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CHAPTER 2

Using Assessments

Assessment is a feedback mechanism for both students and teachers. Assessments should provide students with information about how to advance their understanding of content and teachers with information about how to help students do so.

The goal of this design area is for students to understand how test scores and grades relate to their status on the progression of knowledge they are expected to master. Teachers are able to meet that goal by answering the question, How will I design and administer assessments that help students understand how their test scores and grades are related to their status on the progression of knowledge they are expected to master? The two elements and associated strategies in this chapter help the teacher do just that.

Element 4: Using Informal Assessments of the Whole Class

An effective educator uses informal assessments to get a general sense of how the class is doing regarding a specific topic. Research shows that classroom assessments should be frequent and formative in nature, encourage students to improve, and give students a clear picture of their progress on learning goals (Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, Kulik, & Morgan, 1991; Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, & Kulik, 1991; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Crooks, 1988; Fuchs & Fuchs, 1986; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Natriello, 1987). Teachers should use assessment data to provide students with evidence that effort on their part results in higher scores (Marzano, 2006). There are four strategies within this element.

1. Confidence rating techniques

2. Voting techniques

3. Response boards

4. Unrecorded assessments

The following sections will explore each strategy to provide you with guidelines to effectively implement this element. Read through each before creating a plan for your classroom. Teachers may use the strategies individually or in combination. Remember, these are not merely activities to be checked off; they are methods of creating a practice that combines your art with the science of using informal assessments of the whole class. Reflect on your use of each strategy by filling out the “Strategy Reflection Log” on page 331.

Confidence Rating Techniques

In this strategy, the students rate how confident they are in their understanding of a topic in the moment with direct input. The teacher uses this immediate feedback to determine what areas of the content are causing students difficulty. Following are a few ways students can rate their confidence quickly and easily.

• Hand signals: Hand signals provide an effective means for determining students’ confidence because they require little preparation. The teacher gives the class quick instruction on predetermined hand signals before a lesson begins. Students might give a thumbs-up to indicate confidence with the material, a thumbs-down to indicate lack of confidence, or a thumbs-sideways to indicate uncertainty.

• Polling technology: Polling technology (clickers or smartphone apps) can be a fun and versatile means for students to rate their confidence with the material. Websites such as Poll Everywhere (www.polleverywhere.com) allow the teacher to set up confidence rating questions and then ask students to answer them using the text function of their cell phones or by visiting a specific link and voting online.

• Color-coded cards: Color-coded cards can be as simple as slips of colored construction paper. To use this strategy, a teacher can provide students with a system of different colored cards and have students keep them in a single stack on their desks. For example, a green card could indicate that students are confident with the material, a yellow card could indicate uncertainty, and a red card could indicate that they want the teacher to stop and re-explain a difficult point. During the lesson, students place the colored card that corresponds to their level of confidence with the material on top of the stack.

Voting Techniques

The teacher provides specific questions or prompts and asks students to vote on answers. Typically, such questions have a true-or-false or multiple-choice format. Teachers can use this to spur class discussion or simply gauge classwide competence with the content. Students can vote using confidence rating techniques or other methods such as the following.

• Use tokens: Using tokens to indicate answers can be an especially fun way for K–5 students to vote in the classroom. To use tokens, set up several cans or jars and provide students with a token (a coin or other small object) to place in the containers. Label each container with a different possible answer to a question. Ask students to deposit their tokens one by one, or ask the whole class to deposit their tokens at the same time. When all the tokens have been deposited, the teacher can then ask students to indicate which container they think has acquired the most votes.

• Vote with your feet: The teacher asks several students to provide possible answers to a difficult question. Those students then stand at different locations around the room, while the rest of the class gets out of their seats and stands near the student they think gave the right answer. Allowing two to three minutes for students to make their decision will encourage them to talk among themselves as they make their way around the room. This can induce impromptu class discussions and afford students the opportunity to get up and move around for a short time while staying focused on the content.

Response Boards

The teacher asks students to respond to a question—usually multiple choice, true or false, or short answer—using an erasable whiteboard or response card. He or she can then quickly scan the responses to get a good idea of the class’s competence with the content. As this is meant to be a quick check for understanding, train yourself to look for the following.

• Missing information: The absence of types of information can reveal as much as their presence. The answers to many questions can be phrased in a variety of ways, and when students are unsure about particular concepts they tend to avoid using those concepts in their answers. Pay special attention to whether students are avoiding using certain ideas in their answers, as this can be a hidden indicator that they are having difficulty with those concepts.

