Mark Abramson for Education Week
2015
Tiffany Mungin, a graduating student from East Side Community High School, presents a long-term research project about U.S. soldiers during the
Vietnam War to David Vazquez, principal at the Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists, left, and Ben Wides, a 12th grade history teacher at
East Side Community High School in New York.
Classroom
Assessment
Editor’s Note: As efforts to redefine assessment
gain steam, educators are trying new approaches
to monitoring student progress. In this Spotlight,
explore how teachers are auditing their
classroom assessments, using formative
assessment tools, and engaging students through
self-assessment.
CONTENTS
2 N.Y.C. High School
Strives for ‘Authentic’
Assessment
4 English Teachers’ Group
Seeks to ‘Reclaim
Assessment’
Commentary
5 To Improve Assessment,
Invest in the Classroom
5 The Role of Performance
Assessments in
Fostering Opportunities
for Deeper Learning
7 Students Self-Assess
For Mastery
7 3 Reflective Activities
to Align Assessment
8 Five Formative
Assessment Tools
Recommended by
Teacher Experts
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Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
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Published July 17, 2015, in Education Week
N.Y.C. High School Strives
for ‘Authentic’ Assessment
By Catherine Gewertz
T New York City
line.
Unlike most New York state seniors, who
vied for their diplomas by taking the state’s
standardized tests, Ms. Mungin had to write
a history research paper and an analytic
essay in English/language arts. She also had
to conduct an original science experiment
and undertake an applied-mathematics
project in order to graduate. The 18-yearold’s work would have to be evaluated by at
least two teachers, and she would have to
defend it in formal presentations to panels
of educators.
This is the way mastery is assessed at Tiffany’s school, East Side Community High
School in Manhattan. It’s one of 48 schools
in the New York Performance Standards
Consortium, which have permission to
use projects for graduation instead of the
state-mandated standardized tests known
as the Regents. As national debate intensifies about testing, East Side High offers a
glimpse into an alternative way of sizing up
student learning.
There’s reason to pay attention to that alternative, too. Research on the consortium
schools shows that while they serve larger
proportions of low-achieving students than
New York City schools in general, they produce higher graduation and college-enrollment rates. These students show staying
power in college, too: Tracking data on consortium students shows that three-quarters
enroll for a second year, a little higher than
the national persistence rate.
At East Side, 82 percent of students graduate high school within four years, while citywide, that figure is 68 percent. An average of
69 percent of East Side graduates enroll in
postsecondary programs within six months
of graduating, compared with 51 percent
citywide. Of the East Side students who go
to college, three-quarters enroll in four-year
institutions.
The consortium’s approach to assessment
Mark Abramson for Education Week
iffany Mungin spent many nervous
weeks researching and writing her
paper about the Vietnam War. Her
high school graduation was on the
dates back to the mid-1990s, when a group
of schools won a waiver from the state department of education to use more “authentic” ways of assessing student learning. Part
of the burgeoning small-schools movement
in New York City, those schools sought a
more personalized way of teaching students,
and emphasized project-based learning, and
application of ideas to real-life things.
Facing the Evaluators
Ms. Mungin’s 60-minute social studies
presentation reflected those values. She had
stepped outside the main focus of her law
and justice class to research something that
intrigued her: why so many U.S. soldiers in
Vietnam turned against the war they were
fighting. On a mid-June morning, she took
her seat to present and defend her work,
sitting opposite her teacher, Ben Wides, and
the principal of a Bronx high school, David
Vazquez. Both had already read her eightpage paper according to the consortium’s
shared grading rubrics, evaluating her analysis, her viewpoint and use of evidence, her
sourcing, organization, and “voice.”
Using the Power Point deck on her laptop,
Ms. Mungin presented the highlights of her
argument. She said that soldiers turned
Tiffany Mungin, a graduating
student from East Side
Community High School,
presents a long-term
research project about U.S.
soldiers during the Vietnam
War to David Vazquez,
principal at the Bronx Studio
School for Writers and
Artists, left, and Ben Wides,
a 12th grade history teacher
at East Side Community High
School in New York.
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Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
against the war because of the harsh conditions they confronted in Vietnam, and because they came to believe their own government was lying to them about the war.
Both men took notes as they listened.
Then the questions began: Can you be a
little more specific about the things the soldiers felt the government was lying about?
Who was lying? You mentioned that Vietnam was under a dictatorship; what do you
mean by that? Your paper mentions how
these soldiers experienced very different
conditions and support than during World
War II. Can you elaborate? Was it wrong for
Americans who protested the war to blame
the soldiers who had gone to fight it?
The two educators took Ms. Mungin outside the scope of her paper, too, asking her to
make connections between that period and
the Iraq war, and to expand on her thoughts
about why governments lie, and whether
they still do so today.
They thanked her and asked her to step
into the hall. Mr. Wides and Mr. Vazquez
shared their thoughts and notes on her presentation, judging her opening remarks and
her response to questions separately. They
evaluated them against the multiple factors
in the consortium’s shared rubrics, rating
each one “outstanding,” “good,” “competent”
or “needs revision.” They agreed that her
thesis should be clearer, and that she should
strengthen her evidence that soldiers were
actually being lied to, not just feeling deceived.
Shifting from foot to foot in the hallway,
Ms. Mungin said it was “nerve-wracking”
to wait for their findings. “They didn’t show
any facial expression, so I couldn’t tell, was
I doing good or not?” she said.
As it turned out, she worried needlessly.
