ASSESSMENT

Assessment Framing Statement

Eva Sanchez

ED 698 Master’s Portfolio Spring 2022

University of Alaska Southeast

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Assessment

A teacher facilitates, monitors, and assesses student learning.

The candidate demonstrates their understanding and use of multiple methods of
assessment to engage learners in their own growth, to monitor learner progress, and to
guide the teacher’s and learners’ decision making.
The artifact for this paper is a Teacher Work Sample (TWS) that I completed in the

Spring of 2020 during my semester as a student-teacher. It can be found at

http://sanchezmp.weebly.com/assessment-artifact.html. In this unit, I created two learning goals

from which I designed two separate units that included the standards addressed, assessments that

were used, and finally the lessons that I taught to help students attain these goals. I was

challenged to create pre-assessments that helped to determine students’ prior knowledge,

formative assessments that monitored student progress through our unit, and summative

assessments that helped to determine how successful each student was at attaining the learning

goals of the unit.

Assessment is the vehicle by which we determine student understanding of what we

teach. When designing assessments, Wiggins and McTighe (2005) challenge us to “think like an

assessor, not a teacher” (p.148). In this, we are asked to consider what ‘evidence’ do we need as

teachers to determine student success at achieving the goals we have set for our lesson or our

unit and not just a number that we put in our grade book.

For the TWS, my first goal was to teach students how to compare and contrast key

differences between fact and opinion. There were several assessments that I chose to use as

evidence for understanding. The pre-assessment included a brainstorming session in which

students discussed the differences between fact and opinion. This was followed by a Fact versus

Opinion sort that included not only identifying fact and opinion statements but also creating their

own fact and opinion statements. The formative assessments included an interactive game where
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students had to decipher between fact and opinion statements on their game card and a worksheet

where students changed an opinion statement to fact and a fact statement to opinion. As a means

of consistently measuring student growth and understanding throughout the lesson, for the post-

assessment, I used the same fact vs. opinion sort as the pre-assessment.

The second goal was to teach students how to create an opinion writing piece in which

they stated their opinion and then defended that opinion with facts. The set of assessments that I

used to document students’ learning for the lesson included using an opinion writing prompt that

asked students to identify their favorite food and then defend that opinion with facts for both the

pre-and post-assessments. For the formative assessments, I used another writing prompt that

asked students to identify their favorite pet as a means to help students practice and hone their

ability to write opinion pieces supported with facts.

When many people hear the word assessment, the first thing they think of is pencil and

paper tests – fill in the blank, multiple-choice, essay questions. Over the years, the principles that

influence how we think of assessment have evolved. Assessments can still include those standard

assessments such as word sorts and worksheets to identify key information, but it can also

include a whole class brainstorming session on the differences between fact and opinion; it

includes the small group discussion of students debating their favorite pet; it includes the ‘fun’

game where students are identifying fact and opinion statements but is providing me with key

information as to which students are still struggling with that distinction (Taylor & Nolen, 2008).

According to Taylor and Nolen (2008), there are five purposes for assessment: to plan

instruction, to adjust instruction, to diagnose student misunderstanding or lack of understanding,

to assess student expertise at end of a lesson or unit, and finally to compare student performance

either to him/herself or to other students. Taking the TWS into account, pre-assessments are used
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to plan instruction. Formative assessments are used when adjusting instruction and diagnosing

student misunderstandings. Summative assessments (post-assessments) are used to assess student

expertise at the end of the lesson and determine how successful students were at meeting the

learning goals that we had set at the beginning of the lesson.

Lucy Calkins (as cited in Landrigan & Mulligan, 2013) defines assessment as “the

thinking teacher’s mind work. The intelligence that guides our every moment as a teacher” (p.2).

Assessment documents students’ educational journeys in our classroom: from the beginning of a

lesson to help determine our students’ background knowledge before teaching, to monitoring for

understanding during a lesson, and finally determining the resulting student expertise at the end

of a lesson or unit. It is this ‘scrapbook’ of evidence that we as teachers collect throughout the

journey.

