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Why We Need to Move Away From SMART Goals

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Why We Need to Move Away From SMART Goals

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Why We Need to Move Away from SMART Goals and Towards New Forms of Classroom Assessment - EdSurge News

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Every new school year breathes new life into my professional career. After a summer of relaxation and self-directed professional development (which is…

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This summer, hundreds of educators from around the world gathered in the (frankly sweltering) heat of New Orleans for our annual Fusion conference. I'm always excited to hear keynote speakers (who doesn't like a good TED Talk?), but sometimes, the specificity of the message rings particularly true. When Tom Guskey, educator extraordinaire, took the stage, I was initially captivated by his Jeff Goldblum voice. Then, he shared that he studied under Benjamin Bloom (yes, that Bloom). I sat up a little straighter. And once I truly tuned in, I realized I was listening to a warmly funny, deeply relatable speech about how we teachers-all of us-get the whole idea of assessment objectives just a little bit... wrong.

"I'm not teaching this again!"

Raise your hand if you've ever cooked the same recipe twice. Keep it up if you had to look at the recipe that second time.

I've cooked the same exact coconut oil chocolate chip cookies every month for the past five. And I still have to look at the recipe. That is a project-based learning experience, and I'm an adult. What if my cookbook frustratedly yelled at me, "I'm not teaching this again!"

During his keynote, Guskey asked us, what if we stopped treating assessment like a high-stakes, winner-takes-all guessing game and started treating it like practice? What if we stopped designing assessments that mimic a casino more than real life jobs, relationships, and experiences?

Teachers, drop the ego

Teachers, keep your hands up if you're ever triumphantly "stumped" your students on an assessment question.

Guskey's Wicked Witch of the West impressions of "They didn't see that one coming!" had the audience laughing out loud because we all felt so lovingly called out. I was sitting toward the back of the room chuckling to myself as he confessed that he, too, once crafted test questions based on obscure textbook captions, something I've absolutely done myself.

But what are we really assessing in those moments? Not understanding, but cleverness. Not mastery, but memory tricks.

Guskey was clear: If students are surprised by what's on an assessment, that's not on them. That's on us. Our impact isn't measured by what we've covered; it's measured by what students actually understood. That mindset shift requires a different view of what counts as fairness. It also requires humility.

Guskey also asked the room if we'd ever taught a lesson where we felt "on." Where we thought, "Aw, man, I wish the principal had stopped by for that one!" And then, when it came time to assess what our students learned, we realized that maybe things didn't go as well as we thought. Teachers, I'll say bluntly what Guskey said nicely: It's time we join the real world where our constituents determine our success, not our feelings of our own performance. And, yes, that's pretty humbling.

Reteaching isn't failure. It's the job.

Picture something you really know, deep in your bones where your hands can just do it-whether it's throwing a frisbee or the steps of your skin care routine-and answer this: How many times have you done it? And how many times, at the start, did you falter?

This is the second thing Guskey taught me: Reteaching isn't something we should be ashamed of-or worse, better than. It's the job.

When students need support, we can't just say "the same thing louder and slower" and call that differentiation. Real reteaching means doing it differently, and doing it regularly, that is, shifting the approach, not just repeating the script.There's often pushback here: "But it's not fair to the kids who got it the first time!" Guskey challenged that assumption by asking us to look at other professions:

Surgeons don't start their first operation on a living patient

Pilots don't learn to fly in a real cockpit

Lawyers begin as assistants, working their way up alongside mentors

Hairdressers don't start on paying customers. They practice on wigs or themselves (Yikes)

Everyone gets to practice. Everyone gets to mess up in a low-stakes environment before they're expected to perform under pressure. Why would we expect less of students? Why do we think the ability to get something right on the first try is the ultimate indicator of learning?

For as much as we talk about preparing students for the "real world," it doesn't seem like we're honest about what that means.

Make the assessment the practice

I'm currently reading The Will of the Many, which, like all good sci-fi/fantasy involves Exceptional Students™ at the Exceptional Student School™. In this plot, the summative assessment is running a labyrinth. Any idea how the kids train for this final assessment? They run the labyrinth. Every day. So when it comes time for the "test," they're ready.

That's the kind of alignment we need to aim for. When assessments become a form of consistent practice-clear, transparent, and embedded in everyday learning-students aren't guessing what matters. Instead, they're invited into the learning process as partners, not tricked into it as contestants.

And when students make mistakes, that's not the end of the road. That's the middle of the cycle. As Guskey said, the real work begins in the correction, like when athletes watch playback of their most recent games. "You learn more from a bad performance," Guskey said. In the do-over. In the pause-and-try-again.

What doesn't work about formative assessment, and why stickers do

"If students know they'll get a second chance, won't they just stop trying the first time?" Guskey had a smart and refreshingly honest answer to this fair teacher question. We often ask students to be driven by intrinsic motivation alone, as if that's a natural state for everyone. But let's be honest: most of us like a little recognition. Most of us work because we'll get paid. Most of us expect our supervisors to acknowledge our hard work.

Incentives aren't a sign of weakness. They're a sign of humanity. We mirror the real world when we offer incentives to our students. It's normal for all humans, and it's certainly developmentally appropriate for kids and teenagers.

But why are we so obsessed with negative incentives-and almost zero positive incentives? If you don't believe me, ask students what will happen if they fail, versus if they succeed. If students "fail," they could:

Suffer a stern conversation, a visit to the principal, a phone call home, a suspension, or an expulsion

Be held back a grade, which is embarrassing

Go to summer school, which sacrifices their free time

Miss out on recess or field trips

Lose their devices

Get grounded

Have to sit in certain undesirable classroom locations, like near the teacher

Be punished with extra work

If they "succeed," they:

The very fact that we have more heavily weighted tangible punishments in place shows we believe that students respond to tangible things. And yet we only rely on the highly sophisticated intrinsic motivation as the positive. Couldn't we make the list of positive reinforcement just a little bit longer?

Let's revisit the initial question: How do we motivate students who 1) know they'll get a second chance without 2) having that second chance be a punishment? Maybe we scale the rewards, instead of scaling the punishments.

Guskey shared an anecdote from his graduate teachings. One colleague of his began printing certificates of mastery on two different sized papers. First attempt? Big paper. Second? Still mastery, just smaller. Everyone was skeptical. "These are adult grad students!" they said, incredulous. And, of course, it worked. So Guskey began giving his grad students stickers on their papers, and that worked, too. These grown adult learners cared.

Longing for recognition isn't childish; it's human. It's connective. We're not saying ditch rigor. We're saying prioritize rapport. A certificate of mastery or sticker (even a silly one) can go a long way.

Teach like the real world works

Teachers, let's get clear on our assessment objectives: Are we trying to push kids off a cliff and hope they fly on the first takeoff? Are we trying to catch kids who haven't read the footnotes? Or are we trying to teach kids that practice is a good thing, learning isn't scary, and we're proud of them regardless of their learning schedule?

If we want kids to be lifelong learners, we have to stop making them afraid of getting it wrong. We have to ensure they are:

Unscarred by learning moments

Understanding of what real-world learning is

Unafraid of making mistakes-because that's where the actual learning occurs

If the real world gives second chances-and it does-shouldn't we?

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Are you going for mastery or mystery? Rethinking assessment objectives with Tom Guskey - Teach. Learn. Grow.

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At the 2025 NWEA Fusion conference keynote speaker Tom Guskey explored how educators can rethink assessment objectives to meet student needs.

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Ambitious Teaching and Equitable Assessment

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Ambitious Teaching and Equitable Assessment

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Claims that testing will serve equity very often aren't true. That's my conclusion from 50 years of studying the impact of high-stakes standardized assessments. Yes, I should have retired years ago. But I feel compelled to call attention to how seemingly well-intentioned efforts to increase student achievement actually diminish student learning-and, more importantly, to offer an alternative vision of assessment so integrated with instruction that it actually furthers learning.

