Before you start reading this post, let me warn you: I am writing about a huge topic in education and I struggle to articulate my thoughts in this area. Part of my reasoning for writing this post is to clarify my own thinking. I have revised this post several times, but there are still many gaps left to fill in and questions left unanswered.
An analogy that really brings my thoughts about assessment into focus is learning to ride a bike. My principal told our staff this analogy in the spring. It's a message that stuck with me, especially since my daughter learned to ride a two-wheel bike early this summer. When a my daughter learned to ride a two-wheel bike. It didn't always come easily. She jumped on her new bike and said, "I want to start riding!" but, as you can imagine, the falls that ensued quickly softened this enthusiasm. In some cases, she was hesitant and the falls aren't that bad; other times the falls were traumatic events that took several days to get over. However, she persisted. After watching her progress, my wife and I took to reading blogs and watching Youtube videos for tips and passed on what we thought would be useful. Some helped, some didn't. After many weeks of attempting to ride (and my wife's back getting really sore), my daughter rode off down the path - yahoo!From that moment on, my daughter was a "bike rider". Soon her bike riding skills improved - she was turning, stopping and even starting on her own. This improvement in abilities led to more risk taking, which in turn led to more falling, but never once did my wife and I consider that she might be failing, just experiencing learning. Now, as we hang up her bike for the winter season, we celebrate her ability to ride around the block by herself and her determination to complete a 2 mile ride with her mom, while looking forward to seeing her finally learn how to ride all the way up the driveway without stopping next year.
Compare this experience to the way bike riding would be taught and graded traditionally at school.
First, we would probably feel the need to "front-load" the experience. This would probably mean a lot of reading about bike-riding, maybe a video and definitely a worksheet on vocabulary and proper techniques. Once we were sure she had the theory, we might allow them a few periods (if they were lucky) to practice riding before we started grading her. Traumatic falls would be failures, falls that were adverted into saves would be satisfactory (50%), riding in a straight line to the block before bailing into the neighbour's grass would be a little better (60%), riding in a straight line, stopping, turning around and riding back better yet (70%) and so on until she could ride around the block, stop on demand and ride up a driveway without stopping (100%). My wife and I would still be reading and searching for resources, but ultimately these would be more steps in the process and may not be based on my daughter's experience so much as our initial plan. At the end of the season, we would average these scores and then gave my daughter her final grade.
In this model I'd predict that my daughter would be lucky to leave the season with a passing grade. More likely than not, we'd "push her on with serious hesitations." Never mind her accomplishments - there are just too many falls and traumatic moments early on combined with her struggles later to ride up all the way up the driveway for the math* to work in her favour.For years as a teacher, I practiced the model** that would have left my daughter feeling like she could barely ride. No matter how hard I'd plan, inevitably this model left many of my students and me feeling frustrated. At the end of the unit, term, semester or year I was forced to give students an average grade including assessments from the very first time the students attempted to demonstrate skills and knowledge right up to the very last time. The only students who were able to achieve success in this model were those who never had to struggle (something I believe is essential to learning), which then lead to a focus on the number or grade instead of a focus on the learning. After all, who cares about trying to figure out how to learn, when failure to learn "correctly" hurts your average in the long run?
I'm not going to pretend that I'm at the end of my assessment journey - I still have a lot more questions than answers- but my colleagues and I are making strides this year. We have moved to an objectives-based reporting system which extends all the way to the report card. By breaking down, the "average" into manageable chunks, my students and I are able to better describe the learning which has occurred so far this year. The marks delivered on the report card were a reflection of my professional judgement and of the students' own self-reflections on assignments that we moved into a portfolio together. It was interesting to see how many of my students inherently understood how well they were doing and where they needed to improve after going through the portfolio process; the reflections, and subsequent assessments, of their learning were incredibly close to my professional judgement most of the time.What I really loved about this process is that students were able to take charge of their learning. They knew, and recorded, how they did well and how they needed to focus their efforts to improve. Like my daughter, my students know whether or not they were successful, and they had the evidence to support this opinion. Looking forward, they also know that they can be risk-takers in and that in some areas of their learning, they need to slow down and ask for help. Together we can celebrate their success and look forward to improvement without the worry of being dragged down by a first attempt in learning.
Footnotes:
As I've indicated before, I'm a rambler by nature. This post was a long one after I revised it multiple times. The following footnotes are sections that I didn't want to include, but couldn't bring myself to cut either.
*Here's a hypothetical sample of the math:
(25% + 0% + 30% + 40% + 25% + 25% + 35% + 40% + 75% + 60% + 80% + 85% +90% + 90% + 90%) / 15 = 53%
**In preparation for this blog entry, I stumbled on one of the reasons why I believe I continued to practice this model long after I stopped believing it worked: one of definitions of grading (from a simple Google Search) is, "to reduce a road to an easy gradient". While this definition is not specifically connected to educational assessment, I believe the word easy is very revealing. Many people want learning to be easy: easy to achieve, easy to understand and easy to evaluate. No matter the inaccuracies of an average based system it is difficult to argue with its ease-of-use. As long as math doesn't frighten you, it is easy to employ, easy to read and easy to manipulate.
