My Assessment Struggle

This is going to be a very raw and heartfelt account of my struggle with assessment. As a teacher with 20+ years of experience, I am comfortable stating that I am uncomfortable with my assessment practices. 

For a very long time, I thought that testing was a true indicator of whether or not a student knew what I wanted them to know. Sure, there were all sorts of other assignments and projects, but the “real” indicator of a student’s knowledge was the all-powerful unit test or exam – that’s when you really found out whether or not a student knew what they needed to know! For years, in my history classes, I used to pride myself on running Jeopardy review sessions prior to unit tests and beam with pride when my students stayed late prior to exams to have a pizza party study session using my exam review sheet of significant dates, terms and events. But that’s all changed. 

How did my thinking on assessment change

Philosophically, I now understand that there are better ways of knowing or measuring what a student knows. Four major changes: 

1) Knowledge 

As a social studies educator, I view history as an interpretation of the past. That does not mean that there is no truth, that just means that there are varied and valid interpretations of the past. Students need to learn to evaluate evidence and differing perspectives in order to consider their own interpretations. Whereas my previous form of assessment required students accept a single interpretation of the past, I now recognize that I should assess how students can interpret and employ evidence. I should assess on historical thinking rather than historical memorization. 

2) Understanding

The world is changing, and technological advances mean that we don’t necessarily need to rely on rote memorization anymore–if we ever did. After all, memorization is not an indicator of understanding. Parroting memorized text is not understanding. If someone can forget something in a week, they never really understood it. The ability to use historical details, to place them in connection with other events, and to recognize their impact on the current context, is understanding. 

3) Skills

Previously, all I could think about in my practice was covering content. I needed to make sure I covered every last detail of the curriculum and that students knew every name, date, place, and event. Now, however, by focusing on developing skills like the historical thinking concepts, critical thinking skills, and the ability to have constructive and democratic dialogue. I enable my students to better access the content but also take with them, not only the big picture thinking that is so important, but skills that they can apply to other contexts going forward. After all, the curriculum includes knowledge, values and skills. Covering only knowledge/content only is privileging one element of the curriculum, and ignores that you can learn content while engaging skills. 

4) Student Learning

I once thought that having students cram for quizzes, tests, and exams was beneficial, that rote memorization was equivalent to good scholarship. I now vociferously disagree with that ideal. Such methods are disingenuous and not indicative of student learning. The stress caused by such high stakes testing can be harmful to a student’s well-being, and does not create the conditions for students to demonstrate their learning. The only thing high stakes summative assessments measure is a student’s ability to perform under pressure–but that is not the skill I am teaching, so it would be unfair to assess that. But the question remains, how do we best assess our students’ learning? 

How do I assess within this new philosophy?

Since piloting the Global Issues: Citizenship and Sustainability curriculum in 2011, I have varied my assessment practices greatly. As a course based in inquiry, action, and 10 enduring understandings (EU), I felt there was a lot of leeway as to what assessment methods to choose. But still, I fell back on older methods, quizzes and tests and projects with detailed rubrics. There was a disconnect between how I viewed legitimate assessment, and my classroom assessment practice. My assessment practice still privileged particular skills (writing) and did not align with the curriculum (which encourages student action, dialogue and deliberation) or my own beliefs about assessment (it privileged product over process and learning). Here is a fictionalized example of two types students in the same class:

At the end of the semester it was Student B that received the better mark, but philosophically I felt like Student A demonstrated a higher level of understanding of the course content (enduring understandings) and skills (particularly in the area of dialogue and deliberation). This caused me to reflect on my assessment practices and led me to the conclusion that those practices were not aligned with my philosophy or the curriculum.

Perhaps serendipitously, at this time my administration was encouraging staff members to explore outcomes-based assessment and evaluation. I saw this as my chance to try something different and so I joined an in-school professional learning community where we met to discuss moving our assessment practices to outcomes-based. The move to outcomes-based assessment in the Global Issues course felt freeing: gone was the reliance on testing and performance outcomes unrelated to the curriculum’s Enduring Understandings. For all the course work the students did they would receive a copy of the 10 EUs and they would have to relate their coursework to those understandings. My assessment was based on using a five-point scale to measure how well the students were relating their work to the EUs and I had students do reflections on their major projects using the same five-point scale and 10 EUs. It seems to have worked. I think that student assessment (and, yes, marks) are a better reflection of how well they understand the EUs.

However, this isn’t a happily ever after, yet.

What I’m still pondering.

Firstly, due to the nature of the Global Issues course, a lot of time is spent on discussing current affairs. I believe that this is absolutely critical in this class and have done graduate research confirming the importance of it. My issue, however, is the question of how do you assess dialogue in class? Many students are able to clearly demonstrate their comprehension of the EUs while participating in classroom dialogue, but how is that reflected in their “mark’? Often, the fall-back is having the students write a reflection about that dialogue, but frequently that is exactly where a student might struggle; they are often better able to communicate this understanding verbally than through their written work. Besides, the skill we are working on is dialogue and deliberation. In the same way I assess students’ engagement with historical thinking, I should also be assessing their engagement in dialogue. Doing otherwise would privilege knowledge over skill, not align with my pedagogy (which is anchored to dialogue), and would assess students on a skill that I had not centered in my teaching, written reflections. 

Secondly, as teachers, we are required to make professional judgments about our student work all the time, but those judgments are made under the microscope of a system that emphasizes neoliberal models of success that are expected by parents, and often by the students themselves. I can make judgment calls about how well a student knows course content, but if I’m not able to demonstrate how I made that judgment call in a way that satisfies components of a neoliberal system, I am not doing enough (I’m reminded of an anecdote from a colleague who once told me, “No one questions a paramedic’s judgment when they arrive at the scene of an emergency, they trust that the person knows what they are doing, so why don’t people trust a teacher’s judgment calls?”). To give this a practical take, if I can tell that a student understands course content through dialogue, shouldn’t that be enough? Why is it necessary to test that knowledge or force students to write it on paper?

Thirdly, old habits die hard. Even if I philosophically believe in outcomes-based assessment, what happens when students work just isn’t very good? Going back to my Student A and Student B examples, I knew Student A knew the content of the course, but I was often left disappointed with their work (notice that neoliberal focus on product and dismissal of the work she had done in the process of dialogue). Her inquiry projects could be much more robust and her action project, while good in principle, was never really seen to its conclusion. How much value do we place on quality of work in an outcomes-based assessment system? How do our ideas of quality often rely on ‘effort’ and ‘aesthetic’ over understanding? Nowhere in the does it talk about quality of work, so how do I reconcile this?

Finally, there is a definite frustration with giving a mark at all. So often at the mid-term or end of semester reporting period, I’m left looking at my marks and wondering what it all means. What’s the difference between a student with an 88% and a 92% other than, in the neoliberal world we live in, the fact that the student with the 92% might get a better scholarship to a university that prioritizes marks over substance (and ignores the inherent subjectivity of all forms of assessment and the cultural and economic capital of students).

At the end of the day, there is no perfect way to assess and I know that I will continue to struggle with my assessment practices. But at the same time, I think that perhaps that’s part of the point. The fact that I’m willing to struggle with how best to assess my students and open to radical change might be the most important part of all of this. People often say, if you are not angry, you are not paying attention. Maybe, if we are not questioning our assessment, we aren’t paying attention.