Assessment for Learning

What Is Assessment for Learning?

Assessment for learning occurs throughout the learning process. It is designed to make each student’s understanding visible so that teachers can decide what they can do to help students progress. . . In assessment for learning, teachers use assessment as an investigative tool to find out as much as they can about what their students know and can do, and what confusions, misconceptions, or gaps they might have.

Planning Assessment for learning

· Why am I assessing?

When the intent is to enhance student learning, teachers use assessment for learning to uncover what students believe to be true and learn more about the connections students are making, their prior knowledge, preconceptions, misconceptions, gaps, and learning styles. Teachers use this information to structure and differentiate instruction and learning opportunities in order to reinforce and build on productive learning, and to challenge beliefs or ideas that are creating problems or inhibiting the next stage of learning. And they use this information to provide their students with descriptive feedback that will further their learning.

· What am I assessing?

Teachers use the curriculum as the starting point in what to assess and focus on why and how students gain their understanding. Assessment for learning requires ongoing assessment of the curriculum outcomes that comprise the intended learning. Teachers create assessments that will expose students’ thinking and skills in relation to the intended learning and the common misconceptions.

· What assessment method should I use?

Teachers use focused observations, questioning, conversations, quizzes, computer-based assessments, learning logs, or whatever other methods are likely to give them information that will be useful for their planning and their teaching.

The methods need to incorporate a variety of ways for students to demonstrate their learning. For example, opportunities for students to complete tasks orally or through visual representation are important for those who are struggling with reading, or for those who are new English-language learners.

· How can I use the information from this assessment?

ü Feedback to Students

Descriptive feedback is the key to successful assessment for learning. Students learn from assessment when the teacher provides specific, detailed feedback and direction to each student to guide his or her learning. Feedback for learning is part of the teaching process; the part that comes after the initial instruction takes place, when information is provided about the way that the student has processed and interpreted the original material. It is the vital link between the teacher’s assessment of a student’s learning and the action following that assessment.

ü Differentiating Learning

Assessment for learning provides information about what students already know and can do, so that teachers can design the most appropriate next steps in instruction. When teachers are focused on assessment for learning, they are continually making comparisons between the curriculum expectations and the continuum of learning for individual students, and adjusting their instruction, grouping practices, and resources. Each student can then receive the material, support, and guidance that he or she needs to progress without experiencing unnecessary confusion and frustration.

Assessment as Learning

What Is Assessment as Learning?

Assessment as learning focuses on students and emphasizes assessment as a process of metacognition (knowledge of one’s own thought processes) for students. Assessment as learning emerges from the idea that learning is not just a matter of transferring ideas from someone who is knowledgeable to someone who is not, but is an active process of cognitive restructuring that occurs when individuals interact with new ideas. Within this view of learning, students are the critical connectors between assessment and learning. For students to be actively engaged in creating their own understanding, they must learn to be critical assessors who make sense of information, relate it to prior knowledge, and use it for new learning. This is the regulatory process in metacognition, that is, students’ become adept at personally monitoring what they are learning and use what they discover from the monitoring to make adjustments, adaptations, and even major changes in their thinking.

The ultimate goal in assessment as learning is for students to acquire the skills and the habits of mind to be metacognitively aware with increasing independence. Assessment as learning focusses on the explicit fostering of students’ capacity over time to be their own best assessors, but teachers need to start by presenting and modeling external, structured opportunities for students to assess themselves.

Planning Assessment as Learning

· Why am I assessing?

In order to know what steps to take to support students’ independence in learning, teachers use assessment as learning to obtain rich and detailed information about how students are progressing in developing the habits of mind and skills to monitor and challenge their own understanding, predict the outcomes of their current level of understanding, make reasoned decisions about their progress and difficulties, decide what else they need to know, organize and reorganize ideas, check for consistency between different pieces of information, draw analogies that help them advance their understanding, and set personal goals.

· What am I assessing?

In assessment as learning, teachers are interested in how students understand concepts and in how they use metacognitive analysis to make adjustments to their understanding. Teachers monitor students’ goal-setting process and their thinking about their learning, and the strategies students use to support or challenge, adjust, and advance their learning.

· What assessment method should I use?

Teachers can use a range of methods in assessment as learning, as long as they are constructed to elicit detailed information both about students’ learning and about their metacognitive processes. Teachers teach students how to use the methods so that they can monitor their own learning, think about where they feel secure in their learning and where they feel confused or uncertain, and decide about a learning plan.

