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Article to Accompany the "Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs" Video

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Article to Accompany the "Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs" Video

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Students can learn without grades. So why do we focus so much on summative assessments and their grades? Shifting the focus to formative assessment and descriptive feedback is key.

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Dylan William unpacks formative assessment

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Wiliam describes the characteristics of good teacher feedback which promotes student growth.

"Ultimately, the only effective feedback is that which is acted upon, so that feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor" (Wiliam, 2013, p. 18).

"First, knowing the students allows the teacher to make better judgments about when to push each student and when to back off. Second, when students trust the teacher, they are more likely to accept the feedback and act on it" (Wiliam, 2013, p. 18).

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Assessment the improve Student Performance 

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Assessment the improve Student Performance 

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Succinct checklist for effective assessments.

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Spring has finally arrived. Along with warmer weather comes the final opportunity of the school year to refine your teaching strategies and help your students learn and grow. While many teachers know that embedded formative - assessment can be a powerful tool for evaluating and supporting student learning, it can be challenging to find time-especially in the packed days of spring-to check in on what's working for your students.

Formative assessment is distinct from other types of assessment that take place throughout the year. It's a teaching practice focused on continual checks for student understanding, that can help you make informed decisions about the next steps in instruction for each student. Formative assessment might look like students giving each other feedback in pairs or small groups, a classroom discussion, student self-assessment or a quick quiz or poll. And at its best, formative assessment becomes an integral part of a teaching and learning cycle that helps both students and teachers grow.

So, how do we know if we've chosen the right formative assessment strategies to support student learning? What can we look at to determine where new approaches, different tools or adjustments are needed?

Here are seven simple things to look for in your own classroom to understand if your formative assessment practice is effective:

1. You regularly identify and share learning expectations with students. Teachers who communicate what students should learn and the goals for their progression help students take ownership of their learning.

2. You continuously elicit evidence of student learning. Formative assessment is not an isolated event. Teacherswho check in frequently and in different ways on student learning gain more information and help students to grow in the process.

3. You adapt instruction to meet students' immediate learning needs. Formative assessment is, at its core, designed to help teachers advance and better support student learning by making that learning (and gaps in learning) more visible. By using that information to adjust instruction on a continual basis, you will help students realize their full potential in the classroom.

4. You provide feedback to move learning forward and create a structure for students to act on it. Education expert Dylan Wiliam identifies two key aspects of effective feedback: it must "identify any gaps between a desired learning goal and the student's present status towards that learning goal, and 2) students must take action to close that gap."

5. Students welcome and act on feedback.There are a number of ways to provide feedback to studentsthat can help to create a positive, growth-oriented classroom culture.

6. Students are engaged when they are involved in classroom discussions. When students "tune out," they're no longer learning. Eliminating hand raising and replacing it with other discussion techniques, for example, can significantly improve student engagement. In this vein, a teacher using randomizer techniques when asking questions can help shift the culture of learning so that all students are expected to have something to say.

7. Students support one another and take responsibility for their own learning. Effective formative assessment encourages students to reflect on their own learning and assess it, which can also lead to improved student performance.

How does your own formative practice measure up? Is it time for an overhaul or just a minor tune-up? Ultimately, you'll know your practice is effective when checking for student understanding becomes second nature. For the most experienced among us, the line between teaching and assessing blurs. Even before we reach that summit, every step along the way can bring us closer to creating classrooms that foster continual learning and growth.

Kathy Dyer is a Sr. Professional Development Specialist for NWEA, designing and developing learning opportunities for partners and internal staff. Formerly a Professional Development Consultant for NWEA, she coached teachers and school leadership and provided professional development focused on assessment, data, and leadership. In a career that includes 20 years in the education field, she has also served as a district achievement coordinator, principal, and classroom teacher. She received her Masters in Educational Leadership from the University of Colorado Denver. Follow her on Twitter at @kdyer13.

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7 Ways to Understand if Your Classroom Assessments are Working

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Spring has finally arrived. Along with warmer weather comes the final opportunity of the school year to refine your teaching strategies and help your students learn and grow. While many teachers know that embedded formative - assessment can be a powerful tool for evaluating and supporting student learning, it can be challenging to find time-especially in the packed days of spring-to check in on what's working for your students.

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"If the student is redoing work because of poor performance the first time, you should have confidence that any increase in work quality actually
represents a reliable increase in learning" (Nitko and Brookhart, 2014, p. 70).

"Changes in the work should be interpretable as changes in learning" (Nitko and Brookhart, 2014, p. 70).

This was a great book required for a different course. It describes effective student assessment in detail. It also describes the multifaceted nature of formative assessments. The are used to diagnose student learning the inform the teachers future lesson plans. Formative assessment also involves students in their own learning.

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Educational Assessment of Students, Pearson eText with Loose-Leaf Version -- Access Card Package, 7th Edition

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Professor Nitko is a member of several professional organizations, was elected as Fellow to the American Psychological Association, served on several committees of the American Educational Research Association, elected Secretary of AERA Division D, served on committees of the National Council on Measurement in Education, and was elected to the Board of Directors and as President of the latter.

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Possible Intervention - "Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs" - Part II

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Possible Intervention - "Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs" - Part II

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Some insight and clarification of what reassessment looks like in the video below.
Does it matter when students learn a concept? No, we should not treat students like numbers on a conveyer belt. Our grading and policies on assessments should be flexible to account for the fact that students learn at different paces.