When Mr. Wides and Mr. Vazquez invited
the teenager back into the classroom, they
told her that her project met the standard
for high school graduation. They detailed
their feedback on each aspect of the paper
and presentation, and most of it fell in the
“good” or “competent” range. The only revision required for graduation would be properly formatting her bibliography. Their other
suggestions were optional fixes she could
make to improve the paper, which counts for
30 percent of her social studies grade.
Working Up To It
Students at East Side spend months, even
years, getting ready for these presentations.
The school enrolls 650 students in grades 6
to 12, and all students do 30-minute “roundtable” presentations in their core subjects
twice a year. Requiring analysis and oral
explanation, they’re smaller versions of the
high-stakes projects that Ms. Mungin did
to graduate. Students who spend all seven
years at East Side will produce about 50
such offerings by the time they receive diplomas.
In one classroom in mid-June, 9th grade
science students were presenting roundtables to groups of teachers and fellow students. One girl was explaining a home energy audit she had conducted, and another
was explaining how she had used a sound
meter to monitor the volume in an iPhone,
an inquiry into averting possible hearing
damage. Around the corner, an 8th grade
math student stood in front of two teachers and a fellow student, using an overhead
video projector to explain how he did the
calculations to expand an image by 50 percent.
Staunch advocates of East Side’s way of
learning, and testing, argue that it builds
not only content knowledge, but the skills
to apply it to real-life situations, to make arguments and interpretations with it, and to
present and defend it orally. Principal Mark
Federman said that those skills—even more
than the content—offer students enduring
strengths in college.
“Especially for kids who are used to feeling marginalized, to be able to walk into a
college and speak up, to tell an adult what
you think and why, creates a sense of entitlement, an empowerment, they didn’t
have before,” he said. “And that carries over
to things like getting what you need at the
housing office. Getting your work noticed.
They can advocate for themselves.”
Those strengths may be showcased in the
performance assessment, but they’re built
through a different kind of teaching, consortium advocates said.
“If you want kids to write well, to handle
multiple points of view, do science and not
just read it, apply math and not just do it,
read books and discuss various aspects of
literature, then you have to teach them in
a way that helps kids get those kinds of
skills,” said Ann Cook, who founded one
of New York’s best-known small schools,
Urban Academy, and helps lead the consortium.
“That means a different kind of teaching. Inquiry-based, emphasizing thinking
in depth rather than coverage. You have to
find a way to have students take ownership,
so they care about the projects they do, and
the papers they write. You have to create a
culture of revision, like, ‘That’s a good point,
extend it. Do another draft.’”
That’s the culture Javier Montero came
from as an East Side High graduate. Now
a rising junior at the State University of
New York at New Paltz, Mr. Montero has a
3.0 grade-point average and plans a career
in mechanical engineering. He said that
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3
If you want kids to write
well, to handle multiple
points of view, do
science and not just read
it, apply math and not
just do it, read books and
discuss various aspects
of literature,
then you have to teach
them in a way that helps
kids get those kinds of
skills.”
Ann Cook Founder, Urban Academy,
New York
Back to Table of Contents
Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
while fellow students in his English
composition classes “freaked out”
about writing five-page papers, he
was calm, because he was used to
writing papers two or three times
that long.
“The way I study for my math and
science exams now is the way I prepared for my roundtables and [endof-year presentations] at East Side,”
he said. “I would study everything
from the entire semester, not just
stuff for my project, because I knew
there would be a lot of questions and
answers, and I had to know everything.”
‘Ready to Excel’ in College
Darryl Jones is the senior associate director of admissions at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.
He recruits students from East Side
High, and he says their college preparation stands out as solid.
“I have sat in on classes, and the
teachers teach the classes as if they
were teaching college,” he said.
“They emphasize more thought,
more reasoning, more critical analysis. There is a lot of discussion in the
classroom, and less is done by rote
memory, so these kids are ready to
excel in college. They’re not sitting
passively and just absorbing a lecture. They’re learning to ask the
right questions. When you look at
highly selective colleges, that’s what
it’s all about.”
Gettysburg is one of a growing
number of colleges that make admissions tests like the ACT and the
SAT optional, instead evaluating
students on their grades, essays, and
other things. But selective colleges
that require national admissions
tests can pose barriers to some consortium students, since many come
from low-income families with little
history of formal education, factors linked to lower scores on such
exams. Nearly nine in 10 East Side
students take the SAT, but their
average score on the math and
critical reading portions totals 863
out of 1600. Their average score on
New York State’s English Regents
exam¬—the only one of the five
state-mandated exams that consortium students must take—is 67 out
of 100. The passing score is 65.
Advocates of the consortium’s approach to learning and testing contend that those results show a mis-
match between the deep learning in
the network’s classrooms and the
kinds of knowledge that are tested
on the Regents, which are dominated by multiple-choice questions
and require no writing longer than
a short essay.
Strands of skepticism have dogged
the schools’ approach to declaring
graduation-level competency, however. One state department of education staff member who is familiar
with the consortium’s work said that
in most cases, the assessments are
“quite rigorous,” but in some, the
interactions during testing have
raised doubts about the tests’ validity.
“You see these cases where a
teacher, because she cares about the
student, is walking her through her
presentation, pushing the quality
of what she knows she can deliver.
It’s not cheating, but it’s a confused
interaction,” said the staffer, who
asked not to be named. “It’s not totally about proficiency and mastery.
It’s about what you can produce
with the right support. Many of the
kids who can do it are ready for college. But many can’t do it without
the support, and that support won’t
be there when they go to college.”