Here's the arc of the last 50 years, at warp speed: minimum competency tests in the '70s; basic-skills tests in the '80s; "tests worth teaching to" in the '90s; high-frequency, high-stakes tests in the '00s; and added layers of commercial interim tests in the '10s.* After testing ourselves into a maniacal focus on reading and math, there's now a growing effort to tack on other variables, like social-emotional development, as if that could solve the horrific imbalance of accountability testing over all else.

What has all this testing accomplished? Very little. We've known since the 1980s that standardized testing in basic skills, when there are any consequences attached, results in test score inflation and curriculum distortion. ¹ And we've known since 2011 that the high-stakes testing required by No Child Left Behind increased achievement only minimally. One methodologically strong study found an increase of 0.10 of a standard deviation in fourth-grade math, ² while a research synthesis found an average increase of 0.08, with gains mainly in elementary math. ³ These findings translate to roughly 3-4 percentile points.

What has all this testing cost? Far too much. Each year, testing consumes weeks of instructional time, pulls millions of dollars away from student services and enrichment, and demoralizes budding learners across our country.

It's long past time to reckon with how the accountability testing strategy has failed, accepting that we cannot incentivize our way to equity and excellence, and to redirect our efforts to assessments that support learning. It's time to value teachers, strengthen local curricula, build on the knowledge students bring to class, foster caring classroom environments, and focus on assessments that enable next steps for instruction.

Because of the pandemic, this school year will be different from the past, even in places where in-person schooling was maintained throughout. Many educators and members of the public now more fully understand that relationships matter for learning. Debilitating inequities in educational resources and learning opportunities, known yet effectively ignored by policymakers for decades, are now undeniably exposed. And for the first time, federal monies are available on a scale sufficient to enact meaningful changes.

Many of my fellow educators and researchers have long known ⁴ that genuine opportunities for deep learning require two basic things: rigorous, authentic learning goals and instructional supports that ensure a sense of safety and belonging. The fact that these remain aspirational goals, rather than widespread practices, tells us that the impediments are real and enduring. Inequities are systemic in American society. Learning opportunities are not equal before or during schooling, and testing often intensifies the marginalization of students with low scores because they are given remediation instead of enrichment. So the students who face the most challenges outside of school (due to everything from residential segregation to inadequate access to healthcare)-specifically, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, nonnative speakers of English, and students with special needs-tend to be given the least inside of school. Therefore, any effort to invest in creating more equitable learning opportunities requires recognizing built-in racist and classist causes of inequity and working consciously to remove these systemic injustices.

Developing equitable assessment practices requires starting over, with up-to-date research on teaching and learning. My goal in this article is to provide a new vision of assessment integrated with instruction for the sole purpose of supporting learning-not ranking students, teachers, or schools. I explain how ambitious teaching practices, framed by sociocultural theory, are essentially one and the same as equitable assessment practices. ⁵ I begin with a summary of the outmoded beliefs about learning and motivation underlying our current accountability systems. In the concluding section, I address what teachers need from district leaders and higher-level policymakers.

Outdated Beliefs About Learning and Motivation Underlie Assessment Mandates

Countless studies have shown the curriculum-narrowing effects of accountability pressures. In schools worried about raising test scores in reading and mathematics, science and social studies are driven out of the curriculum along with art, music, and PE. Worse still, testing pressure can undermine learning even in reading and mathematics because low-scoring students often receive repetitive drills, using decontextualized worksheets and other formats that closely resemble multiple-choice test items.

I don't believe that anyone is truly in favor of children receiving such a dry, uninspiring education-so how did we get to this point? To better understand our current situation, let's look back a few decades.

The cognitive researchers who helped politicians launch the first wave of standards-based reforms in the 1990s had some good ideas. Importantly, they pointed to the evidence that thinking and reasoning abilities are developed (not genetically fixed). ⁶ They sought to make rich and challenging curricula available to all students, rather than an elite few, hence the slogans "all students can learn" and "world-class standards." They already had evidence from the 1980s showing the harmful effects of teaching to basic-skills tests, so they called for performance assessments aligned with ambitious new standards. These would be "tests worth teaching to," with students writing essays, conducting chemistry experiments, and engaging in other demonstrations of their current competencies. The researchers emphasized that their aspirations for a "thinking curriculum" were unprecedented and would require substantial "capacity building" and resources to help teachers teach in profoundly different ways.

Unfortunately, the idea of capacity building was replaced almost immediately by a competing theory of change based on incentives that used test scores to mete out rewards and punishments for educators. ⁷ The name "standards-based reform" had been hijacked. Under the new theory of action, it was assumed that with sufficient motivation (from accountability pressure), teachers and other school personnel would find the means to improve instruction and that improvement would show up in students' test scores. What research over the next decade showed, however, was that many administrators and educators did not understand the instructional changes that were needed or lacked the capacity to make them happen in a sustained, impactful way.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB), enacted in 2002, dramatically increased both the stakes and the amount of testing, from milestone testing in grades 4, 8, and 12 to every-grade testing from 3 to 8, plus high school testing. Because of the amount of testing required, the elaborate performance assessments that had appeared briefly in the '90s were too expensive and were replaced by mostly multiple-choice tests. In addition, because of draconian NCLB performance expectations-all students proficient by 2014-districts began purchasing commercial interim tests to get ready for state tests. Just as "standards-based reform" was hijacked, so was "formative assessment." Machine-scored, multiple-choice tests are called "formative assessments," but they are nothing like the curriculum-based, ongoing, interactive processes documented in the literature on formative assessment. ⁸

Thus, we now have a multi-layered testing system that is limited in its ability to document progress toward deep learning goals, much less cultivate deeper learning. State tests must be curriculum-neutral to allow for local control, interim tests purchased by districts have to be generic enough to sell to national markets, and costs preclude portfolios or performance tasks. Although external tests could be useful once-per-year barometers of programmatic trends (if they did not have performance-distorting stakes attached), they are sold as if they have instructional meaning for individual students. Worse, frequent test-score reports give students the wrong idea about the purpose of learning. Feedback about how many additional points are needed to reach proficiency does not help students improve. In fact, research on motivation shows compellingly that data walls and other types of normative comparisons are harmful to learning. Initiatives for culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy, for example, cannot help if students experience public shaming for their low scores. Simply put, test-driven schooling is antithetical to what research on learning tells us about effective teaching and productive learning environments.

Current Research Supports Integrating Ambitious Teaching with Equitable Assessment Practices

Creating truly equitable and excellent educational opportunities means ensuring that each child has access to rigorous curricular resources and is supported to participate fully in instructional activities that enable deep learning. This "ambitious teaching" centers on each student's engagement and participation; it requires paying explicit attention to who students are as they enter the classroom, including their prior learning experiences (inside and outside formal educational settings), their family- and community-based funds of knowledge, and their races, ethnicities, gender identities, social classes, and other aspects that influence their identities as learners.

Ambitious teaching practices are consistent with asset-based pedagogies, culturally responsive and sustaining teaching, and learning research in literacy (including biliteracy and bidialectism), mathematics, and science. The foundation for all of this work is sociocultural learning theory,** which is the state-of-the-art model for understanding how learning happens and why context, culture, and sense of belonging are an integral part of learning. ⁹ Sociocultural learning theory builds on important lessons from cognitive research (in laboratory and classroom settings) about sensemaking, prior knowledge, and metacognition; it also attends to the ways that social and cultural contexts shape development, identity, and new learning. Importantly, it explains why motivational aspects of learning-feelings of self-efficacy, belonging, and purpose-are completely entwined with cognitive development. ¹⁰ Because learning is seen as transforming one's ability to participate in a community of practice, learning involves developing communication skills and gaining experience with tools for thinking along with an increasing sense of competence and ability to contribute.

