Assessment concepts and applications

¶ … Instructional Design

Assessments are an essential part of instructional design. They measure student progress and inform instruction. Formative assessments are used to help scaffold students' understanding, since they measure learning while it is taking place. Immediate feedback helps teachers adjust instruction to meet student needs. Summative assessments, given at the end of a unit or course, evaluate students' readiness for the next set of learning objectives. They also provide useful information for teachers who, as dedicated professionals, should be continually seeking improvement in their content and delivery methods. It is important that assessment results are not misused to a hidden agenda. High-stakes assessments are more important than ever. There may be a trend toward using student scores to evaluate teachers, affecting their pay and even their employment status. Despite the pressures, it is imperative that teachers as well as educational leaders make a commitment to approach test prep and test taking with honesty and integrity.

Assessments as Part of Instructional Design

"To guide students to create increasingly complex knowledge structures requires us to progressively scaffold their thinking," (Meyers and Nulty, 2009, p. 565). Various assessment instruments are important tools in this effort, as they provide teachers with the means to find out what their students know as well as identify any gaps that may exist in the progress toward content mastery. Thus, assessments are a key component of instructional design. Teaching and learning are dynamic processes; each teacher differs in approach to the same content and each student learns in a different way. Assessments allow teachers to make adjustments to content and delivery methods to best serve student needs. Teachers can use assessments to build strong foundations for the next steps in the learning scaffold.

Formative assessments are used to provide feedback to both teachers and students during a course or unit of study. When used to inform instruction, they are valuable tools. If a teacher gives a mid-term exam that few students pass, for example, that should alert the instructor to a major disconnect between teaching and learning. The teacher needs to find out why the failure occurred; there could be a number of reasons for this. If it is material new to the teacher, that individual should meet with experienced colleagues to discuss how the material is presented. Instruction may not have been clear. The teacher's style may not have been the best fit for the content. These factors must be addressed before the teacher continues. The students will need remedial instruction and review before they can move on to the material in the rest of the course. There is no point continuing instruction if students are unable to demonstrate competency with what has gone before. Additionally, if there is a fault with the instructor's teaching style, that must be remedied before teaching can continue.

Experienced teachers sometimes find that content they taught successfully with previous groups is not being grasped by the current group. Again, there can be different reasons for this. It happens sometimes that a teacher simply gets a "low" class. There may be struggling readers or a disproportionately high number of students with some type of learning disability. Formative assessments can give a clue to these kinds of problems. In such cases, the teacher cannot present content in the same way that was successful in the past; new approaches must be developed to reach students and teach them in the way they learn best.

Sometimes external factors beyond the control of the teacher, or even the students, can result in poor test performance. In 2008, regions of northern New England were hit hard by an ice storm. Many schools were closed from the date of the storm, December 11, until after the new year. Many teachers had planned lessons so the end of content units coincided with Christmas break. Valuable days of instruction were lost. Although most school districts compensated by extending the school day or adding days to the end of the school year, instructional flow was interrupted. Most teachers found they had lost momentum upon return to the classroom in January, and students had a difficult time settling in. Most teachers believed assessments given upon students' return did not accurately reflect what students were able to do (C. Pryor, personal communication, May 6, 2011).

Teachers use summative assessments at the end of a course or unit of study to evaluate all that students have learned. Summative assessments are useful to determine a student's level of mastery and can be an indicator of potential for success in subsequent courses or units. If a student does poorly on a summative assessment, for example, remedial instruction may be required. Summative assessments help teachers evaluate content and delivery and make adjustments as needed. Summative assessments are not always useful for informing instruction. When they are used at the end of a course, for example, the teacher may not have the opportunity to work further with that particular group of students.

Assessments can be misused when results are interpreted according to a certain agenda. For example, a school district may be facing a severe budget crisis and opt to reduce services to save money. Particularly when a test is evaluated subjectively, the results can be skewed to show that a child does not need a referral for special services.

The discussion so far has focused on authentic assessments. "In a high-stakes approach to assessment, the test is the major tool; in an authentic approach, the teacher is the major tool" (Vacca, Vacca and Mraz, 2011, p. 94). The teacher is well positioned to observe students and provide feedback. Teachers use observational assessments all the time, sometimes formally with the use of observation forms or anecdotal logs, but most often informally, as a matter of daily course. Many teachers believe, and it is difficult to argue with this, that they know their students better than any assessment tool could possibly reveal. Nevertheless, high-stakes testing is a fact of life in today's education system. Teachers must be prepared to guide their students through the process. They must adhere to the highest ethical standards as they do so.