Tom Mullen, one of East Side
High’s assistant principals, conceded that the distinction between
assessment and instruction can be
“a touchy point,” largely because the
consortium is grounded on the belief
that roundtables and year-end presentations are as much a learning
experience as classroom instruction.
“Critics say they’re fluffy,” he said.
“It’s tough: If we wade too much into
having [year-end presentations] be
a teachable moment, they won’t be a
valid assessment. We have to watch
that line. But we do.
“We’re teaching, and assessing,
what we think really matters. And
judging by our students’ experiences
in college, I’d say we’re onto something.”
Coverage of the implementation of
college- and career-ready standards
is supported in part by a grant from
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Education Week retains sole editorial
control over the content of this coverage.
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Published March 3, 2015, in Education Week’s
Curriculum Matters Blog
English Teachers’
Group Seeks to
‘Reclaim Assessment’
W By Catherine Gewertz
ith anti-testing battles simmering all over
the country, the National Council of Teachers of English is advancing a message that
seems to go against the grain: Reclaim as-
sessment.
The 104-year-old association of English/language arts
teachers has been hard at work on a project to protect
and preserve assessment. And let’s be clear: They’re not
talking about testing.
This organization, whose members are maniacally
devoted to wordsmithing and all the other literary arts,
wants you to feel the difference between testing—the
standardized exercises for which thousands of teachers
prep students—and assessment, a carefully thought out
set of practices that can gauge each child’s learning and
reshape instruction to enhance that learning.
The NCTE’s Assessment Story Project has been reaching out to teachers in K-12 and college to find out about
what kinds of assessment are valuable to their practice.
It’s conducting a survey, in which it seeks—no shock
here—narrative responses about the kinds of practices
that help teachers respond best to students as they learn.
Teachers are welcome to share their thoughts through
the five-question survey, which is still available online.
When the survey period closes, the NCTE will compile
the responses into a report it hopes will offer something
of a profile of the kinds of assessment practices English/
language arts teachers consider important.
In a recent online chat that NCTE hosted about reclaiming assessment, teachers’ responses illustrated the
distinction between testing and assessment. Here’s an
example:
“Literacy assessment is starkly different than literacy
testing. One informs my practice; the other interrupts it.”
—@KevinEnglish
A post on the NCTE blog offers a few early highlights
of teachers’ responses to the survey about assessment.
What begins to emerge is a portrait of formative assessment, a set of practices that are woven into a teacher’s
daily work to inform its shape and to support students
as they work toward mastery.
That kind of assessment, however, is typically overshadowed in school by the other kind: standardized testing. Even as we speak, Congress is debating the role that
testing will play in K-12 education as it weighs a rewrite
of the No Child Left Behind Act. What it decides could
tell us a good deal about the relative influences that testing and assessment will exert on teachers’ day-to-day
work.
Back to Table of Contents
Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
Published October 6, 2014, in Education Week’s Learning Deeply Blog
Commentary
To Improve Assessment,
Invest in the Classroom
I By Heidi Andrade
was pleased to moderate the discussion
at Jobs for the Future’s launch event, on
September 30, for its new Deeper Learning Research Series of white papers.
The ideas about teaching, learning, and assessment presented by the panelists--David
Conley and James Taylor--are not new or
radical, but they are critically important and
extremely timely.
Why “not new”? Because we have known
for decades that it is necessary and entirely possible to teach students to master
core content, think critically, communicate
effectively, work collaboratively, and manage their own learning. These are enduring
educational goals with ample support from
research, and it makes perfect sense that we
are still talking about them.
What was so exciting about the Deeper
Learning event was the fact that we are now
talking in concrete terms about what comes
next in terms of assessment in this country.
The educational community is disillusioned
and exhausted by NCLB-inspired testing, and it is ready for alternatives. As the
Deeper Learning panel highlighted, there
is no shortage of good ideas and classroomtested practices available to us. We know
what good assessment looks like (as my colleagues and I describe in this 2012 paper for
JFF), we have many of the tools needed to
do it, and we are in the process of creating
coherent systems that make it practical.
A shift to better assessment will mean
investing less in standardized testing and
much more in classroom assessment--the
minute-to-minute and day-to-day assessments that teachers and students use to
get meaningful feedback on learning and
to make productive adjustments to instruction and studying. High quality assessments
based on classroom tests, assignments,
homework, projects, portfolios, and exhibitions have been shown to have a significant,
positive influence on learning and even on
students’ motivation. This too makes sense,
because the basic idea is simple:
Good assessment informs both teachers
and students of where they are going (the
learning goals and performance targets for
a particular class and task), where they are
now in relation to those goals and targets,
and what they need to do to close any gaps
between the goals and their current performance. “Ah-ha!” moments abound when
classroom assessment is structured to provide guidance, not just a rating or ranking.
For teachers, those ah-ha moments often
arise in response to clear information about
the exact difficulties their students are having and precisely what they can do to help
them. And for students, the ah-ha moments
often sound something like this: “Now I
know what to do!” That’s when learning
happens.
This is all lovely, but of course there’s a
rub: Too few states, districts, and schools
have invested in classroom assessment in
general and teachers’ assessment literacy in
particular. In order for assessment that actually promotes learning (not just measures
it) to become widespread, we need resources.
Thus, I hereby propose taking a small fraction of the billions of dollars states currently
spend on standardized testing and devoting
it to the development of powerful classroom
assessments. Who’s with me?
This post is by Heidi Andrade, School of
Education Associate Dean for Academic Affairs,
and Associate Professor of Educational Psychology
and Methodology, University at Albany, Albany,
NY.