Sociocultural learning theory, thus, creates an imperative to deeply know each student-academically, emotionally, socially, and culturally-and to offer a supportive classroom environment where students feel safe to talk together about their thinking and reasoning. That's why ambitious teaching is only possible when equitable assessment is fully integrated into instructional practice. Unlike our existing testing regime, equitable assessment is almost entirely formative-but not the so-called formative of today's widely used benchmark assessments (which are mainly another form of test prep). True formative assessment takes many forms, from peer conversations and sharing out of group work to classroom quizzes and exit tickets, but a core feature is that it is grounded in the classroom curriculum and makes visible useful information for guiding day-to-day instruction. Often, students do not know they are being assessed-they are simply sharing their thoughts and participating in activities as a normal part of the learning process.

Assessment integrated in ambitious teaching is equitable in several important ways. First and foremost, it positions students as capable learners and offers helpful information about what next, rather than a sometimes overwhelming list of all the things not known. Because students are assessed on the specific knowledge and skills they have been taught, questions and expectations are more recognizable and relevant as compared with curriculum-general state assessments. In addition, because the teacher is engaging with the student, the results are more meaningful; problems like bad days, issues at home, or simply misunderstanding a question do not skew the teacher's understanding of the student's progress.

When well-integrated, equitable assessment is embedded in and enables ambitious teaching. The summary of shared and unique practices shown below follows from a set of "Classroom Assessment Principles" ¹¹ that my colleagues and I developed in collaboration with our district and state assessment partners. We also invited and received extensive feedback from an array of participants who attended a national conference on classroom assessment. There was only one criticism to which we were unresponsive: the complaint that our principles for assessment "looked mostly like high-quality instruction." Yes, that's exactly our intention.

In the remainder of this article, I walk through each item in the figure. Although these practices would be daunting and likely incoherent if attempted piecemeal, they are highly interconnected and mutually supportive when viewed from a sociocultural perspective.

Develop a shared understanding of ambitious learning goals and features of quality work. Learning goals direct effort and shape thinking. Goals help to explain context and purpose and create a vision for what mature or expert practice looks like. To serve equity, goals must be challenging for all students (instead of reserving ambitious goals only for some students and not others). Equity also requires that challenging goals be accessible and meaningful, which means they are not carved in stone and handed down from on high. Rather, they should be negotiated and connected based on students' interests and experiences outside of school.

For example, Ambitious Science Teaching ¹² describes how anchoring events or phenomena can create a more particularized and compelling context for considering more general curriculum topics. Teachers and eighth-graders in Washington state took up the problem of killer whale populations declining in Puget Sound as they learned about ecosystems. And kindergartners used their 5-year-old words like "sticky," "push," and "pull down to the ground" (for friction, force, and gravity) to talk about whether somebody little could bump somebody big off the end of a playground slide.

Involving students in shaping goals and in monitoring their own progress develops self-regulation capabilities as well as deeper understanding of success criteria. It is well recognized in the formative assessment literature that coming to understand the features of quality work-what it means to be a good writer, a good student of history, and so forth-is an integral part of developing subject matter expertise.

Provide rich and authentic instructional and assessment tasks. It follows that ambitious goals require instructional activities and assessment tasks that fully represent or embody those goals. If a goal is for students to be able to develop and evaluate historical claims and arguments, then instructional activities must involve this kind of experience, including reading across texts, examining primary documents, presenting and critiquing arguments, and the like. Formative assessment can occur as part of learning activities, with both planned-for and in-the-moment questions designed to elicit student thinking. To further the activity, some questions can be asked of the group, but individual questions are also needed to check for understanding, possibly as an exit ticket. Reporting back and showing students how their responses have helped shape next steps can enhance trust and demonstrate a joint commitment to learning (in contrast to more typical testing strategies that feel like catching and punishing students for what they don't yet know).

In a partnership of researchers and practitioners working to improve middle school mathematics instruction, the collaborators noted the importance of open-ended, high-cognitive-demand tasks. ¹³ Problems that can be solved in multiple ways and that expect students to engage in mathematical reasoning help students develop an understanding about why procedures work and which procedures are appropriate to use in particular situations. And when showing their reasoning is part of the learning activity, students give teachers an abundance of information to determine next steps instructionally. Similarly, Ambitious Science Teaching emphasizes the importance of authentic tasks, for both instruction and assessment, that simulate the kinds of intellectual work that is called for in real-world contexts-this often means deciding what the problem is that needs solving as well as transferring learning of a concept from one specific project or problem to another. Tasks with lower cognitive demands can also be informative, but these should be selected carefully, as something like scaffolds, to help teachers see students' partial understandings when they are not yet able to complete more ambitious transfer tasks.

Draw connections to students' interests and funds of knowledge. Most teachers are aware of the importance of eliciting and building on students' prior knowledge. But too often they've been told to probe for an inert list of prerequisite school skills. More up-to-date research acknowledges the profound ways that cultural patterns affect all aspects of learning and development. This makes experiences from home and community highly relevant to school learning. The term "funds of knowledge" ¹⁴ is becoming widely used to recognize the robust, accumulated wisdom developed in families and communities about daily concerns like cooking, budgets, first aid, and automobile repair and about core cultural values regarding morals and ethics. This knowledge, always there but sometimes disregarded in school, can be explicitly engaged as a resource for teaching. Attending to students' lived experiences furthers learning in several important ways. It shows respect and helps to counter negative positioning of students from communities that have long been marginalized. Drawing connections and providing scaffolds from everyday knowledge to academic knowledge also support intellectual development while contributing emotionally to a student's feeling of belonging.

A similar concept emerged from research on teachers who were recognized by parents and principals as successful with African American students. ¹⁵ The practices they had in common, now known as culturally relevant pedagogy, affirm students' cultural identities while at the same time challenging and helping them to succeed academically. Culturally relevant pedagogy also entails engaging students in recognizing and critiquing social inequities. There is no simple formula or list of strategies; this approach centers on teachers forming strong relationships with students and being committed to their success.

In the original research, ¹⁶ the successful teachers did not use any "language of lacking," such as attributions to single-parent homes or poverty. They fought against the idea of one-right-answer thinking and demanded that students work to high intellectual levels. Teachers' assessment strategies focused on allowing multiple ways to demonstrate learning (which is discussed again later in this article). Assessment insights were also gleaned from all of the connections teachers made between school and community. Connecting rap lyrics to poetry is the most obvious; other examples included examinations of zoning laws that allowed liquor stores near schools with predominantly Black students but not near those with mainly white students and critical analyses of social studies textbooks under consideration by a state evaluation panel.

Develop disciplinary discourse practices in a community of learners. Students learn more from talk-based instructional practices, ¹⁷ primarily because explaining your reasoning to someone else is usually more challenging than passively listening without any meaningful check for understanding. In addition, developing language and inquiry skills specific to each discipline, such as mathematics, history, and science, helps students develop a much deeper understanding of that discipline. Including disciplinary practices as learning goals along with big ideas in content domains‡‡ addresses equity by ensuring that students from all backgrounds have opportunities to develop problem-solving, reasoning, and communication skills that enable participation.

Disciplinary practices, such as posing questions, analyzing and interpreting data, modeling, and argumentation, can be thought of as tools for thinking. Talk-based instructional strategies and documentation (e.g., poster presentations), as students engage with these disciplinary practices, provide opportunities for assessment and feedback without the need for separate quizzes and tests.

