MeTA musings: formative assessment

Showing posts with label formative assessment. Show all posts

When grading changes, but assessment does not

I was reading through some notes I took a few years ago...

"Indeed, at the writing of this book, no major study (that we are aware of) has demonstrated that simply grading in an standards-based manner enhances student achievement. However,...a fairly strong case can be made that student achievement will be positively affected if standards-based reporting is rooted in a clear-cut system of formative assessment" (Marzano, 2010, p. 18).

...and was again reminded that changing grading practices is only the first step in the standards-based grading shift so frequently alluded to on this blog.

Lorna Earl describes what can happen when we teachers really begin to re-evaluate their assessment practices,

"Teachers who are working with a new view of assessment as part of learning are finding that it isn't possible to change assessment and leave everything else the same. When assessment changes, so does teaching, so does classroom organization, and so does interaction with students and parents" (2003, p. 45).

Today, I'm reminding myself of the need to focus on changes in assessment practices as much or more than grading practices.

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References:

Earl, L. M. (2003). Assessment as Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximize Student Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Marzano, R. J. (2010) Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Assessment discussions turn into grading discussions

Whenever I am invited to talk with a group of secondary teachers about assessment, the topic of grading almost always comes up, too.

This parallels my early struggles in using assessment for the purpose of providing feedback to inform future learning. Over time, my core beliefs about grades were challenged and stretched.

At the classroom level, any discussion of assessment ultimately ends up in a discussion of grading. Not only are teachers responsible for evaluating a student’s level of knowledge or skill at one point in time through classroom assessments, they are also responsible for translating all of the information from assessments into an overall evaluation of a student’s performance over some fixed period of time (usually a quarter, trimester, or semester).This overall evaluation is in the form of some type of overall grade commonly referred to as an “omnibus grade.” Unfortunately, grades add a whole new layer of error to the assessment process.

Marzano, R. (2010). Formative Assessment & Standards-Based Grading (p. 15). Bloomington, IN: Marzano Research Laboratory.

Rethink Assessment

10/25/2011 Update
The video below is designed to be used with teachers and administrators to discuss shifts in grading.

Note: the footage was used at a technology-related learning conference, so some of the questions posed have this context in mind.

4/20/2011 Update
Slides used in today's presentation

The script used today can be found here.

Both are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

~~Video footage is currently being edited and will be posted here once it is available.~~
See 10/25/2011 update

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Russ and I have been invited to co-facilitate a morning session at the Iowa 1:1 Institute to be held April 20, 2011 at the Polk County Convention Center. All I can say right now is that it's going to be a unique session. The trailer below tells the rest of the story.

Who owns the grades? [Playing the points game]

Guskey and Bailey (2001, p. 18)

"Around the middle school years and sometimes earlier, students' perceptions of grades begin to change. Although the reasons for this change are uncertain, it seems likely due to teachers' shifting emphasis from the formative aspects of grades to their summative functions. As a result, students no longer see grades as a source of feedback to guide improvements in their learning. Instead, they regard grades as the major commodity teachers and schools have to offer in exchange for their performance. This change brings a slow but steady shift in students' focus away from learning and toward what they must do to obtain the grade commodity."

Take aways:

Yet another reason not to grade formative assessments.
Who owns the grades in a classroom? In my earlier years of teaching, I believe that I did. Students could dig themselves into a hole, but it was difficult to fill it back in.
I tend to agree that the system creates grade craving for students. Somewhere in school, students begin playing the "points game" and it becomes increasingly difficult, but not impossible, to undo this craving as a given student progresses through the K-12 system.

Assessment for Learning: Solutions to Common Barriers

Slides from this afternoon's presentation to the staff at Clear Creek Amana.

Thanks to Brad Fox and Michele Pettit for inviting me to speak today.

From Points to Learning – Making Formative Assessment Meaningful

Today, I will be leading a two hour workshop for a cross-section of educators at three neighboring districts.

Two hours seems like just enough time to challenge thinking, demonstrate how it worked in my classroom AND have ample time to answer questions. Other than a three-day workshop, I co-led this summer, this will be the first time I've been allotted more than an hour. I continue to believe that...

Without challenging one's educational beliefs related to grading, the formative assessment cycle tends to be viewed as an add-on. So many educators claim they believe all students can learn at varying rates, but few secondary teachers embrace this philosophy through their grading practices

and with two hours, I am hypothesizing many more will be able to get past the philosophical hurdle known as "grades."

