Assessment Powered Teaching

Nancy W. Sindelar

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781510700833
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Évaluation dans le domaine de l'éducation

Knowledge is power, and this book puts assessment data and instruction together in a step-by-step format. Instead of dreading the time testing takes from teaching, you can harness its power to define learning targets, build standards-based assessments; gather and use test data in the classroom, and develop data-driven teaching strategies. Assessment expert Nancy W. Sindelar provides practical tools that help teachers:
• Use formative and summative assessment results to enhance instruction
• Motivate students by providing clear learning targets
• Utilize technology to analyze students' progress
• Raise test scores
Included are testimonials from teachers, numerous data analysis examples, rubrics, and a chapter on culturally diverse schools. Designed to be adaptable, this book is a powerful resource for teachers, teacher teams, and all educators dedicated to enhancing student learning.

1

Using the Power of Assessment

Assessment of student learning is nothing new. The word assess dates back to the Medieval Latin word assidere, which means to sit by or attend (Scott Foresman, 1988), and attending to students’ learning by using a variety of assessment strategies always has been a trademark of good teaching. Assessments show us what our students know before instruction begins, whether or not our students are understanding the lesson while it is being delivered, as well as what, if anything, our students have learned from the lesson.

Effective teachers use multiple forms of assessment. In addition to tests and quizzes, we position ourselves in classrooms and labs to visually attend to all students’ learning and behavior while delivering instruction. Often we can tell whether or not students are “getting it” just by the expressions on their faces. The information we gain from the various kinds of assessments we use, be it formal tests, student discussion, or student body language, has long been the power that drives the numerous adjustments we make to the teaching and learning activities that are taking place in our classrooms.

What is new is that assessments are now being used to hold teachers and schools accountable more than ever before. What students have or have not learned is published in local newspapers, school report cards are sent home to parents on a regular basis, and schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress face serious consequences. To some extent, “testing” has become the dirty word of the education profession. Many teachers feel they are spending their days teaching to tests they didn’t author and that creativity and content are being stripped from their classrooms due to state and federally mandated tests. Clearly, under No Child Left Behind we are being asked to teach differently than we were taught and are also being held accountable for student learning.

The purpose of this book is to rekindle in teachers the power that meaningful assessment brings to the art and science of teaching and to share some tools and strategies that will afford teachers the opportunity to use assessment to enhance teaching effectiveness in an efficient and practical manner. Teachers who have embraced twenty-first century, state-of-the-art assessment practices have been recharged as teachers and have seen student learning accelerate and test scores rise. They are the assessment-powered teachers of the twenty-first century who have embraced change to become more effective and strategic in their teaching and assessment methods. Here their stories will be shared, celebrated, and hopefully replicated by the reader.

These are the steps you can take to become an assessment-powered teacher.

Step One: Become Familiar With Student Assessment Data and Learn to Use It to Enhance Your Teaching

As teachers, we are in the business of constantly assessing our students. We test, test, test! But many of us don’t take the time to actually analyze test data to understand the results of our teaching and what our students have or have not learned. Some of us don’t know how to analyze test data; others of us don’t know what to do with analyses that have been prepared for us. Too often we use test results to assign a grade and don’t go any farther. Too often unit and chapter tests signal to us as teachers and to our students that the unit is over, and it’s time to move on to new material.

Unfortunately, taking the time to look at assessment results to understand what our students have or have not learned often is forsaken due to the pressure to move on to the next chapter and keep up with the relentless pace of a packed curriculum. As a result, some students are forced to learn new material without the prerequisite skills needed for the new learning that is to take place. Other students have missed the knowledge they will be expected to have mastered later in their educational careers.

The rush to move through the curriculum is a false economy that has a negative impact on learning that multiplies over time as students who miss learning basic information fall further and further behind. As teachers, we all have been guilty of moving on when our students really weren’t ready to move on. In doing so, we placed our students in a losing situation, because they weren’t prepared for the new material that was going to be presented to them, and simultaneously we created a situation whereby our teaching became less effective. We can, however, remedy this lose-lose situation by taking action and seizing the power that comes from test analysis and using the results of test analysis to reteach when and where necessary.