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Published May 6, 2015,
in Education Week’s
Learning Deeply Blog
Commentary
The Role of
Performance
Assessments
in Fostering
Opportunities
for Deeper
Learning
By Elizabeth Leisy Stosich
T here has been growing interest
among educators and policymakers in using classroom-based performance assessments as a means
for promoting deeper learning among students. Since performance assessments
require students to construct an original
response, rather than simply recognize a
correct answer, they can assess many of the
so-called “21st century skills”--critical thinking, inquiry, communication, collaboration-that are essential for success in our rapidly
changing world but poorly measured by
many assessments.
I recently had the opportunity to learn
from a team of four experienced fourthgrade teachers while conducting research
on how teachers in high-poverty schools
are changing their practices to meet the
Common Core State Standards. These four
women were early adopters of the Common
Core State Standards, and they were all
learning to use performance assessments
for the first time. These teachers described
using performance assessments that engaged students in conducting research,
planning for and leading debates about real
world problems, and communicating their
ideas through multimedia presentations.
For these teachers, the process of using
model performance assessments and developing their own performance assessments
helped them learn how to create authentic
learning experiences that would prepare
their students for success in adult life.
When these teachers first saw a model
Back to Table of Contents
Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
curricular unit and performance assessment,
all four teachers viewed the materials as too
difficult for their students. A special education
teacher on the team described the experience:
“The students had to look at political cartoons. They had to read articles. My first
thought was, this is way too hard for my students. But we [our teacher team] spent months
on it. We just picked apart every article.... We
used graphic organizers. Then they were able
to meet those Common Core standards of writing opinion pieces using evidence from the articles. I was very shocked at how well my students did. I feel like the Common Core holds
you to these high standards and these high
expectations, and you’d be surprised what you
can do and what your students can do if you
stick to these standards.”
This teacher and her three colleagues all
described changing their expectations for the
kind of work they and their students could accomplish after their success engaging students
in this in-depth learning experience and performance assessment. Using, developing, scoring,
and analyzing information from performance
assessments can serve as a powerful learning
experience for teachers about the implications
of standards for their classroom practice and
support them in learning to teach to the more
demanding expectations of the Common Core
State Standards. Although using performance
assessments for the first time required a great
deal of collaborative work for teachers, they
viewed this extra work as worthwhile because
of the meaningful learning it promoted among
their students.
What limited opportunities for deeper learning among students in these teachers’ classrooms? The new state tests. The district and
state in which these teachers worked encouraged teachers to engage students in extended
projects and performance assessments in their
classrooms. However, the state developed its
own end-of-year assessments that were described as “aligned” to the Common Core State
Standards but relied heavily on multiplechoice test items designed to assess discrete
knowledge and skills rather than the application of this knowledge. These four teachers
viewed the state tests and their efforts to use
performance assessments in their classrooms
as, in the words of one teacher, “two totally different things.” This teacher explained, “We’ll
start off doing Common Core up until February, and then it’s test prep.” In her view, teaching to the Common Core meant engaging students in rich and authentic opportunities for
learning and application; whereas, the end-ofyear state assessments were a one-time event
that required frequent practice with test-prep
workbooks.
In contrast to the state assessments described above, the new consortia assessments,
the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consor-
tium and the Partnership for Assessment of
Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC),
include short, constructed-response items and
more extended performance tasks that allow
students to apply their knowledge or explain
their answer. The consortia assessments are
a great improvement over many previous assessments. Nevertheless, the consortia assessments cannot measure students’ abilities to
plan and conduct extended research, collaborate with others to define and solve problems,
communicate orally, or use scientific tools.
Systems of assessment that draw on multiple
forms of assessment are necessary to create a
more complete picture of students’ readiness
for college and career.
As David Conley and Linda Darling-Hammond have documented, when state systems
of assessment focus on narrow measures of
performance--multiple-choice items measuring discrete bits of information--rather than
opportunities for students to demonstrate a
broad range of knowledge and skills needed
for success in college and career, assessments
constrain rather than promote opportunities
for deeper learning. This can have particularly
harmful consequences for students in highpoverty schools, since these schools are typically under the greatest pressure to improve
students’ performance on assessments.
In some states, the work these four teachers were doing to engage their students in
authentic opportunities for applying their
knowledge through performance assessment
is an essential element of their systems of assessment. The Innovation Lab Network’s (ILN)
Performance Assessment Project, a working
group of the Council of Chief State School
Officers (CCSSO), supports member states
in developing systems of assessment that include performance tasks designed to measure
deeper learning. Led by the Stanford Center
for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE),
the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE), and the Educational
Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), the ILN’s
Performance Assessment Project is developing
an online resource bank of performance tasks
and the resources that support their use, including high-quality performance assessments
that have been piloted with teachers; professional development resources in developing,
using, and scoring performance assessments;
and policy frameworks for integrating performance assessment in systems of assessment.
The ILN’s Performance Assessment Resource
Bank will include high-quality tasks that engage students in multiple-step and extended
performances, such as researching and developing mathematical models to write an article
on the rising cost of college tuition. As tasks
become more complex and require greater student direction they assess more complex and
integrated aspects of learning and require the
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planning, problem-solving, and persistence
that are necessary for success in the real world.