Elicit student thinking and help students learn to build on each other's ideas. By now, the integration of these various ambitious instructional and equitable assessment practices should be apparent. An overarching idea is that engaging students in challenging intellectual work requires emotional support, respecting who students are, and specific academic scaffolds, enabling next steps for learning. A critical aspect of assessment that's embedded in instruction is that students' thinking has to be visible-at least to the teacher and the student, and often to classmates. This means intentionally creating a productive classroom learning environment in which students are not afraid of offering inaccurate or incomplete thoughts.

In the research partnership on middle school mathematics noted earlier, the participants recognized the importance of whole-class and small-group discussions to further conceptual understanding. Making this happen requires high-quality tasks, otherwise there's nothing to question or discuss. In addition, it is crucial that classroom norms be established about the value of learning from mistakes, what counts as an acceptable explanation for the academic discipline, and the importance of giving a rationale for why particular steps were taken. The researchers emphasized the critical role of the teacher in "pressing students to elaborate their reasoning and to make connections between their peers' solutions and key mathematical ideas." ¹⁸

Engage students in the use of self- and peer-assessment. Self- and peer-assessment are two of the many formative assessment practices that have been shown to increase student learning. ¹⁹ Self-assessment was initially thought of decades ago as a specific strategy to help students develop more explicit understandings of success criteria and to get better at applying these criteria to improve their own work. Subsequent theoretical framings and studies have helped us understand the power of self-assessment to enhance metacognition and executive function and also, from a sociocultural perspective, to enhance self-regulation and student agency.

Peer-assessment shares many of the same benefits for learning as self-assessment. ²⁰ Peer-assessment provides a vehicle for student talk and more explicit attention to the features of quality work. Getting better over time at learning from and being able to critique the work of classmates contributes directly to students' use of disciplinary practices, such as making claims from evidence or being explicit in the use of definitions.

None of these claims about the benefits of self- and peer-assessment are true, however, if students aren't taught how to engage in this kind of feedback meaningfully or if these strategies are imposed only as an additional bureaucratic requirement. This is not about checking right/wrong answers or assigning grades. Rather, self- or peer-assessment practices should be taken up with explicit attention to the ways that they are expected to further self-monitoring and new learning. Because an essential purpose of formative assessment is to provide feedback about how to improve, there must be subsequent opportunities to revise. Too often, students complete assignments "to be done," rather than seeing learning intentions and how new learning will be used and built upon in subsequent classroom work. Insights from self- and peer-assessment need to have a place in the rhythms of classroom activities.

Provide supports to ensure equitable participation, including linguistic scaffolds. Talking about thinking is one of the most powerful tools we have to ensure that all students have the opportunity to engage fully with rigorous learning goals. But hoped-for critical-thinking talk doesn't happen automatically. Ambitious Science Teaching explains the process by which participation in talk leads to higher-order learning. It also provides advice about how to set goals for classroom conversations, how to plan high-cognitive-demand questions, and how to use a repertoire of "talk moves" to be responsive to student ideas. For example, "pressing" is a way to ask students for more: "Can you give an example?" "What evidence supports that idea?" "Sounds like you have the beginning and the end of an explanation [repeat students' partial explanation]; can you say what happens in the middle?" Ambitious Science Teaching also offers scaffolds for student talk, which are especially important for students who have not participated in such conversations previously. Scaffolds include teacher modeling and coaching, sentence starters or sample questions to launch group work, and ways to simplify complex tasks without doing the thinking for students.

Scaffolds to support participation are especially important for English learners. Most teachers are aware of the importance of making sure that students are comfortable with the meanings of academic words like compare, contrast, hypothesize, cause, and effect; but like everything else, real understanding is more likely in discussions about specific applications of such words. Thus, it is beneficial to make these clarifications part of class discussions as new work is being launched. Later, during discussions when students are being asked to explain their group's model or problem solution, teachers may need to invent specific scaffolds for students who are not yet fluent in English. This might mean pointing to the relevant portion of a graphical aid, letting students ask a classmate for help, or coming back at the end to invite an English learner to say "I agree with..." and having permission to repeat what another student has said or posted. Again, these moves are done in the spirit of collaborative learning, with an appreciation shared by the class that our thinking is almost always ahead of our ability to put our thoughts into complete verbal explanations.

Present tasks in multiple modes and use artifacts to document thinking. In addition to talk-based instructional practices that elicit and build on student thinking, presenting tasks in multiple modes and allowing students multiple ways to demonstrate their learning can serve equity goals and affirm a positive learning culture.§§ In addition, representing learning in multiple ways can deepen students' conceptual understanding by drawing connections and offering more than one way to think about a new idea.

The teachers that parents and principals had identified as exemplary teachers of African American students held multifaceted conceptions of assessment and engaged students in work reflecting multiple forms of excellence. ²¹ In one example, a teacher helped her students choose the standards by which they would be evaluated and what evidence or work products they wanted to use as proof of mastery of specific concepts and skills. Another teacher emphasized questioning as a recurring pattern in classroom interactions, asking "Why are we doing this problem?" This invited students to interpret tasks and respond in ways that played to their particular strengths-it also created greater access to the content and the classroom discourse. As students' various answers and approaches were shared across the class, much more robust understandings developed about how targeted knowledge and skills were to be explained and used.

Foster student agency and self-regulation. Fostering student agency and developing self-regulation capabilities are broad, overlapping categories of practices that sum up several of the specific strategies and intentions addressed above and below. Self-regulation, which emerged from cognitive theory, and student agency, which emerged from sociocultural theory, are closely overlapping constructs having to do with both cognitive and affective aspects of learning. They are about developing the awareness, self-confidence, and skills to take responsibility for one's own learning-and they are critical for motivation.

In summarizing the vast research on motivation, the recent milestone report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, How People Learn II, concluded that, "Motivation to learn is fostered for learners of all ages when they perceive the school or learning environment is a place where they 'belong' and when the environment promotes their sense of agency and purpose." ²² The report also summed up what educators can do as follows. ²³

Educators may support learners' motivation by attending to their engagement, persistence, and performance by

helping them to set desired learning goals and appropriately challenging goals for performance;

creating learning experiences that they value;

supporting their sense of control and autonomy;

developing their sense of competency by helping them to recognize, monitor, and strategize about their learning progress; and

creating an emotionally supportive and nonthreatening learning environment where learners feel safe and valued.

With this understanding of motivation-which, notably, does not include external rewards like scores, stickers, or pizza parties-we can see how it is that equitable assessment bolsters motivation. Self-assessment in particular is intended to help students develop their agency and self-regulation. This practice can be especially fruitful when students are given feedback about the quality of their self-assessments. Indeed, all of these ambitious teaching and equitable assessment practices are intended to work together in support of student agency and self-regulation.

Provide improvement-focused feedback. Assessments that result in normative comparisons-posting Jacob's score as "Below Basic" or telling Keisha that she scored at the 55th percentile, for example-undermine learning. This conclusion comes from many hundreds of studies ²⁴ showing that students who receive this kind of feedback do worse, on average, on subsequent measures of achievement than students in control groups that received no feedback. This type of feedback, where students are told how their performance compares to other students, is also called ego-focused or person-focused feedback. In contrast, task-focused feedback that shows students something about how to improve has a positive effect on learning.

How People Learn II provides this summary of the relevant research. ²⁵

Feedback is most effective when it is

focused on the task and learning targets; that is, detailed and narrative, not evaluative and graded;

delivered in a way that is supportive and aligned with the learner's progress;

delivered at a time when the learner can benefit from it; and

delivered to a receptive learner who has the self-efficacy needed to respond.