The data from both classroom tests and state mandated tests can provide us with valuable information to inform our teaching and improve our students’ learning. The existence of new assessment software enables us to see the results of our teaching and the progress of our students’ learning quickly and efficiently. A variety of easy-to-use software programs are available to schools, and some are even free. These software programs score both forced-choice and rubric-graded tests, summarize data indicating which questions our students know and which they don’t know, and show us which standards and learning targets our students know and which they do not know.

Figure 1.1 shows the analyses for a portion of a classroom math test. One of the learning targets was for students to know how to solve problems involving percents and proportions. Questions 52 to 71 tested that learning target. After students completed the test, it was scanned, and a report by learning target was printed. The teacher could quickly see how the twenty-three students performed on each of the questions that measured students’ ability to solve problems involving percents and proportions. The asterisk indicates the correct answer, and it’s easy to see how students performed on each question as the percentage of students answering each choice is indicated in parentheses.

The report shows that students really didn’t have a clear understanding of the learning target. Items 61 and 64 were particularly difficult for this group of students. Only 39% of the class (nine students) selected the correct answer, B, for item 61, and only 43% of the class (ten students) selected the correct answer, D, for item 64. Perhaps items 61 and 64 are poorly worded questions, or there’s conflicting information in the text that caused almost half the class to select the same wrong answers, all possibilities for the teacher to explore and clarify with students.

Figure 1.1 Sample Item Analysis

M1173-06 Solve problems using percents and proportions.

(S6D4, S7C4b, S9A 4a, S10A 4a)

SOURCE: Created using the Assessor by Progress Education. From Using Test Data for Student Achievement: Answers to No Child Left Behind (p. 69), by N. W. Sindelar, 2006, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Copyright 2006 by Nancy W. Sindelar. Reprinted with permission.

In addition to informing instructional practice, the use of software creates ease and efficiency for teachers because tests are scored and analyzed in minutes, and hand scoring and tallying of test results, which often takes hours of teacher time, are eliminated. Though there are good reasons for hand scoring some tests, use of assessment software affords individual teachers, teacher teams, and professional learning communities (PLCs) immediate access to baseline information about what students know and what they don’t know. By getting test results quickly, teachers can begin the important work of changing curriculum and instruction, developing interventions, and providing thoughtful feedback to students.

Though modern assessment software has made it easier to score, analyze, and store student test data, data on student achievement frequently is not used to monitor student performance, even though such data are available (Rosenholtz, 1991, p. 16). Many of us still hand score tests that are written in isolation of state standards, put the grades in a grade book, and move on to the next unit.

We often do not use data from our own classroom tests because we either feel pressured to cover curriculum, don’t understand how to actually analyze the results of our tests, or both. Though schools now receive an abundance of data from state mandated tests, it is not unusual for teachers to not “own” the data from state tests because we do not believe the state has tested the true learning that has taken place in our classrooms. In many schools, teachers and administrators do not see much of a relationship between what is being taught and assessed at the local or school level and the state standards, which are assessed by state tests required by NCLB.

Yet for our students to meet or exceed state standards, a relationship between the local curriculum, instructional, and assessment practices and the state standards must be established, and data from both classroom tests and state mandated tests must be used to inform our teaching, change our curriculum, and accelerate the learning of our students. Using assessment software, we can easily use data from our classroom assessments to measure our own students’ learning and adjust our daily teaching practices to increase student learning and achievement in our classrooms with the students we know and believe in.

Data from state tests can also be used for more than simply selecting and sorting schools and students en masse. As individual teachers, we can use data from state tests to measure the effectiveness of our local curriculum and our classroom assessments to make certain that our local curriculum and assessments are aligned with standards and levels of achievement outside our individual classrooms. This comparison gives us the ability to provide assurances to parents and community members that the rigor of our local curriculum and assessments will help our students be competitive in national and world markets.

Most of us went into teaching because we loved the energy that comes from being with kids, were passionate about subjects we studied in college, and were energized by the thought that we could make a difference. For many of us NCBL has sapped the enthusiasm from all of the above, and the idea of looking at students’ test scores on federally mandated state tests seems overwhelming, irrelevant, or just plain boring.