ILN states have already taken important
steps in developing systems of assessment
that provide more coherent guidance for the
meaningful learning opportunities in which
they expect all students to engage. For example, New Hampshire’s approach to developing
a system of assessments is based on the principle that “large-scale assessment should signal the kinds of learning expectations coherent
with the intent of the standards and the kinds
of learning demonstrations we would like to
see in classrooms.” New Hampshire’s Performance Assessment for Competency Education
(PACE) system uses common performance
tasks with high technical quality and locally
designed performance tasks with clear technical guidelines to assess how well students can
apply complex skills and transfer knowledge
to demonstrate essential competencies for
career and college readiness. This approach
integrates assessment in students’ classroom
learning experiences and reduces the level of
standardized testing.
Similarly, Kentucky has multiple efforts
under way to incorporate performance tasks
in their systems of assessment. Education
leaders in Kentucky recognize that multiplechoice tests cannot measure students’ abilities
to engage in hands-on investigations or use
scientific tools and are working with teachers
to develop performance tasks that assess the
Next Generation Science Standards.
For students to have opportunities for deeper
learning, state systems of assessment must
include opportunities for applying knowledge
and skills to the real problems students will
face in college and career. The Innovation Lab
Network’s Performance Assessment Resource
Bank will launch at the end of this summer
and provide high-quality resources--performance tasks, task development guidance,
scorer training resources, policy recommendations, and more--to support states and districts
in designing systems of assessment that promote meaningful opportunities for learning
and application.
This post is by Elizabeth Leisy Stosich, research and
policy fellow at the Stanford Center for Opportunity
Policy in Education (SCOPE).
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Smart classroom assessment: identify skills & check mastery
Identify skills for learning
Assess skill mastery and retention
Effective classroom assessment helps you make timely
instructional decisions for all students, even when
you have diverse learning needs in a classroom. By
identifying precicesly which skills each student is ready
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Quality classroom assessment gives you insight
into what skills a student has mastered. This crucial
information lets you differentiate instruction based
on mastery of skills that build toward college and
career readiness.
Short, adaptive assessments
An easy, informative tool
The Skills Navigator classroom assessment system
makes it easy to do just that with the Skills Locator test.
You can use the Skills Locator test to precisely identify
the skills each student is ready to work on, then deliver
the instruction every student needs—helping you close
achievement gaps and support every student.
The Skills Navigator classroom assessment system
offers a Mastery Check tool that’s remarkably
efficient, so you can focus your time on teaching the
skills students are ready to learn.
• Typically takes 15 minutes or less
• Identifies the math, language usage, reading
comprehension, and vocabulary skills a
student needs to work on
• Can be taken any time, any place with an
internet connection—no need to test groups
of students together or actively proctor a
student’s use
• Computer adaptive to accurately assess
students performing on, above, or below
grade level
• The test’s adaptive engine will quickly
hone in on the student’s true level of
achievement, regardless of grade level
• Links to instructional resources tied directly
to the skill area a student is ready to learn
• Can be used as little or as often as necessary
to monitor student progress and identify
new skills for students to learn
• Takes just five minutes or less to assess
most skills; takes about 10 minutes for
reading comprehension
• Identifies which math, language usage,
reading comprehension, and vocabulary
skills a student has mastered
• Can be taken any time, any place with an
internet connection—no need to test groups
of students together or actively proctor a
student’s use
• Links to curated instructional resources
aligned to skills
• Can be used as often as necessary to quickly
evaluate mastery
• Can even be used to re-test mastered skills
to check retention
• Skills can be marked as mastered based
on student performance in the classroom,
allowing you to track their progress without
unnecessary tests
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Actionable data at a glance
A solid foundation for assessment
The dynamic user dashboards and reports generated
by Skills Navigator give you access to a wealth of
valuable information, presented in a way that gives
you what you need when you need it. This allows
students to engage with the skills they’re ready to
learn, for teachers to get a clear picture of how their
classrooms are performing, and for administrators to
make critical resource decisions.
Skills Navigator is powered by a proprietary skills
framework developed by the education experts at NWEA,
who unpacked standards into over 1,000 skills that build
foundations for college and career readiness in math,
language usage, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.
They then organized into strands that identify a precise
area of learning and arranged the skills in each strand
into a logical instructional sequence for grades K – 8. This
innovative approach makes it easy to monitor the student
progress on standards-aligned skill strands.
• Administrator dashboards show key high-level
district data, as well as how specific programs
and schools are performing
• Teacher dashboards show at a glance what
students are working on and ready to learn
• Easily drill up or down to access various levels
of data aggregation in mere seconds
• Administrators and teachers can easily
group students by common skill status for
differentiated instruction
• Student dashboards display assigned tasks,
progress, and goals in a fun, engaging way
Progress monitoring for RTI:
an essential tool
Skills Navigator is built on the principles of a Response
to Intervention (RTI) progress monitor for measuring
skills mastery as defined by the National Center for
Intensive Intervention (NCII). Skills Navigator allows
you to understand, at a glance, which students are
responding to remediation efforts and which students
need increased levels of intervention. As a Tier II
intervention progress monitoring tool, Skills Navigator
helps educators:
• monitor progress of students in RTI programs
frequently
• direct students to instructional resources
tailored to exactly what they’re ready to learn
• assess the effectiveness of RTI programs with
solid student performance data
• track how students respond to changes in
intervention strategies
The grade level math, vocabulary, and language usage
skills within the framework are assessed with nearly
10,000 high-quality multiple choice items. Reading
comprehension strands are genre-based and assessed
via common stimulus passage and item sets that use
longer passages to provide rich data on higher order
understanding text while keeping testing time short.
All items have undergone rigorous review by NWEA
educational specialists for content quality, alignment
accuracy, and bias sensitivity.
