that is fundamental to driving student learning — and yet fundamentally intimidating to teachers — approachable. Each chapter is full of essential background knowledge and practical suggestions that helped me to feel more comfortable about what formative assessment should look like in my classroom.
Here’s ten tips that I pulled from Common Formative Assessment that might help to strengthen the assessment practices of your learning teams:
Remember that getting information quickly and easily is essential. Assessment data is only valuable if (1). you are actually willing and able to collect it and (2). you can act on it in a timely manner. That simple truth should fundamentally change the way that you think about assessments.
Write your assessments and scoring rubrics together even if that means you initially deliver fewer common assessments. Collaborative conversations about what to assess, how to assess and what mastery looks like in action are just as valuable as student data sets.
Assess ONLY the learning targets that you identified as essential. Assessing nonessential standards just makes it more difficult to get — and to take action on — information quickly and easily.
Ask at least 3 questions for each learning target that you are trying to test. That allows students to muff a question and still demonstrate mastery. Just as importantly, that means a poorly written question won’t ruin your data set.
Test mastery of no more than 3 or 4 learning targets per assessment. Doing so makes remediation after an assessment doable. Can you imagine trying to intervene when an assessment shows students who have struggled to master more than 4 learning targets?
#meneither
Clearly tie every single question to an essential learning target. Doing so makes tracking mastery by student and standard possible. Your data sets have more meaning when you can spot patterns in mastery at the target — instead of just the question — level.
Choose assessment types that are appropriate for the content or skills that you are trying to measure. Using performance assessments to measure the mastery of basic facts is overkill. Similarly, using a slew of multiple choice questions to measure the mastery of complex thinking skills is probably going to come up short.
#sheeshArne
When writing multiple choice questions, use wrong answer choices to highlight common misconceptions. The patterns found in the WRONG answers of well-written tests can tell you just as much as the patterns found in the RIGHT answers. Fill your test with careless or comical distractors and you are missing out on an opportunity to learn more about your kids.
When writing constructed response questions, provide students with enough context to be able to answer the question. Context plays a vital role in constructing a meaningful response to any question. Need proof? Find the parents of a teenage daughter who asks, “Can I go to the mall with some friends tonight?” How much you want to bet that they are going to ask a few questions before saying yes? I know I will!
Make sure that higher level questions ask students to apply knowledge and/or skills in new situations. A higher level question that asks kids to apply knowledge in the same way as they have practiced before becomes a lower level question really quickly.
The beautiful part of all of these tips, y’all, is that they are easy to understand AND easy to integrate into your process for developing common formative assessments.
So whaddya’ waiting for?
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Related Radical Reads:
What Role do Hunches Play in a PLC?
Should Learning Teams Develop Every Formative Assessment Together?
More on Developing Every Formative Assessment Together
Is REAL Formative Assessment Even Doable?
