Creation of Learner centered Assessments

Designing Learner-Centered Assessments

Traditional assessment approaches have entailed the use of standardized tests that focus on evaluating, grading, or ranking students’ educational value or worth (Duncan & Buskirk-Cohen, 2011). Over the past few decades, learner-centered assessments have gained traction given the increased focus on student-centered learning. This learning approach demands that students set their own learning objectives and determine activities/resources that will help them achieve the set objectives. When the assessment is learner-centered, it engages students in evaluating their own learning. Learner-centered assessment utilizes self-assessment, self-reflection, and authentic assessments in supportive, collaborative, and cooperative environments. These assessments are also reliant on instant, descriptive feedback from educators. This paper develops and pilots a learner-centered assessment using Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) approach.

A Learner-centered Assessment

Educators generally use in-class multiple-choice exams and other forms of assessments to examine students’ understanding of what they have already learned (Rich et al., 2014). However, as learner-centered learning has become critical in the modern learning environment, learner-centered assessments have attracted significant attention. In this regard, assessments should not simply measure what students have learned, but should also be a means to get students to learn while completing tasks given to them. There are various approaches that can be used to design learner-centered assessments. These approaches should be based on the creation of a learner-centered learning environment and the adoption of learner-centered practices to promote students’ reflective thinking (Kim, Grabowski & Sharma, 2004). One of the strategies that can be utilized in designing a learner-centered assessment is the PDSA cycle. This learner-centered assessment is based on PDSA cycle developed by W. Edwards Deming, a management expert.

PLAN

The objective of this assessment is to assess students’ writing skills and their ability to remember narratives or pieces of literature taught in the classroom. In this regard, the state standard that will act as the basis for this learner-centered assessment is CCSS.W.2.3. This writing assessment is based on narrative writing for Grade 2 and Grade 3 students. The learner-centered assessment primarily focuses on examining the students’ foundational writing skills and their ability to remember informational text. To ensure the assessment is learner-centered, students will collaborate with the teacher to create a rubric they will use to self-assess the piece of writing. The teacher will provide a sample rubric, which will be reviewed and edited in collaboration with the students to fit what is expected of them and their learning. Students will commence the writing process using the given topic and the developed rubric for self-assessment. When creating their drafts, students will revisit the rubric in collaboration with the educator before developing their final piece of work.

The application of this learner-centered assessment will involve creating a pilot group of students in the Grade 3 class. The pilot group will comprise seven (7) students in the classroom with different learning styles and needs. The seven students will be from diverse racial/ethnic groups including Hispanics, African-Americans, and Whites depending on the racial/ethnic composition of the entire classroom. The pilot group will be identified based on students’ performance in the previous assessment. The teacher will select students who scored the highest, moderate, and lowest marks in the previous assessment.

Since the pilot group incorporates students with different learning abilities and needs, it will help enhance the learning of all students in the classroom. Insights obtained from the pilot group will be used to review and improve the assessment before its implementation in the entire classroom. The assessment is expected to provide information regarding the students’ foundational writing skills and how teaching can be changed to improved student learning. The PDSA cycle in the development of a learner-centered assessment will be developed by the teacher at the end of the unit of study. Upon completion of the unit of study, the learner-centered assessment will be given to the pilot group, data collected based on their self-assessments, and grading the assessments using the same rubric.

DO

Writing assignments are critical for Grade 3 students since they are in the foundational years of developing their writing skills. These assignments are critical since they promote creativity, encourage student improvement and reflection, and provide high expectations. Using standards CSSS.W.2.3, this assignment is a developmentally-appropriate, learner-centered assessment for third graders in English Language Arts. The development process of this learner-centered assessment is as follows:

· Students will read an anchor text in the book Going Down Home With Daddy by Kelly Starling Lyons.

· Using this anchor text, students will be asked to describe events from the book including its characters. During this process, students will also describe their feelings, thoughts, and actions relating to the story.

· The next step will involve developing a self-assessing rubric for the assessment in collaboration with the teacher.

· Students will then develop a personal writing piece based on their recollection of the events in the anchor text and in relation to the self-assessing rubric.

· A final self-assessment will be administered to the students and collected.

· The writing will be collected and graded by the teacher using the rubric developed in collaboration with the students.

The implementation of the created learner-centered assessment will involve administering the assignment to the pilot group. The assignment was administered to the pilot group to help generate data that would be used in improving the assessment before administering it to the entire classroom. There were several observations made when the pilot group was completing the assignment. First, the pilot group was completely immersed in the writing activity, which was an indicator of their understanding of the anchor text. Secondly, these students were interactive and engaged in the process of developing the rubric as they provided suggestions on how they should be assessed. However, these students seem to get distracted after the first 30 minutes of completing the assignment. They started engaging in disruptive activities after half-an-hour. Despite engaging in disruptive learning activities, most of the students performed well in the assignment. Five of the seven students in the pilot group scored more than 78% in the assignment while the remaining two had a score of more than 62%.

STUDY

As previously mentioned, all the students in the pilot group performed well in the assignment with an average score of approximately 65%. These results demonstrate that students’ had good writing skills and could recall events in the anchor text. Based on insights obtained from the observation, students could have performed even better if they did not engage in disruptive classroom activities when completing the assignment. Prior to administering this assignment, it was expected that students’ average score will be around 60%. Therefore, the average score of more than 65% indicates that the assessment generates better performance than was expected when designing this learner-centered assessment.

The assessment provided the intended benefits for students by promoting the learning and mastery of content taught in the classroom. As noted in the observation, the assessment not only examined what students have learned but enabled them to learn while completing the task. In this case, the assessment helped students to develop and enhance their writing skills as they created drafts of pieces of writing relating to the anchor text. If students would have not achieved the intended results of the assessment, the assessment would have been reviewed, edited, and administered to the pilot group again. This would have involved creating a new self-assessment rubric for the anchor text in collaboration with students and administering it to students for a short period of time. However, this exercise has demonstrated that learner-centered assessments are effective in promoting and enhancing student learning. As shown in this exercise, such assessments provide a tool to examine what students have learned while learning as they complete the assignment.