Links to instruction:
tailored to each student’s needs
See the skills a student needs to work on and
immediately assign differentiated instruction to help
that student grow. Skills Navigator provides direct links
to thousands of curated online educational resources for
every skill measured.
• The resources are curated by Knovation®,
so you can be certain what you assign is
appropriately aligned to grade and standard
• These resources are available for you to assign
and students to work on from anywhere with
an internet connection—even at home
• Students can see all their assigned
instructional resources from their dashboards,
making it easy to get started on their learning
any time, any place
• You can track which instructional resources
any student has accessed
Bring better assessment to your classrooms this school year
Call 866-654-3246 or visit NWEA.org/SkillsNavigator
Back to Table of Contents
Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
Published June 9, 2015,
in Education Week Teacher
Commentary
Students Self-Assess
For Mastery
By Starr Sackstein
Y ou might be wondering if students are
capable of grading themselves after a
year worth of work.
You may be asking if they can objectively review their growth and then take all of
their understanding of mastery and parlay it into
a letter grade that suits the old system.
Perhaps a year or two ago, I too would scoff at
the idea of students being able to really reflect on
their abilities and determine an honest level of
mastery that would yield an appropriate grade.
However, after a year of breaking down the traditional mindset, it was time to put the full power
into my students’ hands.
Uneasily, I let go, providing them ample opportunity to review their body of work with a formal
checklist and set of standards and instead of
being the arbiter, I was an attentive listener.
Students were given a choice as to how they
wanted to do their self-assessments: written,
voice, video, screencast or in-person conference.
Choices were made, schedules adjusted and then
students were provided time to prepare.
Looking back on their body of work, they were
encouraged to review reflections, feedback and
their e-portfolio work so they were able to provide
evidence of their level of mastery.
So far I’ve been blown away by the level of candor and self-awareness my students have displayed. With varying levels of preparedness, I’ve
eagerly listened to them share their ideas about
their growth.
After listening to the students speak and also
reviewing their notes or written assessments, I’m
happy to have my own opportunity to reflect and
adjust the curriculum as needed. There have been
many things I would consider a success this year,
but I have a way to go for full adoption of this
growth mindset.
Students, parents and colleagues are eager to
maintain the status quo if for no other reason
than its simplicity. If anything has convinced me
that this way is a better, more comprehensive way
to track student growth, it’s the students’ ability
to articulate actual learning.
Too often we are afraid that kids will fall short
in this area, but it just isn’t the case. If we provide many opportunities for them to practice and
meaningfully reflect throughout a year, then the
growth is exponential and far more meaningful
than a teacher provided assessment.
n
edweek.org
7
Published April 29, 2015, in Education Week’s Finding Common Ground Blog
Commentary
3 Reflective Activities
to Align Assessment
I By Jennifer Borgioli
magine looking up at the night sky on
a spring night with no light pollution
to mar the view, nothing but sparkles
and twinkles overhead. Some stars
appear bright enough that you could
reach out and touch them, some are
muted and subtle against the black backdrop. Numerous constellations are easily
identifiable. Suddenly, an asteroid comes
careening through the sky, blocking out
the twinkles, pulling your attention away
from the constellations and lovely sparkles.
To most students moving through public education, their experience is very
much like that night sky. Each light represents a moment in which he or she is
asked to show what they know or have
learned, a moment that adults refer to as
“an assessment”.
Consider a middle school student:
nFirst Period - she writes her findings in a
lab report in Science,
Period - she completes a reader’s
response in ELA.
nThird Period - her writing conference
with her teacher is recorded so she can
review it later.
nFourth Period - She uses a graphic organizer to cite her sources for a discussion
in Social Studies.
nFifth Period - Lunch to catch her breath...
nSixth Period - Completes a ticket out the
door in Art class summarizing what she
found surprising that day.
nSeventh Period - In PE, she gives her
opinion about a new game they played
by using her phone to respond to a survey.
nSecond
Like the stars, each assessment is independent but also part of a larger pattern
and system. Some of these moments burn
bright and leave a permanent impression. In this case, our student practiced
for that Socratic Seminar for weeks; it
became a veritable north star on her horizon. The quick text after PE, though,
was more muted, barely noticeable. It was
just something quick she did to share her
thinking with her teacher.
For a student, a constellation is analogous to an individual teacher’s assessment system. Not all assessments may
be formalized, but each teacher has routines, habits, and techniques that provide
a shape or structure to his or her assessment system.
Meanwhile, we’ve increasingly seen the
effects of trying to replicate that careening asteroid; of trying to add more and
more asteroid clones into the night sky,
making it harder to see the stars, or in
some cases, even crowding them out so
that they are all but gone.
Documenting and reflecting upon a
classroom assessment system through
an audit or review is akin to setting up
a telescope and creating a star map of a
constellation and the surrounding sky.
Reflective Activities for Teachers
An individual classroom teacher can
take stock of his or her own classroom
system by engaging in a series of reflective activities. The first is to generate a
list of all classroom assessments used
during a specific time period (i.e., month,
quarter, marking period, semester, etc.).
The list should include all of the different ways in which the teacher has collected evidence of student learning. (e.g.,
worksheet on pivotal battles on the Western front; recording of students doing a
Socratic seminar around the essential
question, “Is war inevitable?”; World War
II test; For Whom the Bell Tolls project;
ticket out the door). The goal is to capture,
in writing, a sampling of the ways students are asked to show what they know
or have learned before, during, and after
instruction.
A second activity involves pondering
questions like: Why did you become a
teacher? What is your goal for your students? Using words, phrases, or pictures,
the teacher should try to capture what
it is he or she hopes students get out of
Back to Table of Contents
Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
being in his or her classroom. The goal of
this step is to invite the teacher to re-connect with what matters to him or her.
