Alternative Assessment in Jen's Classroom

Thoughts on Educating

Please contact the author, Jennifer Morrison (j.morrison@artofeducating.com), with questions, comments, or requests to reproduce this material.

3/17/2008 - Alternative Assessment in Jen's Classroom

So, here’s my stab at explaining how I assess and what alternatives make sense. I’ll explain first, then see if I can come up with a good alternative assessment sound bite for the next time I’m on the radio.

I design and use assessments that measure what students understand, or what I am intending to teach with each unit. I try to teach for future application and big learning, so often these assessments are not traditional tests. I don’t particularly care that students memorize which characters do what things in the plot of a story, but I do care whether kids can analyze what they read for author’s purpose and writing style, as well as connections both personal and cross-curricular. So tests, when I use them, tend to have students analyze texts and pull quotes to support their ideas. Essays are a good format for this assessment objective. Using essays and presentations is also useful because I can figure out what my students can do in terms of writing and speaking. For example, on their mid-term exams, I asked my English students to prepare and write an essay about whether or not Brutus in Julius Caesar is a good man. To write the essay and score well on the SAT rubric we were using, students had to take a viewpoint, organize their ideas logically, and prove their theses with sufficient evidence from the text. They had to know the text deeply and demonstrate that knowledge well in writing. That’s what James Popham would call an important learning outcome.

I would say that important learning outcomes generally involve complexity and often some element of learning by doing. That’s how we learn outside school - in on-the-job situations. I try to capitalize on this complex real-life style of learning with authentic tasks, where students are asked to accomplish real-life tasks up to standards one would find in a professional workplace or situation. For example, to assess students’ knowledge and understanding of Julius Caesar, as a final assessment I had them work on teams to reinterpret a scene, write a script in Standard American English, and act it out on stage. I used rubrics to evaluate both the accuracy of their interpretations and the audience engagement their scenes inspired. (I also had the audience vote on the most engaging productions for further, even more authentic feedback.) In order to engage and make their scenes comprehensible in Standard American English, the actors really had to understand the nuances and underlying motivations of their characters. They also had to demonstrate some of the characteristics of good public speaking and stage presence. In this task they were Hollywood writers, producers, directors, and actors.

Right now I have my English II students engaged on an authentic task in which they are young professionals in an advertising firm hired by the UN to design a web site highlighting issues in Africa for the American general pubic. I will use this task to teach and assess students’ writing skills, research skills, ability to cite sources in MLA format, and some visual/web design in a real-life context. I’ll also teach students how to use Microsoft Frontpage. This actually will be a website available on the World Wide Web targeting the American public. As students work, I ask the same questions an firm superior would ask: “Will that help the general public understand the issue?” or “What would Joe Public be interested in?” In an authentic task of this caliber, students come to understand that when it comes to their writing, a four on the six-level rubric isn’t an option. This is for real-life publication – nothing less than perfect is acceptable, and they must revise again and again until it’s up to snuff.

I also use less complex, more informal, formative assessments to gauge on-the-spot understanding and students’ previous experiences, feelings about the content or my methods, advice for me, as well as reflections on what they’re comprehending or having difficulty with. Popham calls these “dipstick estimates” (106). Whenever I have a question or concern, I do one of these quick-and-dirty assessments through class, group, or individual discussion, responses on post-its (which I or the students can then categorize to analyze and reflect), or focused freewrites in their daybooks. I have a lot of questions as I teach, and these dipstick measurements keep me student-centered. Instead of making assumptions, I know some fast, easy ways to ask and get a grip on what my students are thinking.

Anything worth assessing is also worth reflecting on, so I require my students to self-assess and reflect on most of our time-intensive tasks and assessments. They assess, then I assess. They assess first because it is their assessment that is most important. I want them to be able to measure themselves accurately against a set standard (the rubrics are always made clear beforehand), look for or set standards themselves for their work, and use assessments to learn and plan for future work and learning. The real learning in an activity doesn’t always come with the big assessment or evaluation; sometimes it comes in the thinking afterward. My personal trainer, Brent, put it this way; he said that it’s the time between weight work-outs that your muscles re-program themselves and re-group to handle heavier weights, therefore the most effective training programs build in down-times in between ever more difficult work-outs. I think it’s the same with one’s brain; the reflection between activities is vital for growth. That’s one of the problems with remedial programs and the usual slew of busy work directed at behavior-problem, low-level readers. They’re kept so busy activity-to-activity and worksheet-to-worksheet that their brains never have time to sit back and reprogram.

So, what’s my great sound bite about alternative assessments? Try this...

Because they are designed to compare students (through score spread) more than inform my instruction, large-scale standardized assessments generally don’t show what students know and can do. Alternatively, I prefer assessments that measure important outcomes, combining content knowledge with the skills students need in college and the workplace: critical reading, writing, and speaking. Teachers, and parents can make more valid inferences about a child’s learning from a well-designed classroom assessment or authentic task than from a standardized number. Good alternative assessments include authentic tasks that mimic real-life, on-the-job situations, ongoing informal measurements to gauge student understanding in-the-moment so teachers can be more responsive, and student self-assessment and reflection.

Popham, James. (2005). The truth about testing. Alexandria VA: ASCD.

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