In reflecting on how all the equitable practices in the figure above fit together, notice that they all attend to the identity and feelings of students as members of a learning community. Equitable assessment is not about offering false praise or lowering expectations. Rather, engaging students with specific information about how to improve their work conveys respect (because of the teacher's confidence that the student is able to do this higher-level work), and it invites students to take greater ownership and thereby have a greater sense of control. I have said this many times before, but it is worth repeating: feedback that helps students think about how to improve their work requires substantive insights and is, therefore, more often qualitative (e.g., written comments or a discussion) rather than quantitative (e.g., a score).

Develop norms of respect, responsibility, and improvement. The practice of developing classroom norms in support of mutual respect, personal responsibility, and a shared focus on learning is fundamental to the idea of a learning culture. Creating an environment where students feel safe to ask questions, are willing to share partially formed explanations, and are able to offer critiques of each other's reasoning without meanness or injured feelings requires explicit negotiation and scaffolds (as is true when working toward any meaningful learning goals). Explicit work to jointly establish such norms is imperative if students have not become accustomed to such expectations in other classrooms or in prior years of schooling.

Ambitious Science Teaching suggests ways that norms can be co-constructed through role playing, for example, or by asking students directly what kinds of comments might keep them from participating and then discussing as a class how disrespectful comments might be avoided. Examples of the kinds of norms that might be negotiated include students taking responsibility for their own learning by seeking clarification when they don't understand something and not interrupting or talking over classmates when they have the floor. For these norms to be felt and lived by, they must also be enforced, as when a teacher needs to step in and say, "That's a put-down rather than a fair critique of an idea; how can you rephrase what you said?" ²⁶ A good indicator of when norms are embedded in the learning culture is when students remind each other to stay on topic or to let someone else have a turn.

Establish a healthy relationship between formative and summative assessment. Ideally, in an affirming learning culture, students are excited to engage with new learning because of the intrinsic appeal of the goals and tasks-and because it feels good to contribute to the efforts of the group. Formative assessment practices such as making posters or using Google Docs to report out group questions or initial models for discussion should be seen as helping the class learn together. For more formal assessment practices, such as feedback or peer- and self-assessment, it is important that there be clear conceptual linkages to culminating summative assessments. That way, formative assessment can be seen as supporting improvement toward the same criteria and goals that will be called upon by summative assessments.

Current summative assessment strategies, like regularly giving students formal tests and posting the scores in electronic grade-book management systems, may be handy for parents to check on progress, but they are antithetical to what we know from learning research. First, they involve reducing substantive insights about what students know to mere points, which cannot tell the story about student interest or effort or how to improve. Point systems can foster extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivation to learn (and can reduce intrinsic motivation, as discussed next). And, oddly, even when recorded weekly, each data entry is typically treated as if learning were finished rather than a step in a learning progression; it fails to note substantive improvements over time, much less guidance about how to improve further.

Avoid grading practices that undermine interest, demean students, or distort learning goals. Much of the research on grading tends to involve surveys of current practices rather than examining how grading practices affect learning. One comprehensive summary of these survey studies noted that teachers give credit for "enabling factors" ²⁷ (e.g., effort, ability, improvement, work habits, attention, and participation) in addition to mastery of learning goals. Better evidence about how grades affect learning comes from the motivation literature and from formative assessment research (much of which is summarized earlier). In short, grading best supports learning (and a learning orientation, which is crucial for future learning) when grades reflect mastery of the specific learning goals toward which instruction and feedback have been aimed and when grades are not used to try to motivate or control student behavior.

Even with my decades of assessment experience, I find it difficult to convince fellow educators to give up grades as motivators. After all, extrinsic rewards do work, and students are more likely to turn in assignments and turn off their phones if you make these things "count" toward their grades. What was most convincing to me were the studies of extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards, ²⁸ which show that students (even kindergartners) have less interest in learning activities after these activities had been "reinforced" with extrinsic rewards. Another important nuance related to grading is that many teachers want a way to credit nonachievement factors like effort because of their kindness and caring for students. An alternative practice that is kind and keeps the focus on learning is to allow students to submit new evidence of learning in place of earlier assignments. This makes sense especially when teachers and students together are aware of how a later assignment subsumes knowledge and skills required for an earlier assignment. As it stands now, many teachers feel they are bound by the bureaucracy of prior gradebook points. But ultimately, grades should be about the substantive learning that has been demonstrated-not whether it was demonstrated in week 14 or week 17.

Conclusion: What Districts Can Do to Support Ambitious Instruction and Equitable Assessment

Sociocultural theory helps us understand why personal relationships-between student and teacher and among students-are critical for academic achievement. It helps us see how to create affirming classroom environments by attending to students' identities and sense of belonging and, at the same time, how to ensure rigor by explicitly structuring and scaffolding students' participation skills to cultivate higher levels of thinking. Equitable assessment practices are themselves ambitious teaching practices and are entwined with additional instructional practices that together lead to high levels of engagement and deeper learning.

Some teachers already exemplify ambitious teaching and equitable assessment. After all, the science and math partnerships and the teachers succeeding with African American students described here are all grounded in observing teachers who had been identified as highly effective. Many teachers have implemented some but not all of these ideas. An especially familiar pattern is when teachers are able to implement one set of ambitious practices, such as discourse-based instructional practices, but then maintain more traditional, multiple-choice quizzes and tests instead of show-your-thinking, authentic assessment tasks. For other teachers, both ambitious teaching and equitable assessment practices are new; this is particularly likely in contexts where districts have not had the resources to invest in professional development or curricular materials connected to topics and problems of particular interest to local communities.

Learning to teach or improve one's practice in the ways described in this article can be daunting. Support for teacher learning is just as important as an equity-focused vision for student learning. In our "Classroom Assessment Principles,"*** my colleagues and I identified five recommendations as to what school and district leaders could do to support equitable assessment practices in classrooms.

1. Implement coherent curricular activity systems that integrate curriculum, instruction, and assessment based on well-founded theories of learning.

2. Build collaborations between assessment and curriculum department staff to inform the design and implementation of coherent curricular activity systems in schools.

3. Provide professional development and coaching structures (e.g., time, supports for educator collaboration) that help to coordinate all of the different new things that teachers are being asked to learn, including learning and motivation theories, asset-based pedagogy, disciplinary practices as part of content standards, and classroom assessment principles.

4. Develop or adopt district-level assessments that embody the full range of desired learning goals.

5. Establish grading policies in support of grading practices aimed at creating clear success criteria, while avoiding the use of grades as motivators.

The single most important idea here is that district leaders must understand the research base informing these recommendations and themselves hold a coherent vision of how equity-focused assessment practices fit within commitments to asset-based pedagogies, rigorous subject-matter standards, and culturally responsive and sustaining teaching. The theories of learning (whether implicit or explicit) that govern district-level decisions matter: unhappily, districts are sometimes the cause of impediments to best practice. This happens when district leadership applies intense pressure to raise scores on accountability tests at the expense of other considerations, when districts invest in multiple-choice "formative" test products instead of substantively rich curricular and assessment resources, and when the rules for data management systems emphasize quantizing information rather than substantively describing progress. It also happens when districts create incoherence. Many districts, with the best of intentions, launch multiple worthwhile initiatives, but they do not coordinate among those initiatives, leaving educators struggling to make connections and to find time to squeeze in each mandated activity. Even under the current, highly counterproductive federal and state testing regimes, districts can and must do better.

As we emerge from the pandemic and take stock of our values, I hope we will fundamentally rethink how we approach teaching, assessment, learning, and youth development. The vision offered in this article would be one way to conceptualize how new monies and all the many reform ideas-about rigorous content standards; diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; social-emotional learning; culturally sustaining pedagogy; and equitable assessment practices-could be coherently aligned and mutually supportive. If not this particular vision, then the important thing is that a coherent plan be devised that is grounded in what research on learning has taught us about equity.