Formative Assessment & SBG: a 15 hour course

Eric and I taught a course last week entitled, "Formative Assessment and Standards-based Grading in the 6-12 classroom." It was open to any teacher in Iowa, but was mainly advertised via word-of-mouth and through our local area education agency. From the online course description:

Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading in the 6-12 Classroom
This course will highlight formative assessment (assessment for learning) techniques from a 6-12 classroom perspective. Beliefs about assessment, homework and reporting will be challenged and refined as they relate to this Iowa Core Curriculum characteristic of effective instruction. Many examples and illustrations will be from math classrooms, but examples from other disciplines will be integrated throughout the course.
N umber: 4427-10-01
Dates/Time: Jul. 7, 8, & 9, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Location: Grant Wood AEA, 4401 6th St SW, Cedar Rapids
Audience: Grades 6-12 Instructors, Curriculum Directors, Administrators
Registration: Complete registration form or register electronically at least two weeks in advance.
Fees: Registration is not complete until all fees are paid in full two weeks in advance of the first class. Total for non-credit or renewal credit = $80 paid in full at the time of registering. Total for Morningside credit = $160 paid in full at the rime of registering. Total for Drake credit = $165 paid in full at the time of registering.
Credit: R, D, M - 1 Sem. Hr.
Instructor(s): Eric Townsley and Matt Townsley, Educators

Every once in a while, people will ask me how to help their colleagues jump on board the standards-based grading express. I will write about that in a future post. This experience was unique, because thirty-one teachers and administrators actually paid money to hear what Eric and I had to say. It was hard to believe that so many people took time out of their summer to take this course. We would have been thrilled with fifteen participants. Thirty-one was beyond our wildest dreams. In fact, we originally capped the course at twenty, but the professional development coordinator emailed us less than a month before the course and asked if we would be willing to increase the cap due to it already being full. Talk about a humbling experience! Enough with the pre-course hoopla. Here are the nuts and bolts of how it went down:

Course Objectives

Each participant will be able to…

develop an increased awareness of the differences between summative and formative assessments, and
develop an increased awareness of the impact grading has on assessment practices, and
demonstrate multiple forms of formative assessment.

Established Norms:

Attend all sessions for credit
If you need to use the restroom, please do so
If you must make/take a cell call, please step out of the room
We will challenge you, please don’t take it personally
Please challenge our thinking as well!

Day 1

	Topic	Activity
Module 1 - Intro to formative assessment.	What is it? What do you know about it?	Opener: Impossible quiz; check; "turn in for a grade" Discuss our default teach, check, grade sequence. Is this a good thing? brainstorming - forced groups of 3 to 4 answering questions (What is it? What do you know about it?) about FA. Chappuis, "Helping Students Understand Assessment" article New groups of 3-4 answer questions. After reading and small group discussion, share out in large group. How does it relate to your previous thoughts on FA? What did you learn new?
Module 2 - Homework	What is homework’s role in formative assessment?	Scenarios spread out in room. Small groups rotate once the music plays. Challenge group with questions related to their HW policies and practices. How does these ideas relate to Chappuis article big ideas that FA helps answer... Where am I going? Where am I now? How can I close the gap?
Module 3 - Re-takes, late work and make-up work	What do these have to do with formative assessment?	Read Winger, “Grading to Communicate” article. Small group discussion into large group discussion - What do re-takes, late work and make-up work have to do with FA? END: Journal prompt, "Describe how your ideas about formative assessment and standards-based grading were stretched today. What questions do you have?"

My notes from Day 1...
Some of the participants have heard me/us talk already. They've already taken deep sips of the standards-based grading kool-aid and are growing impatient based on their non-verbal cues and notes in their journals. Other participants admitted they were not anticipating the challenges presented by the readings and our questioning. Grading responsibility and using grades to report learning alone seemed to be the two most controversial topics, but that wasn't too surprising.

Day 2:

Module 4 - Formative Assessment Techniques #1	Journals - Eric Red/green card - Matt Fist to Five - Matt Exit Slips - Eric Self Assessment Slip - Eric	Demo each of these; Hand out example of self-assessment slip. Fist to Five notes - one possible way to set it up in your classroom: 5 - I could teach this to someone else! 4 - I get it! 2 & 3 - I think I get it, but I need more help Fist & 1 - I'm still lost! For each technique, leave time for participants to discuss how they might use it. Small groups - share the technique you're most excited to try out so far
Module 5 - FA Techniques #2	PollEverywhere.com - Matt Google form - Matt Edmodo.com - Eric FA techniques smackdown - Eric	Demo each. Leave time for participants to discuss how they might use it. Smackdown is time for participants to share the best techniques they've tried in their classrooms with the large group
Module 6 - Formative Assessment - what do we do with all of this data?	Addressing the “How can I close the gap?” question	Give out sets of exit slips...what do you do now? Rotate around the room while groups are discussing to challenge their thinking. Discuss connections with PLCs, common formative assessments; interventions are difficult to handle on an individual basis. END: Journal prompt, "Write about one lesson and how you will use what you learned today to improve it."

