Since the pandemic began, one of the most common questions that I have been asked is, “What does good assessment look like when students are working from home?”
I think my initial response to that question might surprise you: Good assessment is good assessment, no matter where your students are working — so don’t think that everything has to be different just because you are teaching students in a remote or hybrid setting.
That means the processes and practices that professional learning teams take when writing an assessment for students learning in a remote or hybrid setting should look the same as the processes and practices that professional learning teams take when writing an assessment for students who are face-to-face in classrooms:
- We need to know the level of rigor of the essential standard that we are assessing before we can write a question that will generate reliable information on student mastery.
- We need to decide on the kinds of things that students should know and be able to do if they have mastered the essential standard that we are assessing.
- We need to write and then deliver a small handful (3-5) of questions for each essential standard that we are assessing.
- We need to think through the common misconceptions that we are likely to see in student responses to our questions.
- For any constructed response questions or performance assessments, we need to decide together what “mastery” will look like in student responses.
- That might include developing exemplars of different levels of student performance or creating shared scoring rubrics.
Once we have the answers to those questions, we can begin to think through how to best deliver our assessments to kids, given the fact that they are working from home — and there are TONS of digital tools that can be used, depending on skills that you are trying to assess. Here are a few examples:
If you are asking lots of selected response/multiple choice questions on your assessment, give MasteryConnect a look. It remains my all-time favorite tool for selected response questions because it requires teachers to tie each question on an assessment to an individual standard in their curriculum — and then tracks and reports classroom progress over time by student and by standard.
By reporting on classroom progress by student and standard, MasteryConnect makes it easy for teachers and learning teams to meet the two core purposes of common formative assessment: To provide students with reteaching and/or extension and to identify instructional practices that are highly effective and instructional practices that need to be abandoned.
Of course, there are also lots of grade level essentials that can’t be assessed through selected-response questions, right?
In fact, there’s a good chance that MOST of your grade level essentials will require you to see student demonstrations in order to determine levels of mastery. Assessment of student demonstration in a remote or hybrid learning environment is totally possible, too.
My favorite tool for assessing student demonstrations of mastery is Flipgrid. It is a ridiculously simple tool that allows users to record themselves as they answer questions or perform a demonstration. Teachers can then score student responses/demonstrations using a shared rubric that can be created directly in Flipgrid and tied directly to student responses.
Here’s an example of an assignment that I recently used to assess student understanding of the concept of superposition in my eighth grade science class:
My students recorded their responses to the question asked in the task. Then, I scored their responses using a shared rubric and recorded feedback for them directly in Flipgrid.
Need some other examples of how Flipgrid could be used as a tool for assessing students who are working in a remote/hybrid learning environment?
What if:
- a PE teacher asked students to record themselves working through fitness activities?
- a band teacher asked students to record themselves playing a piece of music?
- a first grade teacher asked students to record themselves working through a counting activity?
- an eighth grade math teacher asked students to record themselves solving a problem and then explaining their solution?
What is even better is that Flipgrid allows students to record their screens instead of recording themselves.
How might that be useful?
Here’s an example: My daughter’s math teacher asks her to use the Kami Chrome Extension to solve math problems all the time. Right now, she only sees my daughter’s final annotations. If she paired that with Flipgrid, she could ask my daughter to record her screen while completing problems and not only see the final annotations, but also see the steps my daughter took to get to those annotations.
Now, I know what you are thinking: “But what about SeeSaw or Kahoot or Quizizz or Socrative or Quizlet or Padlet? Can’t those tools do many of the same things as MasteryConnect and Flipgrid?
And the answer is, “Yep.” There are lots of digital tools out there to choose from when trying to assess your students. Your goal is to find tools that:
- Have little to no learning curve for you or your students.
- Aren’t blocked by your district’s firewall.
- Fit into your budget — or the budget of your school.
For me, those tools are MasteryConnect and Flipgrid. For you, those tools might be SeeSaw and Quizlet.
See, there’s no ONE right answer to the question, “Which online assessment tool should I be using?” The more important question is, “Am I using a tool that allows me to gather the kind of evidence that I need in order to determine if a student has actually mastered my grade level essentials?”
Now, one final thought: Teachers right now are also SUPER worried that students are going to cheat on assessments while working in remote/hybrid learning environments.
And that’s definitely worth thinking about — not because we need to punish kids who cheat, but instead because if kids are cheating, we aren’t gathering clear evidence of their current levels of mastery.
So, how do I prevent cheating on assessments when kids are working in remote/hybrid learning environments?
The most important step that I take is to lower the stakes on my classroom assessments. Kids know in my room that if they get a score that they aren’t proud of, they can rework almost any task to raise their score. They also know that we are going to take lots of small assessments instead of one huge one at the end of unit — so if they earn a low mark on an assessment, it won’t ruin their average in the long term.
Cheating, to me anyway, is evidence that a student wants to do well — so I tell my kids over and over again that I’ll do anything that it takes to help them succeed. Once they realize that I’m telling the truth, they are almost always willing to quit cheating.
Now, if I was convinced that there was lots of cheating STILL happening in my room, I’d rethink the kinds of questions that I was asking students to answer. After all, if the questions on your assessment can be Googled AND you are worried about cheating, then you have written a bad assessment.
Here’s an example from my classroom: My next unit is on evolution. I have a simple, ten question multiple choice test that I’ve always given for a grade in the past. This year, I’m thinking about ditching that assessment and asking ONE open-ended question instead:
“Compare and contrast the evolution of the telephone to evolution in the natural world. What is similar about their evolutionary development? What is different about their evolutionary development?”
Doing so will give me enough information to determine whether my students understand how evolution works for sure — and there is no real way to cheat their way through that question.
Does this all make sense?
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