• Key words: Proper use of relevant vocabulary is a necessary step to greater understanding of a topic. Looking for the presence of key words in students’ answers can be a quick way of assessing whether they have a basic grasp of the content. Pay attention to how students use key words, as the misuse of certain words or phrases can indicate that students are struggling with the material.

• Procedural clues: For answers involving several steps or components, look for words that indicate order or progression. Words and phrases like before, then, next, or in addition can indicate that students are grasping the procedural nature of certain skills or are beginning to understand the relationships between different concepts. Of course, check to make sure that the procedures and associations are being described correctly.

• Justifications: One way to assess students’ level of competency is to check for justifications in their answers. The use of words and phrases like because or resulting in show that students are beginning to understand the why and how of an answer and not just the what. Correct justifications for answers indicate that students are forming a more comprehensive understanding of the material.

• Extrapolation: A major indicator that students are mastering a content area is that they are able to apply the principles of the content to hypothetical situations. In other words, they not only know the correct answer to the specific question posed but can employ that knowledge to answer other similar questions. Look for if-then statements to assess whether students are understanding the concepts underlying the material.

Unrecorded Assessments

In this strategy, teachers administer assessments that students then score themselves. Teachers do not record individual scores in a gradebook, but they use the scores as a whole to see how well the class is doing. Unrecorded assessments are useful in providing students direct, immediate feedback about their progress. Use the template in figure 2.1 (page 30) to help guide students in reflecting on their assessment.

Monitoring Element 4

Specific student responses and behaviors allow the teacher to determine whether this element is being implemented effectively and producing the desired effects.

• Students readily engage in whole-class assessment activities.

• Students can describe the status and growth of the class as a whole.

• Students seem interested in the entire class’s progress.

• Students appear pleased as the whole class’s performance improves.

Use this list to monitor student responses to element 4.

To monitor your own use of this element, use the scale in figure 2.2 (page 30) in combination with the reproducible “Tracking Teacher Actions: Using Informal Assessments of the Whole Class” (page 37). As with other proficiency scales, level 3 or higher is the goal.

The following examples describe what each level of the scale might look like in the classroom.

• Not Using (0): A teacher only uses assessment to record grades for individual students.

Source: Marzano Research, 2016.

Figure 2.1: Student assessment scoring sheet.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Figure 2.2: Self-rating scale for element 4—Using informal assessments of the whole class.

• Beginning (1): A teacher administers informal assessments of the whole class, but those assessments are not focused on specific content important for students to learn.

• Developing (2): A teacher uses informal assessments of the whole class to provide students with feedback about how they are doing but does not attempt to determine if this feedback is useful to the students.

• Applying (3): A teacher uses informal assessments of the whole class to provide students with feedback about how they are doing and monitors their responses in order to adjust his classroom instruction.

• Innovating (4): A teacher uses various informal assessments of the whole class to provide students with feedback about how they are doing. When she notices that some students are reluctant to indicate their confidence with the material in the whole-class setting, she has brief conversations with those students at their desks to gauge their confidence.

Element 5: Using Formal Assessments of Individual Students

An effective educator uses a variety of formal assessments to determine individual students’ proficiency with specific content at specific points in time, which are then translated into scores and recorded in a gradebook. Research has shown that gathering and using student assessment data to provide feedback and develop knowledge and skill improves student achievement (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Ideally, teachers and students use assessment data in a loop as they focus on a specific learning target, collect data about and evaluate learning in relation to the target, and then take steps to move closer to the target (Brookhart & Nitko, 2007). Feedback to students, an important element of assessment, is also associated with student achievement gains (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).

There are seven strategies within this element.

1. Common assessments designed using proficiency scales

2. Assessments involving selected-response or short constructed-response items

3. Student demonstrations

4. Student interviews

5. Observations of students

6. Student-generated assessments

7. Response patterns

The following sections will explore each strategy to provide you with guidelines to effectively implement this element. Read through each before creating a plan for your classroom. Teachers may use the strategies individually or in combination. Remember, these are not merely activities to be checked off; they are methods of creating a practice that combines your art with the science of using formal assessments of individual students. Reflect on your use of each strategy by filling out the “Strategy Reflection Log” on page 331.

Common Assessments Designed Using Proficiency Scales

Teachers who teach the same content at the same level work together in teams to create common formative and summative assessments that provide students with feedback. Consider the following four steps.