My notes from Day 2...
We promised not to talk about grading today and it worked! Participants were in a great mood today and appreciated the time to talk about ideas that work in their classroom. I was surprised to find out how many participants had not used exit slips or thought of using journals as a way to reflect on the day's learning goals. We modeled journals throughout the course! I think this is the type of class most folks were expecting: low key and little, if any, challenges to their educational philosophy. Some are asking how to put it all together and are anxiously awaiting tomorrow.

Day 3:

Module 7 - Intro to standards-based grading	What is it? How is it different? Why do it?	Guest Speaker: Shawn Cornally (Shawn's notes on his talk are here)
Module 8 - SBG	Learning Targets Gradebook changes Multiple models	Questions? Clean up Shawn's mess. :)Divide group into two to provide a more intimate setting to answer implementation questions.
Module 9 - Putting it all together	Lingering implementation issues/questions.	Piece everything together. END: Action plan

My notes from Day 3...
Shawn's talk wasn't as practical as I anticipated, but it was more emotional and effective than I ever dreamed possible. He knew coming in that responsibility and allowing new evidence of learning to replace old evidence were the two major hang-ups of the group. His talk started out slow. At first, I thought to myself, "Shawn, can you just get to the point?" He started talking about bacon and that's when I knew it was starting to get interesting. The guy received a round of applause - something Eric and I hadn't even come close to earning on the first day. Participants asked quite a few questions about implementation. Based on the questions, comments and action plans, I estimate that 25+ of the 31 participants were tasting the sweet flavor known as standards-based grading. I'm not kidding when I say that a core group of the class asked if we would teach a follow-up course of hold a mid-year meeting for the group to get together to discuss their progress. This was a strange, but encouraging turn of events.

Follow-Up:
A course website was created to post additional resources as well as archive those discussed during the three-day course.

Final thoughts:
We told the group towards the end of Day 3 why we felt like Day 1 had to be so frustrating. Without challenging one's educational beliefs related to grading, the formative assessment cycle tends to be viewed as an add-on. So many educators claim they believe all students can learn at varying rates, but few secondary teachers embrace this philosophy through their grading practices. Three days seemed like just enough time to break down the majority of the participants' educational philosophies related to assessment and grading. Cramming the workshop into a two-day format would have been a stretch. Teaching this course online as we had originally planned to do this winter would be nearly impossible due to the face-to-face real-time interaction needed on Day 1 to challenge each others' beliefs. Teachers in so many other schools face the same realities we do - even if they change their grading practices, it takes a systematic change in order to maximize SBG's impact on students' learning in the long haul.

What do you think? What topics/ideas about standards-based grading did we leave out? What would you add or omit to the course?

Grading "formative" assessments?

Karl Fisch recently wrote about his proposed assessment scheme for next year's Algebra class. He plans to weight his grades:

10% - Preparation
70% - Formative Assessment
20% - Summative Assessment

Karl admits that a Dan Meyer-esque system is the ideal, but he's just not ready to take it to the next level in his own classroom yet. Karl's proposed system is much better, in my opinion, that the majority of the grading schemes in your typical secondary classroom, so this post is in no way intended to downplay his current effort, but instead it has helped me examine my own practice as you'll see at the end of this post. His writing brings up a question that I'm often asked in my conversations with colleagues and speaking engagements:

"Should a formative assessment ever be entered into the gradebook?"

I've written about the classic "grading practice" question once before, but it's worth revisiting.

Karl says he is going to report out learning by skill. Standards-based grading, I like it. Are these assessments still considered formative though, if they don't inform future instruction?

"One distinction is to think of formative assessment as "practice." We do not hold students accountable in "grade book fashion" for skills and concepts they have just been introduced to or are learning." - National Middle School Association

I don't know how much feedback Karl will be giving his students before he administers the "formative" assessments he's referring to in his post. He will giving repeated assessments until a student understands/masters the skills. Is this an example of a repeated summative assessment or a formative assessment in action? I might be getting hung up on the fact that it is entered into the grade book each time. Two more questions come to mind:

Are these types of assessments truly formative if we're entering them into the grade book...or is this just semantics? Or are we kidding ourselves into thinking they're formative just because there's a second chance down the road?
Assuming the types of assessments Karl refers to his post are not "formative," what types of assessments should we be doing in our classroom that are formative? More ungraded quizzes? Exit slips? A closer look at daily homework/practice?

Sometimes I think my assessment system is on the right track. Other times, I question if it needs revamped. Since I critiqued Karl's system, I am also going to provide a brief overview of my current Geometry assessment scheme:

Teach the big ideas using direct instruction, inquiry activities or some combination of the two.
Students complete some "homework" problems I assign. Answers are posted on the board immediately for students to check at anytime and to encourage asking questions of each other or me.
The next day, students finish checking their answers, write the troublesome problem numbers on the board. Either I go over a few of the requested problems or students work in groups to get their questions answered. Students turn in their homework assignments and record the number of assignments they've completed without regard to their level of content mastery.
Every two to four days, I give the students a quiz covering the big ideas they've learned since the last assessment. The next day I hand back the quizzes with marks on a lykert scale indicated how each student is doing in relation to mastery of each of the assessed learning targets. Students with relative strengths and weaknesses are paired together for 5-10 minutes to ask questions of each other or me for the sake of learning from their mistakes. These quizzes are not entered into the grade book.
At the end of every chapter, students are given a test. The tests are not reported as a single score. Instead, a score of 0-4 is recorded for each learning target. More information about the grade book can be found here.
Students who would like to improve their learning target scores come in outside of class and are given opportunities to replace their learning target scores based on new evidence of understanding.

