Shoreline Public Schools
Framework for Assessment
Guiding Principles
The purpose of assessment in Shoreline Public Schools is to accurately and efficiently measure students’ progress toward meeting district standards and achieving career and college readiness. In order to do this, assessments should:
·be designed to inform instruction;
·produce actionable/meaningful data; and
·maximize instructional/learning time.
Shoreline’s Assessment Framework is built upon these guiding principles. Assessment is an essential component of the teaching process in which we learn about a student’s growth and progression to help inform next steps. Charlotte Danielson describes distinguished use of assessment within instruction as:
●‘...fully integrated into instruction through extensive use of formative assessment;
●Students appear to be aware of, and there is some evidence that they have contributed to, the assessment criteria;
●Students self-assess and monitor their progress;
●A variety of feedback, from both their teacher and their peers, is accurate, specific, and advances learning;
●Questions, prompts, assessments are used regularly to diagnose evidence of learning by individual students’ (2011).
A Comprehensive Assessment System
Assessments serve a variety of purposes for a variety of stakeholders. The audiences or users of data vary depending on the level and type of assessment. Formative assessment in the classroom informs teachers and students on progress toward learning a particular goal. Universal screeners at a grade level help identify which students may need additional support and/or intervention, while policy makers use district and state level data to make decisions about programs and funding.
Assessment serves stakeholders at all levels of the educational system in a variety of ways in our efforts to improve learning for each and every student. Stakeholders need to understand how to appropriately use assessment to support their decision-making needs – ‘whether those of a teacher or student acting to detect and fill an immediate learning gap, or those of school or district leaders, or others using assessment to take program-level action. Capacity to use assessment to improve schooling also demands sound assessment tools: assessments that provide both valid information about where students are in their learning and what they have achieved and comprehensible, usable reports that support intended decision making’ (Herman, 2016).
We believe that the student needs to be at the center of the assessment process. Ideally, teachers and students work in partnership around clear goals that students understand. In classroom assessments, clear rubrics or descriptors of learning are shared or created with the student, resulting in engagement and an accurate picture of where the student is on the pathway to academic success. Frequent opportunities for feedback are provided so the student has accurate knowledge of progress towards the goal.
Assessments for a Variety of Audiences and Purposes
Questions Guiding Our Work
As we create and/or select assessments in Shoreline, we ask these Guiding Questions:
1. To what extent are our assessments of learning varied, providing multiple and different ways for students to demonstrate understanding?
Teachers use a variety of assessments to help inform instruction and communicate progress. Ideally formative and summative assessments must work together to help teachers and students make decisions about what actions to take to promote further learning. ‘Prior to any student taking the summative assessment, there must be a comprehensive series of related and detailed formative assessments’ (Afflerbach, 2016).
‘The subtle difference between student achievement and student growth makes a difference in what counts as success. Our goal is to find the most appropriate and valid/reliable methods of gathering information about student progress’ (Brooke, 2015).
2. To what extent do our assessments enable students to demonstrate deep learning and understanding of concepts?
●Empowerment happens through self-advocacy, self-reflection, and student engagement in the assessment process;
●Deep learning and understanding of concepts can be demonstrated through open-ended questions, synthesizing of different ideas, and justification of reasoning;
●Applications of deep learning occurs when tasks are open-ended, have layers of complexity, and are grounded in real-life context.
3. To what extent do our assessments minimize bias and allow each student to demonstrate learning?
●Each assessment authentically assesses the skill or content being measured;
●Each student has the opportunity to demonstrate their learning.
4. How is this assessment aligned with the standards?
●Before selecting or creating an assessment, we must evaluate its alignment to the standards. Is it measuring student progress towards and beyond those standards?
●Curriculum materials are resources for instruction, and the assessments that are embedded in the curriculum may or may not reflect the grade level standards;
●The standards are our driver, not the materials.
5. Does this assessment measure student learning in a way that reflects our beliefs about how students learn?
●Consider a variety of tasks to show understanding of concept/strategy;
●Consider a student’s zones of proximal development;
●Consider student interest;
●Consider using a variety of forms of feedback.
6. Does this assessment provide useful data to us and the student/family about what the student understands and what needs to be learned next?