The third activity involves comparing the
information generated by the first two activities. That is,in what ways is he or she
measuring what matters? Each assessment
can be coded. Those that align with or help
support the teacher’s educational philosophy can be coded with a check. A check plus
can be used for those assessments that illustrate the teacher’s most valued outcomes
or embody his or her reasons for becoming a
teacher. Finally, a check minus can be used
for assessments that have little or no perceived value to the teacher.
The alignment between a teacher’s philosophy and her or his assessment system can
serve as a first step in taking stock. There
are a variety of other entry points or lenses
teachers could use to enrich or expand their
review. For example, they could look for patterns in the:
n Purposes
for the assessments: when are
most of the assessments administered;
before, during, or after instruction has occurred?
nTypes of assessments used: are the assessments mostly multiple choice? Are
students asked to create products or too
demonstrate or perform what they’ve
learned?
nUsefulness of the assessments: Are assessments structured to give students feedback that helps them get better the next
time they tackle a similar task? Do they
support future curriculum or lesson planning activities?
nFairness of the assessments: Are the assessments as free of bias as possible? Were
steps taken to reduce measurement
error? If a student fails an exam, it’s because of a gap in their learning, not a flaw
in the exam?
nAlignment to standards: Are particular standards targeted? What steps are taken to
ensure that assessments are aligned to
the standards?
Collecting data by doing this kind of a review is just the first step. Some reflective
questions to consider after the analysis include:
nWhat patterns do you notice?
nWhat implications do those patterns hold
for you?
nWhat revisions could you make to the as-
sessments you coded with check minuses
so that you can turn them into checks
and check pluses?
nWho could you share the patterns of your
data with to increase the health and bal-
ance of the assessment systems in your
school?
The powerful thing about this process
is the reminder that, unlike the night sky
which is immovable and outside our sphere
of influence, a classroom assessment system can be tweaked and modified. Even
with (perhaps especially because of) the
brightness of the asteroid, we need to remember that we have much influence over
the learning and assessment experiences
at the classroom level. The act of doing
these kinds of review serve two powerful
purposes. First, it helps teachers and administrators ensure that focus remains on
the stars, the curriculum-embedded assessments, even as attention is captured by the
asteroid. Secondly, it can be the check and
balance to ensure the assessments students
experience are beneficial, useful, and purposeful so that when that asteroid comes
by, it’s a predictable, routine event that does
not distract from the beauty of the stars
and constellations.
n
edweek.org
8
Published June 18, 2015,
in Education Week’s The Startup Blog:
Ed Tech From the Ground Up
Commentary
Five Formative
Assessment
Tools
Recommended
by Teacher
Experts
By Swaroop Raju, co-founder of eduCanon
Y ou just asked a question to your
classroom of 30 students. One
student raises her hand and gives
the correct answer. It would be
easy to assume that your class has gotten
a grasp of the concept and is ready to move
on to the next learning objective. The reality, however, is that one student’s response
does not reflect the overall level of understanding in your classroom.
One possible solution is that you could deliver a quiz to each student. But the grading would take up too much class time and
you’d be left without time to remediate misconceptions the quiz reveals.
Fortunately, there are a handful of tools
that make formative assessments a fast
and fun process. We asked a few teacher
experts what their favorite formative assessment tools are.
1. Socrative
Mike Voth, AP physics teacher,
McKinney, Tex.
“Socrative provides quick and easy formative assessments. It is a great tool for making ALL students think about and respond
to a question or discussion item. It works on
almost every device and is completely free.”
2. TodaysMeet
Samantha Stebbins, high school math
teacher, Riverside, Calif.
Meanwhile, we’ve increasingly seen the
effects of trying to replicate that careening
asteroid; of trying to add more and more
asteroid clones into the night sky, making
it harder to see the stars, or in some cases,
Back to Table of Contents
Education WeeK Spotlight on Classroom Assessment
even crowding out them so that they are
all but gone.
Documenting and reflecting upon a
classroom assessment system through
an audit or review is akin to setting up
a telescope and creating a star map of a
constellation and the surrounding sky.
Reflective Activities for Teachers
An individual classroom teacher can
take stock of his or her own classroom system by engaging in a series of reflective
activities. The first is to generate a list of
all classroom assessments used during a
specific time period (i.e., month, quarter,
marking period, semester, etc.). The list
should include all of the different ways in
which the teacher has collected evidence
of student learning. (e.g., worksheet on
pivotal battles on the Western front; recording of students doing a Socratic seminar around the essential question, “Is war
inevitable?”; World War II test; For Whom
the Bell Tolls project; ticket out the door).
The goal is to capture, in writing, a sampling of the ways in students are asked
to show what they know or have learned
before, during, and after instruction.
A second activity involves pondering
questions like: Why did you become a
teacher? What is your goal for your students? Using words, phrases, or pictures,
“Setting up TodaysMeet literally takes
minutes. After the setup, you have a quick
and easy way to communicate with your
students, deliver formative assessments,
and gauge the efficacy of a lesson.”
3. Plickers
John Greenwood, 4th grade teacher,
Huntsville, Ala.
“Our school hasn’t gone 1-to-1 yet, and
my students don’t have devices they can
bring to class. Plickers is an easy way
for me to get a sense for each student’s
understanding without any fancy tech.
Students hold up a card for their answer
choice and my iPhone camera automatically grades each response, giving me a
quick visual of responses.”