Lorrie A. Shepard, distinguished professor and dean emerita of the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder, has been researching assessment and working with educators to enhance student learning for 50 years. She has served as president of the National Council on Measurement in Education, the National Academy of Education, and the American Educational Research Association.

*For a more complete explanation of the dominant testing ideas of the last 50 years, please see this presentation I gave on April 21, 2021. ( return to article)

†For an in-depth discussion of the connections between race, opportunity, and well-being, see "Healing a Poisoned World" in the Fall 2020 issue of AFT Health Care. ( return to article)

‡For details on culturally sustaining practices that reinforce the ambitious teaching I describe in this article, see "Liberatory Education: Integrating the Science of Learning and Culturally Responsive Practice" in the Summer 2021 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

§To learn about bidialectism, or speaking more than one variety of English, see "Teaching Reading to African American Children" in the Summer 2021 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

**Although various lists of effective teaching practices have been derived without a theoretical foundation, theory is important for continuing to improve; it aims to explain why certain practices work, helps us think about improvements when initial efforts fall short, and provides a model of how all the pieces fit together. ( return to article)

††While this discussion draws from the Ambitious Science Teaching book, there is also a companion website with excellent, free resources. ( return to article)

‡‡This is one positive feature of some recently developed standards, including the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. ( return to article)

§§While multiple modes are beneficial, this should not be confused with learning styles. For details, see "Ask the Cognitive Scientist: Does Tailoring Instruction to 'Learning Styles' Help Students Learn?" in the Summer 2018 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

***This detailed resource, which also addresses what state leaders and teacher educators should do, is available for free here. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. US Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Testing in American Schools: Asking the Right Questions (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1992).
2. T. Dee and B. Jacob, "The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Student Achievement," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 30, no. 3 (2011): 418-46.
3. National Research Council, Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2011).
4. L. A. Shepard, "The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture," Educational Researcher 29, no. 7 (2000): 4-14.
5. L. A. Shepard, "Classroom Assessment to Support Teaching and Learning," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 683 (2019): 183-200.
6. L. B. Resnick and D. P. Resnick, "Assessing the Thinking Curriculum: New Tools for Education Reform," in Changing Assessments: Alternative Views of Aptitude, Achievement, and Instruction, ed. B. R. Gifford and M. C. O'Connor (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1992), 37-75.
7. National Research Council, Testing, Teaching, and Learning: A Guide for States and School Districts (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1999).
8. L. A. Shepard, "Formative Assessment: Caveat Emptor," in The Future of Assessment: Shaping Teaching and Learning, ed. C. A. Dwyer (New York: Lawrence Earlbaum, 2008), 279-303.
9. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2018).
10. L. A. Shepard, W. R. Penuel, and J. W. Pellegrino, "Using Learning and Motivation Theories to Coherently Link Formative Assessment, Grading Practices, and Large-Scale Assessment," Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 37, no. 1 (2018): 21-34.
11. L. A. Shepard et al., Classroom Assessment Principles to Support Teaching and Learning (Boulder, CO: Center for Assessment, Design, Research and Evaluation, University of Colorado Boulder, 2020).
12. M. Windschitl, J. Thompson, and M. Braaten, Ambitious Science Teaching (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2018).
13. P. Cobb et al., Systems for Instructional Improvement: Creating Coherence from the Classroom to the District Office (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2018).
14. L. Moll et al., "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using A Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms," Theory into Practice 31, no. 2 (1992): 132-41.
15. G. Ladson-Billings, "Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy," American Educational Research Journal 32, no. 3 (1995): 465-91.
16. Ladson-Billings, "Toward a Theory."
17. S. Michaels, C. O'Connor, and L. B. Resnick, "Deliberative Discourse Idealized and Realized: Accountable Talk in the Classroom and in Civic Life," Studies in Philosophy and Education 27 (2008): 284-97.
18. Cobb et al., Systems for Instructional Improvement, 49.
19. H. Andrade and A. Valtcheva, "Promoting Learning and Achievement Through Self-Assessment," Theory into Practice 48, no. 1 (2009): 12-19.
20. P. Black et al., "Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom," Phi Delta Kappan 86, no. 1 (2004): 8-21.
21. Ladson-Billings, "Toward a Theory."
22. National Research Council, How People Learn II, 133.
23. National Research Council, How People Learn II, 133.
24. A. N. Kluger and A. DeNisi, "The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory," Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 2 (1996): 254-84.
25. National Research Council, How People Learn II, 155.
26. Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten, Ambitious Science Teaching, 66-67.
27. J. H. McMillan, "Secondary Teachers' Classroom Assessment and Grading Practices," Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 20, no. 1 (2001): 20-32.
28. E. L. Deci, R. Koestner, and R. M. Ryan, "A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation," Psychological Bulletin 125 (1999): 627-68.

[Illustrations by Angela Hsieh]

American Educator, Fall 2021

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Ambitious Teaching and Equitable Assessment

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Claims that testing will serve equity very often aren't true. That's my conclusion from 50 years of studying the impact of high-stakes standardized assessments. Yes, I should have retired years ago. But I feel compelled to call attention to how seemingly well-intentioned efforts to increase student achievement actually diminish student learning-and, more importantly, to offer an alternative vision of assessment so integrated with instruction that it actually furthers learning.

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John Hattie writes that the secret to great teaching lies in evaluative thinking-it's less about what teachers do and more about how they think about what they do.

The most critical teacher influences relate to their having high expectations for all students, not labeling students, seeing differentiation as allowing for different paths and different times for all to attain the success criteria, being high in verbal ability (especially in their early years of teaching), being seen by students as highly credible influences on their learning and achievement, having high levels of clarity such that student all know what they are learning and why they are learning, and knowing their progress in their learning. Finally, the greatest influences are when teachers work together to evaluate their beliefs and evidence of impact, seek critique and alternative explanations of their impact, and use microteaching to collectively review this impact on students.

While there are no metas on the nature of thinking used by teachers, the claim is that there are particular ways of thinking that demarcate the more from lesser effective teachers. We call this evaluative thinking (Rickards et al., 2021). As Scriven (1991) noted, the core evaluative thinking skills are critical thinking, reasoning, and understanding others (how they think, reason, judge, interact). In education, this evaluative thinking is focused on maximizing our impact on the learning lives of the students, which thence includes making classrooms inviting places to learn, developing a climate of fairness, developing respect for self and others, and ensuring the focus is on improvement in learning and student character (see Hattie & Larsen, 2020). We identified five core evaluative thinking skills:

1. Evaluative thinking involves invoking reasoning and critical thinking in valuing evidence, leading to where-to-next recommendations.

2. Evaluative thinking involves addressing the fidelity of implementation, continually checking for unintended consequences, and allowing for adaptations to maximize the value of the outcomes.

3. The focus of evaluative thinking is specific to the major decisions each profession aims to make: for teachers, it is maximizing the impact on the learning lives of students.

4. Evaluative thinking involves investigating potential biases and confounding factors that may lead to false conclusions.

5. Evaluative thinking relates to understanding others' points of view, leading to judgments of value or worth.

Thus, educators with high levels of evaluative thinking have greater pattern recognition, are more adept at checking biases and constraints, are more able to monitor their and others' (e.g., their peers and students) judgments, and are more likely to seek alternative actions. As a result, they can be slower to come to problem representations and conclusions, try to see the world through other eyes, check back with the problem statement more regularly, and are focused on becoming a learning expert.

Every year, a student engages in a huge gamble as to who is at the front of their class-will it be a teacher who has a major positive influence or a teacher who has a less-than-average although positive influence? Will it be a teacher who engages in evaluative thinking or one who wants to cover the curriculum? The mantra is that every student should have a great teacher by design, not by chance. A great teacher is not defined by the teaching methods they use, their personality, their initial teacher education program, or necessarily their subject matter knowledge.

