#360 – Assessment: Beyond Tests

In this episode, the Unpacking Education team discusses assessment, including traditional testing and options that extend beyond. The dialogue includes conversations about student performance, creation, interaction, and expression. By opening up our assessment options, we can save time, measure success more accurately, and potentially increase motivation for our students.

Students would rather talk, move around, and ask questions than sit still and be quiet. Humans are wired to construct knowledge through action.

Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID)

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• Assessment as Revelation, with Dr. Kelly Camak Niccolls (podcast episode)
• Skills for the Future: Carnegie and ETS’s Vision for the Future of Assessment, with Danielle Eisenberg (podcast episode)
• Accelerate Learning With Meaningful, Targeted Assessment (article)
• Personalize: Meeting the Needs of All Learners, with Eric Sheninger and Nicki Slaugh (podcast episode)
• Design Assessments Students Will Want to Do (article)

Considering Your Options

There is a place for traditional tests in our classrooms. They are fast, efficient, and provide data that can be quickly analyzed. Still, there are many ways to assess student learning that go beyond a paper-and-pencil test. As we design assessments, it’s important to consider how students can demonstrate what they have learned in ways that are active, authentic, and motivating. The following are a few highlights from our conversation:

• Rena: “If you have your own children or you watch our youngest learners, how are they constructing knowledge? It’s not by sitting there. . . . They’re doing. They’re moving around.”
• Winston: “A lot of my teachers really focused in on doing well on the SAT because that was my leveling stick with other kids from other places who might have chances of doing other things that I might not have.”
• Paul: Tests are “quick. They’re easy to grade . . . We need to try to keep things manageable.” Tests also provide accessible data.
• Winston: “How do I really make sure that the data is clean?”
• Rena: “In a lot of districts, they might have . . . curriculum that they’ve purchased, that they’ve piloted, that they’ve looked at, and you’re getting assessments from that.”
• Rena: “AI tools now can help us . . . around language, and we can help maybe make those questions better or more accessible for students.”
• Paul: “What level of understanding are we measuring with those test questions?”
• Winston: “What is the importance of this assessment? Is it just a quick ‘I need to know where the general sense of the classroom is,’ or is it a ‘Did I not teach this well?’”
• Winston: “Instead of having students write a paper, I had them have the option of writing a song or doing some sort of art form, and then doing a write-up of the art, and explain to me why their art piece made sense to the question that I asked.”
• Rena: We can differentiate assessment by “giving them a bit of a choice board, or a choice opportunity—same expectations but different options.”
• Rena: “One that I know kids really like is creating a ‘choose your own adventure’ story. And it also . . . forces them to think of both perspectives.”
• Paul: “The kids all created games. Then they had to write the directions for the games, and then they had to have other kids play the games without any input from them other than the directions. You knew right away if you were writing well or not . . . You had authentic feedback on how your writing was. So you had an authentic purpose. You had [an] authentic audience. You had authentic feedback.”
• Winston: “What ways are you communicating the information that students gave you so that they can alter what they’re doing next?”
• Paul: “If you give choice . . . the student can find that path where they are going to preserve their dignity and be able to do it in a way that builds them up and not tears them down. . . . We want kids to have success because success builds success.”
• Rena: “If they’re doing a Socratic Seminar, or if they’re making a video, or something else, what is the rubric? We’re still having those same standards, but then make it easy for yourself as a teacher. How can you be assessing in the moment? . . . If you’re assessing in the moment, then you don’t have to take home 190 papers to grade, so you actually can be more efficient.”
• Winston: “How do you want to show that they have taken away something valuable from the lesson you just did?”
• Paul: “All the kids made their own surveys. They all picked their own objective. They surveyed. They gathered authentic data. When they’re analyzing their own data, it matters way more than if you just give them a spreadsheet of numbers. It’s that personal connection.”
• Rena: “They’re designing food trucks and creating logos for the food truck, and then they’re creating menus, and they have [a] budget for those food trucks. . . . And you also have to think about the vendors, and the cost, and . . . what are you making . . . and then what is the standard of living. . . . It was really deep and so applicable to life and career, and kids were stoked.”
• Winston: “We want our kids to be critical thinkers, to be able to process information in the future.”
• Rena: “It doesn’t have to be large-scale projects.”
• Paul: “Reach out and find another audience in your school ecosystem.”
• Paul: “I think if we look at what motivates people, it’s not always that grade, and if we can find ways to bring in that intrinsic [motivation] and that joy that kids have for things they’re passionate about, we can really transform assessments in a lot of different ways.”
• Rena: If you can, work with another teacher, perhaps with an interdisciplinary approach.
• Winston: “Can the students write a journal article or a newspaper article about a science thing? Like, what would it be like if a student wrote the next [The] War of the Worlds about a disease that’s coming, and they did all the research about how it’s transmitted?”
• Paul: “If you’re in science class, be a scientist. When you’re in math class, be a mathematician. If you’re in history class, be a historian. Write history about something. Write the history of your family.”
• Rena: Create AI chatbots with tools like SchoolAI.
• Paul: Authenticity is key. “Authentic interest, authentic audience, authentic product, authentic process, authentic feedback—if we can build those things into our assessments, we will get an authentic assessment and a really powerfully motivating one on top of it.”
• Winston: “People only learn by doing. Let ’em do.”
• Rena: “How do we create opportunities for active learning?”