I hope to write more about this assessment system in detail sometime in the near future as I've recently realized that I have never put it all together in one place, but I think the outline above will give at least the avid reader enough of a refresher to engage in a meaningful conversation.

I critiqued Karl. Now I'm leaving myself open to criticism, too. Have I gone far enough with 'formative" assessments or do I have room for improvement, too?

(Update: see Jason's post for more reaction to this conversation)

ICTM 2010: How do you know if they know?

Presentation given at the Iowa Council of Teachers of Mathematics Conference, February 19, 2010.

Title:

How do you know if they know? Re-examining assessment through the lens of learning

Brief description:

This session will highlight “assessment for learning” techniques from a secondary math classroom teacher's perspective. Come to get your beliefs about assessment and reporting learning challenged and refined as they relate this Iowa Core Curriculum characteristic of effective instruction.

Additional resources are available here.

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Slidecast (slides and audio recording) from the conference presentation:

ICTM 2010: How do you know if they know?

View more presentations from Matt Townsley.

(cross posted at iieme.org)

It's not ALL about standards-based reporting...(take 2)

I wrote about this topic once before. As I read though Marzano's Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading, I am becoming even more convinced that standards-based grading is merely a tool to improve teaching and learning.

"Indeed, at the writing of this book, no major study (that we are aware of) has demonstrated that simply grading in a standards-based manner enhances student achievement. However,...a fairly strong case can be made that student achievement will be positively affected if standards-based reporting is rooted in a clear-cut system of formative assessments." (18)

A grading system that does not allow new evidence of learning to replace the old, standards-based or otherwise, is not giving our students the learning opportunities they need and deserve. A feedback starved classroom fails to meet the mark, too. I like the Brookhart and Nitko quote in Marzano's book that nails the definition of formative assessment:

"...formative assessment is a loop: Students and teachers focus on a learning target, evaluate current student work against the target, act to move the work closer to the target and repeat." (10)

From my own experience discussing formative assessment with secondary teaching colleagues, a major hurdle to embracing/using the formative assessment loop in the classroom is grades. Marzano agrees,

"At the classroom level, any discussion of assessment ultimately ends up in a discussion of grading." (15)

It just so happens that some of us are choosing to use standards-based reporting as a medium for reaching this ideal. Personally, I can't imagine a grading system in my own secondary math classroom that would philosophically fit other than standards-based reporting. I'm guessing someone has figured out another way to make their classroom feedback-friendly in the spirit of formative assessment while simultaneously embracing the idea that grades should communicate learning only. I look forward to reading about it so that I can share with my colleagues. I find myself preaching standards-based grading too often when I should be evangelizing the formative assessment loop instead.

If you've figured out a way to embrace these ideals without standards-based reporting (particularly in a secondary classroom context), please post a link and/or your thoughts in the comments below.

For regular readers of MeTA musings, is this even possible?

I just don't get it

The verdict is still out on the validity of grading homework in the eyes of many educators in my sphere of influence. If the purpose of homework isn't to check for students' understanding, what activities do classroom teachers rely on figure out who "gets it" and who is still lost? The next two diagrams summarize what I hear:

I regularly ask teachers I come in contact with to describe their formative assessment strategies. Answers such as "think, pair share" and "observe the non-verbal cues of the students throughout the class period" come up quite frequently. It's the stuff that often doesn't land on paper. Great. Those are all examples of formative assessment that can drive future instruction. Here lies the controversy:

Once students complete a few problems or write an essay on paper (or take notes or complete a word find or sometimes just write their name and date and turn it in - how sad is that..) many educators I know automatically feel like a point value needs to be assigned. Why? How is a "thumbs up/thumbs down" prompt any different from an activity that involves students writing down an answer or their thoughts on paper, especially when they serve the same purpose? Why is it universally acceptable to grade one and not the other?

.....I just don't get it. Can someone explain this to me?

Taking on the naysayers: allowing the new to replace the old

When discussing formative assessment and my current standards-based grading system with colleagues, various aspects of it seem like a lot of "work" (such as inputting multiple scores into the grade book rather than just a single summative assessment score) while other parts are viewed as downright controversial.

In Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at Work, DuFour, et. al (2008) suggest three components of formative assessment:

The assessment is used to identify students who are experiencing difficulty in their learning.
A system of intervention is in place to ensure students experiencing difficulty devote additional time to and receive additional support for their learning.
Those students are provided another opportunity to demonstrate their learning and are not penalized for their earlier difficulty. (emphasis mine, pp. 216-217)

Allowing new evidence of learning to replace old evidence is such a hard sell. I hear responses such as Won't students give a mediocre effort the first time? We're not teaching responsibility! This isn't how college works. I've used this example in a previous post and it's also the one I use to illustrate the point that new evidence of learning should replace old evidence:

Consider the following example. Assume that homework is graded on completion and quizzes/tests on content mastery.

Student A: Homework: 50% Quiz: 60% Test: 100%
Student B: Homework: 100% Quiz 100% Test: 100%

Student A did not understand the concepts and therefore did not complete the homework. Somewhere between the "quiz" and the "test" Student A came in for extra help and finally "understood" the concept which explains his/her sudden improvement on the "test."

In the traditional grading system, which student earns a better grade? Student B, of course. A traditional points system penalizes "later learners." On the "test," both students demonstrated the same level of understanding, but Student A is penalized for initially struggling. Do we have a realistic expectation that students will "get it" the first day we teach concepts to them? If so, then why not have daily tests?

DuFour, et. al go on to explain this point concisely in their book:

"Our position has been challenged in several ways. Some have argued students should not be given a second opportunity to learn, or, at the very least, their initial failure should be included in calculating the grade. They claim it would be unfair to allow low-performing students the opportunity to earn a grade similar to those of students who were proficient on the initial assessment. Our response is that every school mission statement we have read asserts the school is committed to helping all students learn. We have yet to find a mission statement that says, “They must all learn fast or the first time we teach it.” If some students must work longer and harder to succeed, but they become proficient, their grade should reflect their ultimate proficiency, not their early difficulty." (p. 219)

I am becoming increasingly convinced that any classroom claiming to involve formative assessment or "assessment for learning" must allow new evidence to replace the old. It just makes sense.

How do you know if they know?

I was asked to present at a professional development day for several school districts in Eastern Iowa. My presentation is entitled, "How do you know if they know? Re-examining assessment through the lens of learning" and will describe the theory behind my current grading and assessment practices. The theme of the day is the Iowa Core Curriculum and I believe my assessment practices mirror at least some of what is being framed as a movement here in Iowa towards "assessment for learning."

Regular readers of this blog know that I no longer report a single score for a test, but instead report students' understanding through multiple learning targets. Homework and quizzes are viewed as feedback opportunities rather than summative assessments. Students may re-take parts of the "test" and their newest level of understanding will always replace the old.

The slides below will be used at the session and make the most sense if you view it full-screen along with the speaker notes.

In addition, the packet with an outline of the presentation and a few selected Educational Leadership articles that all session attendees will receive is available here.

Finally, I created a small website with links to additional commentary on standards-based grading and suggested further reading.

Breaking the "norm of silence"

In Building Leadership Capacity in Schools, Linda Lambert mentions the need for educational leaders to sometimes break the "norm of silence." The n.o.s. looks something like this:

"I won't talk with you about anything you're uncomfortable with."(p. 54)

I admit that this has been my attitude towards some (but not all) of my colleagues regarding many of the ideas written about on this blog. Looking back on this practice, I am ashamed to see the change that "could have happened" but didn't due to my silence. For example, I have been mulling over a way to change homework grading practices for several years. It led to the assessment and grading revolution my regular readers know I have been working through and sharing via this blog. I remember when my math education colleagues finally were convinced that posting homework answers on the board for students to see anytime as they worked through the problem sets was a good idea.

Why am I, still to this day, ashamed to share my ideas about assessment reform with my colleagues? This hit home several days ago when I sat on a panel of "veteran teachers" speaking to a group of pre-service educators at an evening class. One student asked the question, "What is one thing you would change about the educational system? I suggested that the way we grade and report student progress needs quite a bit of fixing and I had some ideas on how this might be done, but would only share them if there was enough time at the end of the Q&A session. After my colleagues on the panel discussed NCLB and "too much paperwork" as their pet peeves, I could only smile. Was that any surprise to these pre-service teachers? I'm guessing any current introductory to education textbook mentions the pitfalls of NCLB, but grading?!

Sure enough, a brave middle-aged man asked me a follow-up question about grading towards the end of the time allocated for the teacher panel. I boldly laid out an assessment-for-learning rich classroom with a reporting scheme based on learning targets rather than specific assessments. By comparing my system with the traditional grading system, it was easier than I thought to gain the attention and respect of these pre-service teachers. It seemed so easy. Maybe it was the follow-up email from one of the students wanting to know more about this "anti-grades" idea? Maybe it was the conversation with a colleague in the parking lot after the panel about how he might work towards this ideal? I do know that my "assessment secrets" should no longer be purposefully be hidden in a box.