Instead, a great teacher is determined by their impact on all students, engaging in both knowing-that and knowing-how notions in lessons, and ensuring and knowing that all are gaining more than a year's growth for a year's input. We know quality teachers more by how they think and seek critique about their impact on students than by what they do and know.

Teachers' initial teacher training programs have little impact on how well teachers influence their students' achievement. Maybe subsequent effects (e.g., the experience of the first classroom years) wash out this earlier training. The low quantity and quality of evidence of teacher training should be a major embarrassment for these institutions, who constantly ask for more years, more resources, and more influence. Teacher education may be more successful if it places more emphasis on learning and teaching strategies; developing teachers' conceptions of teaching as an evidence-based profession (learning from errors as much as from successes); creating an appraisal system that involves a high level of trust and dependence on observed or videotaped reflection/evaluation of practice; and providing beginning teachers with a range of different teaching methods to use when current ones do not work. In addition, it may be more successful if it reintroduced microskills teaching methods, which have demonstrably positive effects on new teachers; developed teachers' understanding of different ways to teach surface, deep, and conceptual knowledge; demonstrated how teachers could build positive relationships with all students; and showed how evaluation and assessment of students provide effective feedback to teachers about how well they are teaching, who they have not taught so well, and where they need to reteach.

One way forward is to ask teacher education programs to articulate a set of graduating standards and then evaluate the nature and quality of evidence that all students meet these standards. Suppose employers and independent educationalists sit with the education program academics in making these decisions. In that case, there is a higher likelihood that these programs will improve to concentrate on training new teachers to affect students' learning.

It is difficult to find evidence that subject matter knowledge is important. This is a conundrum. The claim is that those with high levels of subject matter knowledge are more optimally placed to understand the content, the likely errors and misconceptions, and the optimal progressions of surface and deep learning in that content. Such teachers are better placed to provide feedback as students struggle and help move them from their current understanding to deeper and more richly constructed views of the content. It would be expected that students are more likely to become passionate about and enjoy the subject as they master the content, as opposed to those students who learn in a minimax fashion to gain knowledge and facts to pass the test, complete the assignment, and move on to whatever is the next content prescribed for them. But the evidence is lacking for these claims. We may need to ask what minimum subject matter knowledge is needed to be an accomplished teacher and how we can optimize the teaching strategies of those teachers with greater subject matter knowledge. The hunch is that there needs to be alignment between the higher levels of content knowledge and the proportion of surface and deep learning. It is likely that where surface dominates the teaching methods, then subject matter knowledge matters little.

So it is teacher beliefs more than the methods or content that matter. It is less about what teachers do and more about how teachers think about what they do. Teachers walk into a classroom with conceptions of teaching, learning, curricula, assessment, and their students (Brown, 2011 ; Witter, 2021). We need to understand these conceptions better, as it seems they are powerful moderators on the success of these teachers. Low expectations of the students' success are a self-fulfilling prophecy. It appears that expectations are less mediated by between-student attributes (gender, race, physical attractiveness) than by whether they are held (high or low) for all students. How to invoke high expectations seems critical, and this may require having more in-school discussion of appropriate benchmarks across grades and seeing evidence of performance before starting the class or year (Nuthall, 2007, shows half of all material taught in any class is already known by the stu-dents); so much of the early months of the year involves trial and error, as teachers find out proficiencies of students-information which could have more readily been garnered by reviewing student records and having a discussion with previous teachers.

The greatest single issue facing the further enhancement of students is the need for teachers to have common conceptions of progress and standards. Moderating standards and expectations across teachers (and schools) is essential to student growth. When a student moves from one teacher to another, there is no guarantee that they will experience increasingly challenging tasks, have a teacher with high expectations of how to progress up the curricula, work with a teacher who will grow the student from where they are as opposed to where the teacher believes they should be at the start of the year, and experience a teacher with high levels of evaluative thinking.

My colleague Russell Bishop (2019) moves around classes asking students, "Does your teacher like you?" and so many ethnic minority students (in New Zealand) say no, but the white students say yes. When teachers are shown the results of surveys, they are often astonished-primarily because they assumed that the relations were positive, looked for cues that all was well, and rarely saw the classroom through the eyes of the students. The powerful effect of Bishop's work is that, after seeing these results, the teachers were quick to change their practices. Professional learning that questions assumptions and the teacher's theories of practice can be very effective.

The power of positive teacher-student relationships is critical for learning to occur. This relationship involves showing students that the teacher cares for their learning as a student and can "see their perspective, communicate it back to them so that they have valuable feedback to self-assess, feel safe, and learn to understand others and the content with the same interest and concern" (*Cornelius-White, 2007, p. 123). Then the powers of developing a warmer socioemotional climate in the classroom and fostering effort and, thus, engagement for all students are invoked. This requires teachers to enter the classroom with certain conceptions about progress, relationships, and students. It requires them to believe that their role is that of a change agent-that all students can learn and progress, that achievement for all is changeable and not fixed, and that demonstrating to all students that they care about their learning is both powerful and effective.

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John Hattie writes that the secret to great teaching lies in evaluative thinking-it's less about what teachers do and more about how they think about what they do.

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Three Key Questions on Measuring Learning

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Three Key Questions on Measuring Learning

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Vol. 75

No. 5

Abstract

What Matters in a Contemporary Education?

Knowledge

Basic Skills

Understanding

Long-Term Transfer

How Should We Assess the Things That Matter?

How Might Assessments Serve Learning?

Measuring What We Value

To gauge different types of learning, we need a broader collection of measures, with a greater emphasis on authentic, performance-basedprojects.

Abstract

What Matters in a Contemporary Education?

Knowledge

Basic Skills

Understanding

Long-Term Transfer

How Should We Assess the Things That Matter?

How Might Assessments Serve Learning?

Measuring What We Value

Educators, policy makers, parents, and others interested in improving the way we measure learning in today's schools need to examine three essential questions: 1) What really matters in a contemporary education? 2) How should we assess those things that matter? 3) How might our assessments enhance learning that matters, not just measure it?

What Matters in a Contemporary Education?

Any consideration of educational measurement must begin with the desired outcomes to be measured. In our work on the Understanding by Design® framework, the late Grant Wiggins and I described four key types of educational goals-knowledge, basic skills, conceptual understanding, and long-term transfer goals. All of them are essential to a successful education in the 21st century (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011). While these goals are interrelated, their distinctions are important because each type requires different approaches to both teaching and assessment. Let's look at each in turn.

Knowledge

Knowledge goals specify what students should know-factual information (state capitals, multiplication tables), vocabulary terms, and basic concepts (climate, balance). The attainment of knowledge goals can be best gauged through objective test or quiz items and teacher questioning.

Basic Skills

Skill goals state what students should be able to do. Every subject area contains basic skills (addition, handwriting, drawing, dribbling a basketball) that are essential to building competency and mastery. Teachers can assess student proficiency in a particular skill through direct observation of a performance or by examination of an end product that required use of the skill. Unlike with assessments of knowledge, for which there is usually a single, "correct" answer, skill performances can be best tracked along a continuum of proficiency levels from novice to expert.

Understanding

Understanding goals refer to students' grasp of conceptual "big ideas." Such ideas are inherently abstract. They may be in the form of concepts (patriotism), principles (F=ma), themes (friendship), issues (government regulations), or processes (problem solving). Understanding in this context generally cannot be assessed through multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank test items. Instead, students need to provide explanations, justify conclusions, and support answers with evidence. As with a doctoral dissertation, there is a need for the defense, not just the answer.