Although many assessment methods have the potential to encourage reflection and review, what matters in assessment as learning is that the methods allow students to consider their own learning in relation to models, exemplars, criteria, rubrics, frameworks, and checklists that provide images of successful learning.

· How can I use the information from this assessment?

Students use assessment as learning to gain knowledge about their progress, show milestones of success that are worthy of celebration, adjust their goals, make choices about what they need to do next to move their learning forward, and advocate for themselves.

ü Feedback to Students

Although assessment as learning is designed to develop independent learning, students cannot accomplish it without the guidance and direction that comes from detailed and relevant feedback.

If all feedback does is provide direction for what students need to do - that is, if the feedback doesn’t refer to students’ own roles in moving forward to the next stage of learning - they will be perpetually asking questions like Is this right? Is this what you want? Rather, feedback in assessment as learning encourages students to focus their attention on the task, rather than on getting the answer right. It provides them with ideas for adjusting, rethinking, and articulating their understanding, which will lead to another round of feedback and another extension of learning.

ü Differentiating Learning

When assessment lies in the hands of students as well as teachers, students are practicing their own metacognitive skills of self-reflection, self-analysis, interpretation, and reorganization of knowledge. When these skills become well-developed, students will be able to direct their own learning. Assessment as learning provides the conditions under which students and teachers can discuss what the students are learning, what it means to do it well, what the alternatives might be for each student to advance his or her learning, what personal goals have been reached, and what more challenging goals can be set.

Assessment of Learning

What Is Assessment of Learning?

Assessment of learning refers to strategies designed to confirm what students know, demonstrate whether or not they have met curriculum outcomes or the goals of their individualized programs, or to certify proficiency and make decisions about students’ future programs or placements. It is designed to provide evidence of achievements to parents, other educators, the students themselves, and sometimes to outside groups (e.g., employers, other educational institutions).

Assessment of learning is the assessment that becomes public and results in statements or symbols about how well students are learning. It often contributes to pivotal decisions that will affect students’ futures. It is important, then, that the underlying logic and measurement of assessment of learning be credible and defensible.

Planning Assessment of Learning

· Why am I assessing?

The purpose of assessment of learning is to measure, certify, and report the level of students’ learning so that reasonable decisions can be made about students. There are many potential users of the information:

ü teachers (who can use the information to communicate with parents about their children’s proficiency and progress)

ü parents and students (who can use the results for making educational and vocational decisions)

ü potential employers and post-secondary institutions (who can use the information to make decisions about hiring or acceptance)

ü principals, district or divisional administrators, and teachers (who can use the information to review and revise programming)

· What am I assessing?

Assessment of learning requires the collection and interpretation of information about students’ accomplishments in important curricular areas, in ways that represent the nature and complexity of the intended learning. Because genuine learning for understanding is much more than just recognition or recall of facts or algorithms, assessment of learning tasks need to enable students to show the concepts, knowledge, skills, and attitudes in ways that are authentic and consistent with current thinking in the knowledge domain.

· What assessment method should I use?

In assessment of learning, the methods chosen need to address the intended curriculum outcomes and the continuum of learning that is required to reach the outcomes. The methods must allow all students to show their understanding and produce sufficient information to support credible and defensible statements about the nature and quality of their learning, so that others can use the results in appropriate ways.

Assessment of learning methods include not only tests and examinations, but also a rich variety of products and demonstrations of learning-portfolios, exhibitions, performances, presentations, simulations, multimedia projects, and a variety of other written, oral, and visual methods.

· How can I use the information from this assessment?

ü Feedback to Students

Because assessment of learning most often comes at the end of a unit or learning cycle, feedback to students has a less obvious effect on student learning than assessment for learning and assessment as learning. Nevertheless, students do rely on their marks and on teachers’ comments as indicators of their level of success, and to make decisions about their future learning endeavours.

ü Differentiating Learning

In assessment of learning, differentiation occurs in the assessment itself. It would make little sense to ask a near-sighted person to demonstrate driving proficiency without glasses. When the driver uses glasses, it is possible for the examiner to get an accurate picture of the driver’s ability and to certify him or her as proficient. In much the same way, differentiation in assessment of learning requires that the necessary accommodations be in place that allow students to make the particular learning visible. Multiple forms of assessment offer multiple pathways for making student learning transparent to the teacher. A particular curriculum outcome requirement, such as an understanding of the social studies notion of conflict, for example, might be demonstrated through visual, oral, dramatic, or written representations. As long as writing were not an explicit component of the outcome, students who have difficulties with written language, for example, would then have the same opportunity to demonstrate their learning as other students.