What's stopping me from breaking the "norm of silence" with my own colleagues? What's stopping you from sharing all of the ideas you read, tweet and blog about with your education-minded colleagues?

Rethinking Homework: Best Practices that Support Diverse Needs

I recently finished reading one of ASCD's 2009 Select Member publications, Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs.

Full disclosure: A big thanks goes out to Laura Berry, ASCD Communications Specialist, for sending me a complementary copy after I submitted an essay for consideration in one of their themed publications that never came to fruition. I have not received any compensation to write this review and did not receive the book under any obligation to write this post. Now, on to the review.

The author, Cathy Vatterott, is an academic at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and is commonly referred to as "The Homwork Lady." In this book, she breaks down homework research and paints a fairly objective picture of the limits of this research as well. In addition, Vatterott lays out the common objectives proposed by homework critics such as Alfie Kohn and attempts to create a practical spin on what this does and does not mean for the average classroom teacher. The third chapter is entitled, "Homework Research and Common Sense" and it lives up to its title from the get-go. Her objective approach is summed up in the following quote.

"...the gist of the research, then, is that a small amount of homework may be good for learning, but too much homework can actually be bad for learning." (p. 62)

With such a middle-of-the-road attitude, it's hard not to at least take her arguments seriously. Vatterott even asks some of the hard questions typically heard in faculty lounges during the lunch hour.

"What if more time spent grading homework equaled less time to plan quality classroom instruction, which could affect the quality and amount of learning that occurs in the classroom?" (p. 79)

Okay, maybe the question has never been posed that formally, but who hasn't heard the occasional griping about the usefulness of homework, particularly when students don't complete it and when grading it takes so much of an educator's time? My guess is that I'm not the only one who hears this sentiment from time to time.

Perhaps the most useful chapter is the fourth one focusing on effective homework practices. The author draws a line in the sand regarding homework and grading - an idea that took me years to agree with, but could cause some readers to immediately close the book and never pick it up again.

"Homework's role should be as formative assessment - assessment for learning that takes place during learning. Homework's role is not assessment of learning; therefore it should not be graded." (p. 112, emphasis mine)

Because I happen to believe that grading homework does indeed get in the way of learning and is counterproductive towards documenting understanding in a way that allows new evidence of achievement to replace old evidence, I continued reading with great enthusiasm.

I especially enjoyed a section describing how "grading homework" is different from "checking homework."

"The purpose of homework should be to provide feedback to the teacher and the student about how learning is progressing....Checking (providing feedback) is diagnostic - the teacher is working as an advocate for the student." (p. 112)

Rethinking Homework was well-written, provides many thought-provoking ideas related to homework, grading and formative assessment. Personally, I had already read several of the articles and books Vatterott quotes in her writing, so the underlying ideas often seemed like old hat. If you've read with great detail Marzano, O'Connor, Fisher & Frey, Stiggins, Guskey and even Robyn Jackson's latest ASCD book (which I recently reviewed as well here), this book may seem like a broken record. On the contrary, if you're looking for a single book to read that might might challenge the status quo in the way you and your colleagues view homework and more largely assessment, I highly recommend Rethinking Homework by Cathy Vatterott.

Lorna Earl's quote from the book, Assessment a s Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximize Student Learning rings true in the context of this review.

"...changing classroom assessment is the beginning of a revolution - a revolution in classroom practices of all kinds...Getting classroom assessment right is not a simplistic, either-or situation. It is a complex mix of challenging personal beliefs, rethinking instruction and learning new ways to assess for different purposes." (2003, pp. 15-16)

Perhaps this book will finally be the spark to unite a blaze of conversations in your school that change the way educators view teaching and learning. How do you think your colleagues would respond to this book's premises?

(In)formative assessment: LESS grading and MORE feedback

It's an exciting time of the year. Classes start in less than 48 hours. Lots of district, building, leadership and curriculum meetings have taken place the past few days. One common theme has been "assessment." Even though our district continues to perform very well on standardized tests, we have been charged to go from "good" to "great" by the administrative team. I can't express in words how exciting I am for the direction our district is going through the boulevard called assessment. I truly believe that transforming assessment practices is the beginning of so many other great conversations and classroom changes. To keep this in the front of our minds, each faculty member is being asked to document his/her assessments from August to December. The documentation is loosely associated with Ric k DuFour's three essential questions.

1. What do we want all students to learn?
As educators, we must think about the essential learnings (standards, benchmarks, learning targets, objectives, take your pick!) our students should have as a result of taking our course. These may change slightly from year to year depending the students, but we should be able to identify the "core" ideas and concepts each student is expected to learn.