4. Kahoot!
Johnnell Ramlow, 6th grade Englishlanguage arts teacher, Ozark, Mo.
“I use Kahoot! regularly. My students
love the competitive side of this online
quiz game. I love the instant feedback to
know what I need to re-teach or spend
more time on. I also love that I can find
published quizzes to use, or make my
own, or have kids make a quiz—they love
that too.”
5. eduCanon
Trent Goldsmith, accounting, economics
and business teacher, Lansing, Mich.
“I use eduCanon in my classroom due
to its compatibility with a blended classroom. EduCanon allows my students to
create a ‘path’ and to take ownership for
their own learning of concepts. It frees me
up to teach application of these concepts
in class. Furthermore, it allows me to
check for understanding (through questioning during the videos), and it allows
students to ‘get caught up’ if they are
gone.”
n
edweek.org
9
Copyright ©2015 by Editorial
Projects in Education, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication shall
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted by any
means, electronic or otherwise,
without the written permission
of the copyright holder.
Readers may make up to 5 print
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Published by Editorial Projects
in Education, Inc.
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Phone: (301) 280-3100
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Gifted Education
No Child Left Behind
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4 Leading the Charge
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7 States Make
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Mining
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Information Poor
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Data
13
RESOURCES:
Reinventing
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Special
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Technology
2011
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On Data-Drive
CONTENTS:
INTERACTIVE
l
Pay for Performance
Teacher Tips for the New Year
1
Access to quality
Editor’s Note:
with
district leaders
data provides
ed
to make inform
the opportunity
management
instructional and
Spotlight
decisions. This
and
risks
ial
examines the potent
data systems and
of
tages
advan
in which data can
the various ways
e learning.
be used to improv
Math Instruction
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30,
Published June
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Homework
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School Uniforms and Dress Codes
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ELLs in the Classroom
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tion Week
2011 in Educa
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Schools Find Us
Techniques
ta
Predictive Da
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stand ard in
long been a
and
t They ’ve
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tic tools to predic
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experts say
analyt
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with predic
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in higher educa
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slower to take
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By Sarah D. Sparks
T
the factors that
pred ict the
likelihood of
a specific
result.
On Teacher Evaluation
Editor’s Note: Assessing teacher
performance is a complicated
issue, raising questions of how to
best measure teacher
effectiveness. This Spotlight
examines ways to assess teaching
and efforts to improve teacher
evaluation.
INTERACTIVE CONTENTS:
1 Wanted: Ways to Assess
the Majority of Teachers
4 Gates Analysis Offers Clues
to Identification of Teacher
Effectiveness
5 State Group Piloting Teacher
Prelicensing Exam
6 Report: Six Steps for Upgrading
Teacher Evaluation Systems
7 Peer Review Undergoing
Revitalization
COMMENTARY:
10 Moving Beyond Test Scores
12 My Students Help Assess
My Teaching
13 Taking Teacher Evaluation
to Extremes
15 Value-Added: It’s Not Perfect,
But It Makes Sense
RESOURCES:
WEEK Spotl
ight
on imple ment
ing comm
on Stand
ardS
n
edweek.org
2012
On Implementi
ng Common Sta
ndards
Published February 2, 2011, in Education Week
Editor’s Note:
In order to
implement the
Common Core
State Standards,
educators
need instructional
materials and
assessments.
But not all states
are moving at
the same pace,
and some district
s are finding
common-core
resources in
short supply. This
Spotlight
highlights the
curricu
professional develo lum,
pment, and
online resources
available to
help districts prepar
e for the
common core.
Wanted: Ways to Assess
the Majority of Teachers
By Stephen Sawchuk
T
he debate about “value added” measures of teaching may
be the most divisive topic in teacher-quality policy today.
It has generated sharp-tongued exchanges in public forums,
in news stories, and on editorial
pages. And it has produced enough
policy briefs to fell whole forests.
But for most of the nation’s
teachers, who do not teach subjects or grades in which valueadded data are available, that
debate is also largely irrelevant. Now, teachers’ unions,
content-area experts, and
administrators in many states
and communities are hard at work
examining measures that could be
used to weigh teachers’ contributions to
learning in subjects ranging from career and technical
education to art, music, and history—the subjects,
InteractIve
cOntentS:
1 Educators in
Search of
Common-Core
Resources
4 Higher Ed. Gets
Voting
Rights on Assessm
ents
6 Common Core’s
Focus on
‘Close Reading
’ Stirs Worries
7 Few States Cite
Full Plans
for Carrying Out
Standards
8 Common Core
Poses
Challenges for
Preschools
10 Common Core
Raises PD
Opportunities,
Questions
cOmmentar
y:
11 Standards: A
Golden
Opportunity for
K-16
Collaboration
PAGE 2>
12 The Commo
n-Core
Contradiction
17 Resources on Teacher Evaluation
Data-Driven
15 Resources on
Decision Making
reSOurceS:
14 Resources on
Common Core
iStock/ olandesina
iStock /123render
Educ ation
Published Februa
ry
29, 2012, in Educa
tion Week
Educators in Searc
h
of Common-Core
Resources
A
By Catherine Gewe
rtz
s states and distr
icts begin the
mon academic
work of turning
standards into
comcurriculum and
tion, educators
instrucsearching for
teach
often finding
that process frust ing resources are
Teachers and
rating and fruit
curriculum deve
less.
road maps that
lopers who are
reflect the Com
trying to craft
mon Core State
Standards can
??
Principals
Bullying
Getting The Most From Your IT Budget
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Autism
iStock/kyoshino??
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