●The assessment data must inform instruction and learning;
●The feedback loop must be clear, quick, and timely in order to be useful.
7. Does this assessment help students know what they know, where they are going, and how they’ll know when they get there?
●Does the student know the success criteria?
●Is the student able to use the data to self-monitor, predict, and/or self-report their own achievement?
Purpose of Assessment
Our system of assessments is built upon a belief that the student is at the center of assessment. There are many layers of assessment, from direct contact with students to measuring system wide effectiveness, but all assessments need to push us towards assessing of learning, for learning, and as learning.
Assessment OF learning:
●What do the students know, understand, and are able to do? Do the teachers and students know? At what level?
Assessment FOR learning:
●What do we do next, based on what students know (formative assessment)? Are students using feedback to set and revise learning goals? Are teachers adapting their instruction based on evidence, and students actively managing and adjusting their own learning?
Assessment AS learning:
●If students know where they are going and how they will know when they get there, they are better able to set their own expectations, self-monitor, and predict or self-report their own achievement (Hattie, Fisher & Frey, 2017). Assessment should be seen as part of the learning process, not separate from it.
Definition of terms
●Universal screening assessments are quick, repeatable tests of age-appropriate skills administered to all students at a grade level. Schools may administer screenings to all students two to three times per year. Universal screeners are used to identify students who may not be making expected progress and who may need additional diagnostic assessment and/or intervention (SERC, 2012).
●Diagnostic assessments are used to help teachers understand the causes for student performance, i.e. a student’s learning strengths and needs, and help teachers identify where a student’s understanding may break down. Diagnostic assessments provide information to help teachers plan, modify and/or differentiate instruction/intervention (SERC, 2012).
●Progress monitoring assessments are used to regularly assess students in specific academic and/or behavioral areas in order to determine the efficacy of and inform instruction/intervention and to make effective decisions regarding the instructional/intervention needs of a class, small group or individual student. (SERC, 2012)
●Summative assessment documents how much learning has occurred at a point in time; its purpose may be to measure the level of student, school, or program success (ChappuisChappuis, 2007/2008).
●Formative assessment supports learning in two ways:
- Teachers can adapt instruction on the basis of evidence, making changes and improvements that will yield immediate benefits to student learning;
- Students can use evidence of their current progress to actively manage and adjust their own learning (Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, & Chappuis, 2006).
●Interim assessments are common assessments that may be mandated by school or district authorities outside the classroom. They are administered periodically over the course of the school year to provide educators and other stakeholders with information on how students are performing relative to short- and longer-term learning goals and to predict whether students are likely to test proficient on the end-of-year state tests.
Bibliography
Afflerbach, P. (2016). Reading assessment, looking ahead. The Reading Teacher, 69(4), pp. 413–419.
Brooke, E. (2015). Assessment competency: How to obtain the right information to improve data-driven instruction. Lexia Learning.
Chappuis, S. & Chappuis, J. (2008). The best value in formative assessment. Informative Assessment, 65(4), pp. 14-19.
Danielson, C. (2011). Danielson’s framework for teaching rubrics by Washington State version 1.1.
SERC, (2012). Elementary assessments: Universal screening, diagnostic, & progress Monitoring.
Hattie, J., Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2017). Visible learning for mathematics: What works best to optimize student learning. Corwin.
Herman, J. (2016). Comprehensive standards-based assessment systems supporting learning. The Center on Standards and Assessment Implementation, WestEd.
Stiggins, R., Arter, J., Chappuis, J., & Chappuis, S. (2006). Classroom assessment for student learning: Doing it right—using it well. Portland, OR: Educational Testing Service.
District Assessment Review Committee
2016-17
Veronica Della
Jennifer Etter
Becki Frisk
Patty Gerlicher
Lisa Gonzalez
Donna Hoffman
Ellen Kaje
Tessa Kaplan
Dana Knox
Marilyn Leverson
Lisa Levy
Andrew Lohman
Karen Nicholson
Kathryn Pihl
Michael Power
Jacqui Rublee
Melissa Sargent
Peggy Thesing
Mary Anne Thomas
Pat Valle
March 2017