1. Create a proficiency scale for the topic that will be the focus of the common assessment.

2. Design an assessment that includes items and tasks for score 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 content.

3. Score the assessment individually or in cooperation with the other teachers and discuss the results for all students who have taken the common assessment.

4. Identify those students with common needs based on the assessment results, and group students for instruction according to their needs.

Assessments Involving Selected-Response or Short Constructed-Response Items

The teacher administers assessments that employ selected-response and short constructed-response items. Constructed-response items require students to generate a correct answer as opposed to merely recognizing one. Short-answer assessments and oral responses are examples of constructed-response assessments. Following are six types of selected-response items (Marzano, 2006).

1. Traditional multiple choice: Provides a stem and alternatives, some of which are distractors and one of which is the correct choice

2. Matching: Provides multiple stems and multiple options

3. Alternative choice: Provides a stem and two choices that are quite similar

4. True or false: Provides statements that must be judged as true or false

5. Fill in the blank: Provides a stem for which only one correct answer is reasonable

6. Multiple response: Allows for two or more correct responses

Student Demonstrations

The students generate presentations that demonstrate their understanding of a topic. Different content areas lend themselves more readily to certain types of demonstrations. For example, subject areas that focus on physical skills (such as physical education, art, and music) frequently use student demonstrations. For those content areas where demonstrations are primarily mental in nature the teacher might ask a student to think aloud while he or she is using the skill, strategy, or process.

Ask students the following questions during or after a demonstration (Marzano Research, 2016).

• “What specific skills were you demonstrating?”

• “What parts do you think you did well?”

• “On which parts did you struggle?”

• “What would you do differently if you were to do it again?”

Student Interviews

During student interviews, the teacher holds a conversation with individual students about a specific topic and then assigns a score to each student that depicts his or her knowledge of the topic. Following are tips for interviewing students.

• Have a clear progression to the interview: Instead of asking the student to tell you everything he or she knows about a particular topic, start with the score 2.0 content in the proficiency scale for that topic and then move up through score 3.0 and 4.0 content.

• Prompt for further information: If a student can’t think of anything else to say, gently prod him or her for further information using the proficiency scale as a prompt.

• Revisit previous statements: Ask a student to recall topics from earlier in the conversation. Help him or her make connections with the current topic by asking, “How is what you said earlier affected by what we’re talking about now?” Or, you might simply ask the student to explain a previous topic over again. Revisiting a topic can help the student recall information he or she missed the first time around.

• Ask the student to defend conclusions: When a student draws an inference, makes a prediction, or otherwise states a conclusion, ask him or her to defend or justify the statement. Explore gaps in reasoning by asking, “How did you form that conclusion from this particular information?” Encourage him or her to think about alternative possibilities by asking, “How might these same events have resulted in a different outcome?” or “What sort of information might disprove your conclusion?”

Observations of Students

The teacher observes students interacting with the content and assigns a score that represents their level of knowledge or skill regarding the specific topic observed. Students may display their proficiency through demonstration or verbally in response to the teacher’s questions. For example, a teacher may observe a student incorrectly executing the order of operations when working a mathematics problem. The teacher might point out the mistake and then observe the student rework the problem with the correct method.

A template, like the one in figure 2.3, can help to record your observations.

Source: Marzano Research, 2016.

Figure 2.3: Student observation chart.

Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.

Student-Generated Assessments

The teacher invites students to devise ways they will demonstrate competence on a particular topic at a particular level of the proficiency scale. Student-generated assessments provide a wide variety of ways in which students can demonstrate competence. Use the template in figure 2.4 to help guide students in planning for their assessment.

Source: Marzano Research, 2016.

Figure 2.4: Student-generated assessment planning guide.

Response Patterns

The teacher identifies response patterns at score 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 levels as opposed to adding up points to create an overall score on an assessment. This generative score indicates the content on which students are doing well and the content on which they must improve to move to the next level. There are three approaches a teacher might use to examine response patterns.

1. Percentage scores: In this method, the teacher computes percentage scores for each score level. For example, say a student acquires 88 percent of the possible points for the score 2.0 level, 50 percent of the points for the score 3.0 level, and 15 percent of the points for the score 4.0 level. Examining the overall pattern, the teacher then determines how well the student performed overall in reference to the scale. This is done by making decisions about the student’s proficiency moving from score 2.0 through score 4.0. The score 2.0 percentage is 88 percent, so the teacher concludes that the student obtained at least a score of 2.0 on the assessment. Next, the student’s percentage score for the 3.0 content was 50 percent. The teacher concludes that this is not enough to warrant an overall score of 3.0, but it is enough to warrant a score of 2.5. The teacher stops at this point. If a student has not provided enough evidence to warrant a score at one level, then he or she is not scored at the next level up.