Long-Term Transfer

Long-term transfer goals refer to students' capacity to apply what they've learned to a new situation or different context. Transfer goals are process oriented; they specify what we want students to be able to do with their learning in the long run when confronted by new opportunities and challenges. They tend to be reflected in the anchor standards or framework practices in official academic standards, but they are often transdisciplinary in nature (encompassing complex skills like critical thinking and collaboration, or developmental Habits of Mind such as persistence and self-regulation).

Transfer abilities-or qualities inherent in them-are also increasingly valued in the 21st century workplace, in a way that they haven't needed to be in the past (see fig. 1) (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2016; Darling-Hammond & Adamson, 2013). Indeed, it's not too much to say that the future belongs to those who can apply their learning effectively in new situations.

Transfer abilities can best be measured through authentic, performance-based tasks, with well-developed rubrics for evaluation.

How Should We Assess the Things That Matter?

Assessment is a process by which we make inferences about what students know, understand, and can do. To allow valid inferences to be drawn from the results, an assessment must align with, and provide an appropriate measure of, a given goal. Moreover, because all forms of assessment are susceptible to measurement error, our inferences are more dependable when we consider multiple sources of evidence.

Given that there are different types of learning goals, we need an associated variety of assessment types to gather valid evidence of learning. Think of assessment as analogous to photography. Like the results on a test, a picture can be informative; however, no single photo can provide a complete portrayal of a situation. To continue the analogy, what we need is a photo album of evidence on student learning, not a snapshot-a collection of multiple measures, appropriately aligned to different types of learning outcomes that matter.

This raises a vital question concerning the alignment between assessments and educational goals: Are we currently assessing everything that matters, or only those things that are easiest to test and grade? With respect to large-scale, standardized assessments, the answer is fairly obvious. For example, virtually all current standards in English language arts include listening and speaking skills, which are generally acknowledged as the foundations of literacy. Yet those skills are rarely, if ever, assessed on standardized tests. Similarly, most standardized tests have limited capacity to assess transfer goals, or related complex skills like scientific investigation, historical inquiry, research, argumentation, and creative thinking.

Now for a related question: If some outcomes that matter are slipping through the cracks of standardized testing, are we doing a better job of measuring all valued outcomes through classroom assessments? Studies of classroom assessments raise doubts (Frey & Schmidt, 2010). For one study, a district collected classroom assessments from all K-12 teachers in all subjects during a six-week period (Gibble, 2000). Of the total of 664 assessments collected, 20 percent were identified via a random sample for analysis by a committee of teachers and administrators. Here were two of their findings: 1) The majority of the assessments (75.5 percent) measured the lowest levels of cognition (levels I and II on Bloom's Taxonomy), and 2) assessment items were predominantly (80 percent) in multiple-choice, true-false, matching, or fill-in-the-blank formats.

Although this study is dated, its findings are consistent with patterns that I have observed more recently as "test prep" pressures result in classroom assessments that mimic the formats (generally selected- and brief-constructed-response) of state and national accountability tests (McTighe, 2017). Ask yourself: What would the results be if you replicated this study in your school or district today? Are any of your valued outcomes not being properly assessed?

Given the limitations of large-scale testing and the status of classroom assessments, what changes do we need to make to ensure that we are assessing outcomes that matter? What assessment photos do we need for a composite album of evidence of learning? Traditional types of assessments offer sufficient ways of measuring students' knowledge and basic skills. For example, we can use multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank test items to gauge students' knowledge of historical or scientific facts. However, to properly assess conceptual understanding, long-term transfer, and other complex skills, we need greater use of authentic, performance-based measures in which students are asked to: 1) apply their learning to a new situation, and 2) explain their thinking, show their reasoning, or justify their conclusion.

Authentic tasks are like the game in athletics. While the players have to possess knowledge (the rules) and specific skills (dribbling), playing the game also involves conceptual understanding (game strategies) and transfer (using skills and strategies to advantage in particular game situations). Assessing what matters must include assessing performance in a "game" in addition to tests of requisite knowledge and skills.

Another dimension of making sure we are assessing things that matter shifts the spotlight from educators to students. A photo album approach to assessment can enable learners to contribute their own personal "photos" as evidence of their accomplishments. They can be invited to propose ways of showing that they are meeting academic standards. Students and parents can be asked to contribute evidence of creativity, persistence, or community contributions accomplished outside of the school day. After all, isn't that what transfer means? Maintaining high standards does not require standardization of all measures.

Involving learners in creating the assessment portfolio builds students' capacity for self-assessment. The ability to honestly appraise one's performance against established criteria and performance standards is a life-long skill and a sign of intellectual maturity.

How Might Assessments Serve Learning?

Which leads us to our third big question: How might assessments become more integral to learning, as opposed to just evaluating it? To say that assessment should serve learning is a nice slogan, but what exactly does it mean? Over the years, Wiggins and I conducted a workshop exercise to explore this question. We asked participants to think of a highly effective learning experience and then identify ways in which the associated assessments contributed to that learning. The responses to the exercise have always been remarkably similar across groups and provide a veritable blueprint to guide teachers' classroom assessment practices. Figure 2 offers a representative list of assessment characteristics that we found contribute to deep and effective learning (McTighe, 2013).

This list explains why I am an advocate for expanding the use of authentic tasks and projects in schools. Such assessments offer more than just another way to measure student achievement. Like the game in sports or the play in theater, authentic performances are motivating to learners. They give relevance and purpose to learning, and they underscore the need for practice.

Authentic tasks also influence teaching. Coaches recognize that their job is not to simply "cover" the playbook play-by-play and teach individual skills. They understand that knowledge and skills are in service of larger ends, and that their role is to prepare players for authentic transfer performance in the game. Performance-oriented teachers in all subjects understand this role as well.

Measuring What We Value

How we answer the three questions posed in this article has significant consequences for educational measurement, instructional practices, and ultimately, student learning. The outcomes we choose to measure, as well as the methods of assessment we use, signal to students, parents, and others what matters. If we claim to value critical thinking, creative problem solving, oral communication, and the ability to work effectively in groups, then we need to teach and assess those outcomes. Otherwise, students will quickly get the message that these goals don't really count. If our assessments consist primarily of "single-correct answer" items, we validate rote learning and formulaic responses.

While there is still a place for traditional measures of knowledge and skills in an assessment photo album, greater attention must be given to gathering evidence of authentic student work through performance tasks and projects. By collecting authentic student work samples in digital portfolios, students can compile a literal "album" of growth and evidence of genuine achievements over their school career. As Wiggins (1998) opined many years ago, "Students should graduate with a resume of accomplishments, not just a transcript of 'seat time' and a GPA." It's time to act on this idea.

Of course, form follows function. The integration of multiple assessment measures, including expanded use of authentic, performance-based assessments, requires major shifts in school structures, including in grading practices and scheduling. Teachers will need time to collaborate on assessment task design, within and across subject areas (especially because many authentic tasks can be naturally interdisciplinary). To make the most of performance-based assessments, teachers will also need built-in opportunities to meet in professional learning communities to examine the student work resulting from those tasks (McTighe, 2008). These activities cannot be properly accomplished during a 30-minute team planning block or during an after-school meeting.

But we know the importance of identifying learning goals that matter, of determining ways to assess all of our valued outcomes, and of designing assessments in ways that can be integrated with learning. What's needed in most schools is the will and a systematic plan to do so.

References

Frey, B. B., & Schmitt, V. L. (2010). Teachers' classroom assessment practices. Middle Grades Research Journal, 5(3), 107-117.

McTighe, J. (2008, May). Making the most of professional learning communities. The Learning Principal, 3(8), 1, 4-7.

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Three Key Questions on Measuring Learning

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To gauge different types of learning, we need a broader collection of measures, with a greater emphasis on authentic, performance-basedprojects.

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How Classroom Assessments Improve Learning

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How Classroom Assessments Improve Learning