All About Assessment

At the end of last term, when I looked at my upcoming classes I think I said something along the lines of "Whaaa?!" (with a bit of Scooby Doo tone to it). This was because I saw that I would be taking an entire class on assessment. I thought to myself, "Self, how hard can it be to give tests?" But, oh how wrong I was!

This class has been really informative and changed my view of assessment in tons of ways. For starters, the class is mostly about the concept of assessment for learning, as opposed to simply assessment of learning (the latter being what most of us are used to, taking a test at the end of a class to see how much of it you learned). The material for the course revolves around the work of a gentlemen named Rick Stiggins from just down the road in Portland, OR.

Here's a video of Mr. Stiggins, don't be fooled by the corny intro, he has some good stuff to say-


You can find more about Rick Stiggins and his work at http://www.assessmentinst.com/ This is the website for the Pearson Assessment Institute which he founded to provide training to educators in just the kind of areas we have looked at in this course.

The basic philosophy is that in a standards based educational system we need to be explicit about what we expect our students to be accomplishing and that by using assessments as a tool to help them understand where they are supposed to be going we can help them be successful. Stiggins even takes it one step further, and talks about ways to involve students in the assessment process, even to the point of having students help develop grading standards and rubrics. Some people shy away from this approach as it seems almost like teaching to the test, but the key differences are that 1) you are using assessment to support learning AND to evaluate learning, so it's not just one or the other; and, 2) teaching to the standards is different than teaching to the test.

As doubtful as I may have been at the outset that this course could fill 10 weeks with relevant material, it has. As the quarter is winding up I am looking forward to next term when I will taking classes on classroom management, English language learners instruction, integrating the arts, and health and fitness.

Until then, all the best.
Mike