I’m Don Klinger, Professor of Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Educational jurisdictions continue to search for educational policies and practices that will enable teachers to better support students’ learning and achievement. Along with efforts to modify educational curriculum and standards, a critical area of focus has been on assessment practices within the classroom. With its roots in formative program evaluation, formative assessment is considered a critical tool in the efforts to improve students’ learning. Current conceptions of formative assessment have acknowledged that teachers and students are critical users and beneficiaries of formative assessment. Teachers can use this information to guide and modify instruction, set new instructional goals, and meet individual students’ needs. Students can use this information to guide their own learning and identify learning strengths and weaknesses, and these in term help to enhance self regulation, cognitive development, and metacognition.
As a result of these promising findings and supporting theoretical frameworks, prek-12 educational research, standards of practice, and educational policies increasingly work to implement formative assessment practices that enable both teachers and students to be “users” of classroom assessment. And this is where the challenges begin. Our work with suggests that while teachers are able to implement formative assessment practices, these practices are often relatively simplistic and prescriptive. Teachers often struggle to use the assessment information to direct their instruction. Perhaps more importantly, students continue to largely be passive receivers of assessment information. They are not given sufficient skills and knowledge to use formative assessment to guide their own learning.
Yet, we are making inroads, and these successful efforts are based on the principles of “utility” found within program evaluation. The new Classroom Assessment Standards for preK-12 Teachers, (Joint Committee on Standards for Education Evaluation, JCSEE), contain 16 Standards for sound and effective classroom assessment under three headings: Foundations, Use, and Quality. The five Use standards have certainly arisen from the “Utility” standards found in the Program Evaluation Standards. Admittedly, the language and format has been modified to fit the preK-12 education context. As one example, central to the use of formative assessment is Effective Feedback (Standards U2): Classroom assessment practices should provide timely and useful feedback to improve student learning. We now work directly with teachers to give them the skills to provide descriptive feedback that is focused on modifying and shifting students’ learning. At the same time, we are helping to train teachers to provide students these same skills in order to support effective peer-and self-assessment. It seems those of us in classroom assessment research continue to follow the lead of program evaluation. It is now about “Use.”
Rad Resource: The Classroom Assessment Standards for preK-12 Teachers available as an ebook from Amazon.
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Dear Sheila and Don,
I’m a graduate student at Queen’s University, but also a Teacher Consultant for Social Emotional Learning in my school district. As one of my projects this year, I’m facilitating an assessment project and growth plan in Social Emotional Learning at one of the elementary schools in my portfolio.
I wonder why I have never heard of this resource from JCSEE! What a great resource – everything I have learned about good assessment practices is tightly and concisely packaged within the document. While I will assume, just as with The Program Evaluation Standards, The Classroom Assessment Standards are to be used holistically, rather than teased down to the individual standard. However, after downloading the book from Kindle, I was drawn into the Quality Standards – particularly:
Q3: Unbiased and Fair Assessment: Classroom assessment practices and subsequent decisions should not be influenced by factors unrelated to the intended purposes of the assessment
Q3 goes on to describe how bias in assessment can occur. It defines the various factors of Bias as:
Cultural and language differences
Physical, mental and developmental challenges
Gender
Appearance
Socioeconomic status
Peer groups
As well as factors embedded in classroom assessment itself:
Reading difficulty where reading is not the focus
Lack of familiarity with the assessment format
For the duration of my career, I have worked with students who all may have experienced the biases as listed above in Q3. And my question to you is
So how do we reduce bias and create equitable assessment practices?
The answer may lie within the pages of “Street Data”
Shane Safir and Jamila Duggan’s book, “Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity Pedagogy and School Transformation” offers advice on this very question. They say to shift the focus from solely imposing curriculum standards and meet the students where they are at – learning about their lived experiences.
They identify three levels of data – satellite, map and street.