Yet use of modern assessment software can enhance our effectiveness in all those areas we value as teachers. Use of assessment data can get kids energized about their own learning. It can provide insight into our effectiveness in teaching the subjects we love most. While the use of disaggregated test data truly can help us make a difference in helping all kids achieve at higher levels than ever before by diagnosing areas of strength and weakness for individual students as well as student subgroups.

Modern assessment software makes it easier than ever before for teachers to score, grade, and analyze students’ work. We no longer have to spend hours hand scoring tests, deciding whether an 89% is a B+ or A–, or wondering if the learning that has taken place is adequate to move on to the next unit. A report based on the data such as those in Figure 1.1 can be generated in minutes to tell us which students mastered the learning target and, if we choose, assign a grade based on our own preset scale.

With a little help from simple technology that is already in place in many schools, we can save hours of grading time and get information that will be invaluable to our teaching. Thus, the first step in becoming an assessment-powered teacher is to become familiar with analyzed student test data and learn to use it to enhance the effectiveness of our teaching.

Joy Joyce, a high school social studies teacher, states,

I began using the data generated by item analysis when teaching Advanced Placement economics in 1993. Using the data compiled after each chapter or unit test allowed me to effectively target the economic concepts that needed immediate reteaching to the class as a whole and guided the review that would be done immediately prior to the AP test. The combination of reteaching and review resulted in consistently high AP scores in every year’s test administration. (personal communication, July 2005)

Joy is just one example of a teacher who learned how technology could simplify data analysis of her own tests to enhance her teaching and her students’ learning. First, she took control of the curriculum. Then, using data analysis, took the time to understand what her students learned and what they hadn’t learned. Using this valuable information, she then retaught where necessary. As a result, her students not only learned the content she deemed important, they were highly successful on the College Board’s Advanced Placement tests.

Step Two: Develop an Efficient System for Collecting Meaningful Student Test Data

Key to Joy’s success was that her economics curriculum and her local, teacher-made assessments were aligned with the AP economics curriculum and the state standards. Was she “teaching to the test”? Definitely not. She was teaching a standards-based curriculum that was going to be tested, and she used test analysis to identify and reteach what her students didn’t know. She was not teaching specific answers to specifically anticipated test questions. Rather, she was reteaching and holding her students accountable for knowledge and analytical techniques that were part of her standards-based curriculum. Assessment analysis revealed to Joy the areas where her students were proficient and those where they were weak. Using test analysis she was able to plan instruction and reteach to promote more areas of proficiency. The alignment of her local curriculum and assessments to standards became the system that allowed her to collect meaningful data about what her students did and did not know.

While more and more schools are aligning their local curricula to state standards, it still is not at all unusual for lessons to be taught in isolation of state standards. There are districts that believe, “We hire the best [teachers] and stay out of their way.” As a result, many teachers develop their own curriculum and assessments that are not linked to national or state standards. Also, curriculum for a particular course or grade may only be tied to a textbook that may not address a particular standard.

Because the goal of a standards-based curriculum and assessment system is to improve learning by defining and measuring what students need to know and be able to do, the increase in focus changes what and how we need to teach. When standards, local assessments, and local curriculum are aligned, “teaching to the test” becomes synonymous with teaching what students need to know and be able to do. When we use a standards-based curriculum and standards-based local assessments, we are not teaching individual test items that we think might be tested, but rather we are teaching the standards, testing to see if our students understand the standards, and reteaching and providing interventions when they don’t. When our students take the state mandated tests, they do well because they know the standards we have taught and tested at the local level.

To develop an efficient system for collecting meaningful student data, it is helpful for teachers to work together—-either in grade-level or subject-area teams or with a colleague who also wants their students to achieve similar standar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1. Using the Power of Assessment
• 2. Creating a Data-Driven Instructional System
• 3. Making Data-Driven Decisions in the Classroom 37
• 4. Empowering Students With the Results of Their Learning 65
• 5. Powering Achievement in Culturally Diverse Classrooms 82
• 6. Harnessing the Power of Collective Wisdom
• Glossary of Terms
• References
• Index