2. How will we know when each student has learned it?
As educators, we should be able to articulate the connection between the essential learnings and the assessments we administer in our classrooms. This involves more than just printing out the textbook publisher's test and assuming it "fits" our intended purposes. It is also not merely giving students pop quizzes covering the night's reading and moving on when they haven't a clue what they were to have learned. What's the best way to clearly connect assessments and learning targets? Standards-based grading! It's been a hard sell the past few days in my conversations with colleagues, but I look forward to sharing my successes and failures in developing the implementation of this idea further on this blog.

3. How will we respond when a student experiences difficulty?
As educators, how are our assessment and instruction practices setup to support students who struggle? Are we caught up in the "assess and move on" rut? Or are our assessments created, graded (or not) to inform future instruction? The buzz word commonly used here is "formative assessment." I discussed this idea in many previous posts, including this one.

I really don't feel like I have a firm grasp on #3. Last year, I reported out to my students their successes and failures on quizzes (my bi-unit written, formative assessments) the same way I did on tests, via a 4-point scale per learning target. I keep thinking about Susan Brookhart's comments in her Dec. '07/Jan. '08 Educational Leadership article, "Feedback that Fits" when she said,

"Formative assessment..Here is how close you are to the knowledge or skills you are trying to develop, and here's what you need to do next....Good feedback contains information students can use....For feedback to drive the formative assessment cycle, it needs to describe where the student is in relation to the learning goal..."

My "old" standards-based reporting on quizzes looked like the image below. I gave students written feedback on individual problems and then a score for each learning target assessed correlating to a narrative describing their current state of understanding.

I used to argue that the learning target score was a way of communicating to students how well they were doing in relation to the learning goal. I think it still does make sense in this context, but it does not give them the feedback they need and deserve describing what they need to do next to improve their learning. Looking back, I was giving my students a red, yellow or green light, but never a map to tell them where to turn next. My "next" step is changing the "scoring" into a rubric that instead gives students an idea of where they fit on the continuum of concept mastery.

I hope this continuum and more "student-friendly" wording along the bottom is information students can better use. I will also continue to give feedback on individual problems so that students can understand what they need to do to better understand the topic or overcome their misconception. Last year's practice of grouping students according to their relative strengths and weaknesses (related to the learning targets) will continue so that students not have the opportunity to learn from my feedback, but also from their peers. My goal in this give students more meaningful feedback and less grading. This subtle change, I believe, takes the emphasis away from a "number" and instead on the feedback.

What flaws or critiques do you see with this change in philosophy? How would you react as a student if you did not receive a "grade" (in the form of a number or percentage) but rather a mark on a continuum to complement written feedback on problems?

Know where your students are going

Note: This is the third post in a series based on the book Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn Jackson.

Do we really plan homework, tests, etc. around our learning objectives?

This is a question I grappled with last year as I transformed my grading practices to a more standards-based system. A hiccup I ran into was using assessments I had created the year before. With a renewed laser-like focus on learning targets, I slowly realized that my assessments did not always clearly align with my intended outcomes. To be brutally honest, "time" was a factor that often hindered me from creating assessments that explicitly measured my learning targets. My intentions were great through an improved reporting and grading system, but the assessments need to be tweaked.

Robyn Jackson says...

"Master teachers spend more time unpacking standards and objectives than they do planning learning activities because they understand that clear learning goals will drive everything else they do." (p. 58)

Several pages later, she alludes to an idea found in a book, Understanding by Design, written by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. In my spring reading, I found this book to be very helpful in thinking about the order in which to design assessments and instruction. Jackson states it clearly...

"For each learning goal, decide how you will know when students have achieved that goal and how you will know when students are on the right track. Explain these indicators to students." (p. 63)

I think I have a pretty firm grasp on this concept of keeping the end in mind. I need to take a second look at the list of learning targets (objectives) for each course I teach and then ensure that I have formative assessment prompts ready to help students see when they are on the right track. Furthermore, explaining to students my philosophical difference between "grades" and "feedback" will be key. Initially, I anticipate students questioning my practice of not using traditional scores to mark up their formative assessments. My hope is that this will be a prime opportunity to show them the value of written and verbal feedback rather than a single score.

"To be effective, feedback needs to cause thinking. Grades don't do that. Scores don't do that. And comments like “Good job” don't do that either. What does cause thinking is a comment that addresses what the student needs to do to improve" - Nov. 2005 Ed. Leadership article.

A conversation might have look something like this last year before I implemented standards-based grading.

Me: You earned 10/16 points. Which ideas did you understand and which ones do you still need work on?
Student: Well, I missed one point on question #1 and five points on question #5. I think I need to better understand how to do #5. Can you tell me how to do it?

With standards-based grading in place, the conversations now look something more like this:

Me: How do you think you did on your quiz?
Student: I got 4/4 on learning targets 1-3, but 2/4 on learning targets 4 and 5. I really don't understand the ideas behind [insert learning target here]. Can you help me?