2. Response codes: With this approach, each student’s response on each item is coded as correct, partially correct, or incorrect, as opposed to assigning points to each item. For more specificity, a teacher can use high partial and low partial in place of partially correct. After scoring individual items, the teacher determines the pattern of responses and assigns a score accordingly. For example, if a student’s answers are correct on all items of the score 2.0 section of the test, partially correct on two items of the score 3.0 section of the test, correct on the third item of the score 3.0 section, and incorrect on the two items of the score 4.0 section of the test, that student would receive a score of 2.5.

3. Flowcharts: A flowchart is a type of diagram that represents a process. Steps are placed in boxes, and the boxes are connected with arrows, leading one through a progression of boxes based on a series of answers to yes or no questions. Using a flowchart, teachers can easily, consistently, and uniformly score the assessments of the whole class. Teachers can use the flowchart in figure 2.5 to score an assessment using a proficiency scale.

Monitoring Element 5

Specific student responses and behaviors allow the teacher to determine whether this element is being implemented effectively and producing the desired effects.

• Students can explain what the score they received on an assessment means relative to a specific progression of knowledge.

• Students can explain what their grades mean in terms of their status in specific topics.

• Students propose ways they can demonstrate their level of proficiency on a scale.

Use this list to monitor student responses to element 5.

To monitor your own use of this element, use the scale in figure 2.6 in combination with the reproducible “Tracking Teacher Actions: Using Formal Assessments of Individual Students” (page 38). As with other proficiency scales, level 3 or higher is the goal.

The following examples describe what each level of the scale might look like in the classroom.

• Not Using (0): A teacher does not use assessments that address the content that is being taught.

• Beginning (1): A teacher conducts formal assessments of individual students and records their scores in the gradebook, but he does not frequently use those assessments to provide students with helpful feedback about their progress toward learning goals.

Figure 2.5: Flowchart for proficiency scale.

Figure 2.6: Self-rating scale for element 5—Using formal assessments of individual students.

• Developing (2): A teacher conducts frequent formal assessments of individual students and records their scores in the gradebook. She provides students with clear feedback about their progress, though she does not monitor whether students respond to that feedback with improved understanding of the content.

• Applying (3): A teacher conducts frequent formal assessments of individual students and records their scores in the gradebook. He provides them with clear feedback about their progress, and his monitoring of their assessment scores allows him to refine his classroom instruction for further improvement.

• Innovating (4): A teacher uses various strategies to conduct frequent formal assessments of individual students in order to provide them with clear feedback that will help them improve their understanding of the content. When her classroom observations reveal that one of her students seems to be struggling with the assessments, she seeks alternative forms of assessment that provide the student with different ways to demonstrate his understanding.

Action Steps

Use the “Tracking Teacher Actions” reproducibles that follow (pages 37–38) to monitor your implementation of each element in this chapter.

Additionally, visit the appendix (page 329) for the reproducible “Tracking Progress Over Time” (page 330), which helps teachers set goals related to their proficiency with each element and track their progress toward these goals over the course of a unit, semester, or year. Also, the “Strategy Reflection Log” (page 331) in the appendix provides a space to write down your thoughts and reflect on the implementation process for specific strategies related to each element. Finally, visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for both student surveys and teacher surveys, the results of which provide feedback about your proficiency with each element.

Tracking Teacher Actions: Using Informal Assessments of the Whole Class

The teacher can use this form to plan his or her usage of strategies related to the element of using informal assessments of the whole class.

Source: Adapted from Marzano Research. (2016). Marzano compendium of instructional strategies. Centennial, CO: Author.

The Handbook for the New Art and Science of Teaching © 2019 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download this free reproducible.

Tracking Teacher Actions: Using Formal Assessments of Individual Students

The teacher can use this form to plan his or her usage of strategies related to the element of using formal assessments of individual students.

Source: Adapted from Marzano Research. (2016). Marzano compendium of instructional strategies. Centennial, CO: Author.

The Handbook for the New Art and Science of Teaching © 2019 Solution Tree Press • SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction to download this free reproducible.