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Rick Wormeli: Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs, Part Two

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Possible Intervention - "Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs"

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Possible Intervention - "Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs"

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Allowing students to redo an assessment is more than an accommodation that a teacher can use on a few students. Giving students the opportunity to reassess on concepts which they have not mastered is establishing a whole new culture and respect for learning in your classroom.

Fixed vs Growth Mindset: allowing redos reflects growth mindset. "The consequence of not doing your work is doing your work." Giving a student a zero/failing grade and not allowing them to a chance to demonstrate their learning at a later date shows that the assignment/learning the content did not even matter.

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Rick Wormeli: Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs, Part One

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Rick Wormeli: Formative and Summative Assessment

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"...we believe that the results presented here provide firm evidence that improving formative assessment does produce tangible benefits..." (Wiliam, Lee, Harrison and Black, 2004)

Although this research cannot be used because it was published in 2004, it presents a very interesting and real study describing the challenges teachers face while attempting to incorporate formative assessment.

high-stakes state-mandated testing

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"Formative assessment is about forming learning— that is, it is assessment that gives information that moves students forward" (Brookhart, p. 102, 2013)

This book has a great chapter on strategies for sharing learning targets with students.

Transparency helps students know what they are learning and why.

Sharing learning targets also implicates students in their own learning.

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"...students aren’t always self-regulated learners. They may not be aware of what they do or do not understand. They sometimes think they get it, when they really don’t" (Fisher and Frey,  2014, p. 1)

I think EVERY teacher can relate to the scenario described above.

Formative Assessment is a way for teachers to trouble shoot what/why students are not mastering a concept. This resource gives many types of strategies (oral, written, performance tasks etc.) for incorporating formative assessment in your classroom

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Possible Resource - Formative Assessment Strategy 

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Possible Resource - Formative Assessment Strategy 

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"Another strategy is to give students anonymous samples of student work... on a task that requires students to do such work. Students review and analyze   the samples and communicate what is good in the better samples and what is lacking in the weaker ones" (AMTE, 2014).

This article focuses on a great intervention; formative assessment. The quote above describes a powerful task which many math teachers call error analysis.

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Students often struggle with math concepts.

Research indicates that American students fall behind students from similarly developed nations on national math assessments (DeSilver, 2015).

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How do U.S. students compare with their peers around the world? Recently released data from international math and science assessments indicate that U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of the pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.

One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

Younger American students fare somewhat better on a similar cross-national assessment, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. That study, known as TIMSS, has tested students in grades four and eight every four years since 1995. In the most recent tests, from 2015, 10 countries (out of 48 total) had statistically higher average fourth-grade math scores than the U.S., while seven countries had higher average science scores. In the eighth-grade tests, seven out of 37 countries had statistically higher average math scores than the U.S., and seven had higher science scores.

Another long-running testing effort is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a project of the federal Education Department. In the most recent NAEP results, from 2015, average math scores for fourth- and eighth-graders fell for the first time since 1990. A team from Rutgers University is analyzing the NAEP data to try to identify the reasons for the drop in math scores.

The average fourth-grade NAEP math score in 2015 was 240 (on a scale of 0 to 500), the same level as in 2009 and down from 242 in 2013. The average eighth-grade score was 282 in 2015, compared with 285 in 2013; that score was the lowest since 2007. (The NAEP has only tested 12th-graders in math four times since 2005; their 2015 average score of 152 on a 0-to-300 scale was one point lower than in 2013 and 2009.)

Looked at another way, the 2015 NAEP rated 40% of fourth-graders, 33% of eighth-graders and 25% of 12th-graders as "proficient" or "advanced" in math. While far fewer fourth- and eighth-graders now rate at "below basic," the lowest performance level (18% and 29%, respectively, versus 50% and 48% in 1990), improvement in the top levels appears to have stalled out. (Among 12th-graders, 38% scored at the lowest performance level in math, a point lower than in 2005.)

NAEP also tests U.S. students on science, though not as regularly, and the limited results available indicate some improvement. Between 2009 and 2015, the average scores of both fourth- and eight-graders improved from 150 to 154 (on a 0-to-300 scale), although for 12th-graders the average score remained at 150. In 2015, 38% of fourth-graders, 34% of eighth-graders and 22% of 12th-graders were rated proficient or better in science; 24% of fourth-graders, 32% of eighth-graders and 40% of 12th-graders were rated "below basic."

These results likely won't surprise too many people. In a 2015 Pew Research Center report, only 29% of Americans rated their country's K-12 education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (known as STEM) as above average or the best in the world. Scientists were even more critical: A companion survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that just 16% called U.S. K-12 STEM education the best or above average; 46%, in contrast, said K-12 STEM in the U.S. was below average.
Note: This is an update of a post originally published Feb. 2, 2015. It has been updated to include more recent data. Related posts: 4 charts on how people around the world see education Half of Americans think young people don't pursue STEM because it is too hard
Topics: Educational Attainment, Science and Innovation, Education

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U.S. students' academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries

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How do U.S. students compare with their peers around the world? Recently released data from international math and science assessments indicate that U.S. students continue to rank around the middle of the pack, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.