Satellite – the larger scale data within a school – for example the test scores of an entire grade or the number of detentions given in a year
Map – individual classroom based assessments, PM Benchmarks or rubrics
Street – qualitative assessment of experiences and perspectives compiled through anecdotes, interviews and conversations.
It’s in the street data that we find equity in our assessment practices. It is the information from our students and families that can help teachers reduce their bias, and create better assessment practices based on the needs and the experiences of the children they teach.
The first bulleted guideline in Q3 is “Identify personal values or opinions that may impact the classroom assessment results of individual students or subgroups of students.”
Perhaps using approaches suggested in “Street Data” may lead to more equitable classroom assessment practices. What do you think?
Klinger, D.A., McDivitt, P.R.,Howard, B.B., Munoz, M.A., Rogers, W.T., & Wylie, E.C. (2015). The Classroom Assessment Standards for PreK-12 Teachers. Kindle Direct Press
Robinson, S. 2016. CREATE week: Don Klinger on classroom assessment use. AEA365.
https://aea365.org/blog/create-week-don-klinger-on-classroom-assessment-use/
Safir, S & Dugan, J. 2021. Street data: a next-generation model for equity, pedagogy and school transformation. SAGE Publications
Hi Don and Sajeni,
I am a master’s student at Queen’s University but primarily, I am a high school principal. I have begun working closely with teachers to strengthen their assessment tools and was provided with the Classroom Assessment Standards for preK-12 Teachers, (Joint Committee on Standards for Education Evaluation, JCSEE) in one of my university courses. I agree that this document is set up in a way that works well for teachers in preK to grade 12, with language that is clear and concise.
In my role at my school, I have chosen to begin my focus on Foundations as the starting point in guiding teachers in reflecting on their assessment strategies. It is important that “students…[are] meaningfully engaged in the assessment process and …. the assessment evidence [is used] to enhance their learning.” This allows students to use their assessment as learning. It appears that, among more seasoned teachers, that time hasn’t been allocated to reflecting on their existing assessment tools to ensure that they are supporting student learning in their current classroom. The same assessment tool and method used 10 years ago may no longer provide the same result as originally intended. Effective feedback can be timely, but without it “having a clear purpose that supports teaching and learning,” it will not have the intended result.
Following your post, Sajeni posted a comment and in her reflection she noted how students don’t take formative assessment seriously. I think this point is important as high schools, especially, haven’t continued with the intentional practice of focusing on assessment for learning that is entrenched in the elementary setting. The need to provide grades, especially for post-secondary applications, has shifted the primary focus of assessment in the classroom to summative assessment practices that don’t necessarily “engage students in self-assessment to reflect on their own learning” as stated in F1 under Foundations. Students’ meaningful engagement with their learning needs to continue throughout their schooling. This opens a whole other conversation!
Thanks everyone for their time in posting and reflecting!
Hello Don Klinger,
Your article piqued my interest because I am currently doing pedagogical research on assessments and evaluations at McMaster University. More specifically, I want to use assessments as a learning tool rather than using assessments solely for evaluation purposes.
I agree that formative assessments are great learning opportunities, but like you stated I often find that students don’t take formative assessments seriously. University students are reluctant to do work if they are not for grades and when they complete formative assessment they don’t put in their full effort. In fact, most of the time instructors are not able use the information gathered from the formative assessments to redirect instruction. How can these challenges be overcome? How can we ensure that formative assessments are used by students and instructors?
I am currently taking a course at Queens University called Program Inquiry and Evaluation. Learning about the process of program evaluation has made me realize that it can be scaled down to evaluate learning strategies used in the classroom. It makes sense that the use standards for sound and effective classroom assessment have been adopted from the utility standards for program evaluations. How are teachers trained to give them the skills to provide descriptive feedback that is focused on modifying and shifting students’ learning? How do teachers transfer these skills to students to support effective peer-and self-assessment?
Thank you for sharing and I would love to hear more about your research.