I need to take my "feedback" one step farther by not only giving students a score for each standard, but also a narrative outlining what the student needs to do to improve. I believe that this small tweak to my formative assessments will help students see not only how they've done (past tense), but also what they can do to improve (future tense) - the "thinking" Jackson mentions.

All of these ideas are all great, but my first order of business needs to be taking a solid look at my summative assessments. Jackson paraphrases the ideas of Wiggins and McTighe,

"It is not until you define your assessment instrument that you have clearly spelled out what your true objective is." (p. 66)"

Wouldn't it be nice if students no longer asked "what's going to be on the test?" What if the norm instead was students who knew exactly what to expect on the test and worked diligently to ensure that they understood those concepts and skills at a level in which they could articulate them not only on a "test," but also to their parents and peers? I think this is what the Iowa Core Curriculum is calling "Teaching for Understanding."

Personal action items from this principle are as follows:

Take a detailed look at summative assessments for each course. If an assessment does not clearly match-up with its intended learning targets, modify to fit.
Create a rubric or blank space on each formative assessment for detailed feedback. This will remind me and the students of the "feedback narrative" expecation mentioned above.

Through the implementation of these action items this summer, I hope to have a year similar to the master educator described on p. 76 of Jackson's book:

"Because I had invested the time up front to unpack my standards, define mastery and the steps toward mastery, and identify how I would determine whether my students had reached mastery, I had more time during the year to relax and teach."

Now is the time to plan with the "end" in mind and know where your students are going.

Two totally different questions

"Can you tell me how to do it?"

(or worse yet, "What formula should I use?")

"Can you help me figure out what I did wrong?"

Students ask these two questions of each other and of me on a daily basis. They are two totally different questions. As we reviewed for tomorrow's Geometry test, I had an opportunity to explain the difference to my students. A brief synopsis follows.

A student that asks, "Can you tell me how to do it?" most likely...

has not thought it through first for his/herself, and/or
more concerned about the "answer" than the concept/algorithm

A student that asks, "Can you help me figure out what I did wrong?" most likely...

has already given some original thought to the problem, and/or
has struggled through multiple ways of approaching the problem

The latter question is obviously the one I emphasized as students reviewed together.

From the Iowa Core Curriculum on "Teaching for Understanding":

"Teachers assist students in making connections between prior and new knowledge to develop deep conceptual and procedural knowledge"

When a student asks "Can you tell me how to do it?" or "What formula should I use?," I am not able to determine his/her prior knowledge. Perhaps this is why I struggle with answering whole group questions on the previous day's assignment at the beginning of class. When I spit out the solution to p. 697 #34, I am inevitably answering the question "Can you tell me how to do it?" for my students! Ideally, each student would be able to figure out their own misconceptions (a la metacognition), right?! On a more realistic note, it would involve me looking at what the student did and did not do on that particular problem to help him/her overcome the misconception.

In the future, I'm looking forward to more opportunities to model to my students the better question of the two, "Can you help me figure out what I did wrong?" To me, this is what formative assessment is all about.

One small change

One small change in my classroom this year has yielded incredible results. In an earlier post, I mentioned a quote from a book by Lorna Earl entitled, Assessment a s Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximize Student Learning.

"...changing classroom assessment is the beginning of a revolution - a revolution in classroom practices of all kinds...Getting classroom assessment right is not a simplistic, either-or situation. It is a complex mix of challenging personal beliefs, rethinking instruction and learning new ways to assess for different purposes." (Earl, 2003, pp. 15-16)

The revolution began by implementing standards-based reporting - the "how" behind my assessment.
Lesson learned: Clear learning targets coupled with examples of strong and weak work help students better analyze their own strengths and weaknesses. The "old points system" was flawed. Two students could both earn 16/20 on a quiz. Student A made four computation errors. Student B understood four of the big ideas and bombed the fifth. Both students (and their parents) were "tricked" by the system in to thinking they have the same level of understanding. As a math teacher, I did not like this numbers game at all.

Once I started focusing on the learning targets associated with standards-based reporting, it became evident to me how important it was to give meaningful feedback. I had been missing the boat thinking that I was the only person capable of giving students quality feedback. Students were being underutilized in this context. I declared everyday to be "formative assessment day" through an increased emphasis on linking assessment with instruction - the "why" behind my assessment.
Lesson learned: I saw the value of using ongoing assessment to guide my instruction. Formative assessment does not just involve more quizzes or exercises, but rather using the results from these carefully designed appraisals to continually guide forthcoming instruction. Linking "assessment and instruction" as the educational cliche grew in importance and applicability. The best definition for formative assessment I have seen is:

"Formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students as part of instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning to improve students’ achievement of core content" (source).

By re-examining the "how" and "why" behind my assessment practice, I see learning through a much different lens. Look for more posts next year describing these changes in detail.

What "one small change" have you made this academic year and how has it changed your philosophy of education?

MeTA musings

...where Math education, Technology and Assessment meet