Assessments look more like ‘scrapbooks’ and not ‘snapshots’ (Wiggins & McTighe,

2005). Landrigan & Mulligan (2013) refer to this as triangulating assessment. Any conclusions

drawn about student understanding must come from multiple data points. In the TWS, I used

multiple sources of information, from discussions to gameplay; from sorts and sentence writing

to writing actual paragraphs. The information that we glean of student performance comes from

a variety of sources, from individual worksheets, to brainstorm sessions, and finally from student

collaboration sessions with each other and with me where we engage in authentic conversation

using open-ended questions that force students to think about information learned in unique and

interesting ways. For example, when I was teaching a lesson on fact vs opinion during my

Teacher Work Sample (TWS) unit, I considered several data points to determine my students’

prior knowledge. I first gave them a fact vs opinion worksheet where each student had to

determine whether a statement was fact or opinion. Another important aspect of my pre-
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assessment was a brainstorming session that we had where the students and I discussed the

differences between fact and opinion. Had I only used the worksheet, I would have concluded

that my students had only a rudimentary understanding of the difference, as many confused fact

and opinion. It was only after our discussion that I came to realize the students’ knowledge was

much more nuanced than I believed. I realized that if students were able to think of one

exception to a fact statement, they qualified it as an opinion. For example, for the statement

‘There is a sledding hill in our playground’ many students classified this as an opinion because

there are several sledding hills on our playground. Their understanding of fact and opinion was

black and white; they could not make generalizations from the provided statements. It was only

after this realization that I was able to change how I taught this concept to include showing

students how to prove fact statements, either through direct investigation (can you see a sledding

hill on our playground?) or by researching the topic online or in information books.

The next step in assessment, as noted by Wiggins and McTighe (2005) is to determine

what sort of student responses are necessary to determine student understanding. “Classroom

teachers must make reliable (dependable) decisions about students using assessment tools that

are as valid (direct and reasonable) as possible given the amount of time we have available for

assessment and the very real limitations of human observation and judgment” (Taylor & Nolen,

2008, p. 27). When scoring assessments, especially when asking open-ended, thought-provoking

questions that challenge understanding, the range of student responses are vast. A way to

evaluate student response consistently and fairly is to use performance criteria – rubrics and

checklists.

For example, the second learning goal of my TWS was to I asked students to create an

opinion writing piece. As with any writing, grading students fairly and consistently was a
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challenge. To overcome this challenge, I created a rubric that I referenced when reading and

scoring each student’s writing. In this way, I had a set criterion that I used for each student in my

attempt to overcome my limitation of ‘human observation and judgment’.

All of the above examples have demonstrated the first four purposes of assessment: plan,

adjust, diagnose, and assess student expertise. The last purpose of assessment, comparison, also

provides us with vital information about our students’ understanding compared to each other, but

more importantly, to themselves, for a lesson. This highlights the idea that assessment and

instruction are inseparable (Tomlinson, 2014). “Assessment is today’s means of understanding

how to modify tomorrow’s instruction (Tomlinson, 2014, p. 17). Again, using my TWS as an

example, I was able to chart student understanding as I taught my lessons. By creating data

charts, I was able to determine patterns of misunderstanding not only with individual students

but also with the whole class as well. I was able to see that students were able to state their

opinions well but were unable to express the reasons for their opinions. After seeing this data, I

changed the graphic organizer to include scaffolding that helped students to think through their

reasons at the same time that they wrote their opinions.

Another fundamental aspect of assessment is to ensure that we assess ALL students.

Assessments must fit the student, not vice versa. “Effective preassessments, formative

assessments, and summative assessments make room for student variance by providing multiple

means of representation, multiple means of expression, and multiple means of engagement”

(Sousa & Tomlinson, 2011, p.76). When teaching the TWS, I allowed students to see directions

visually on the Smartboard while at the same time I read them aloud (auditory). In providing

multiple means for expression, students were allowed to express what they knew in a variety of

ways, orally, written answers, a diagram. Multiple means of engagement denotes that I
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acknowledge all students’ backgrounds in my teaching and assessment. When creating

assessments, I ensure that students have the background knowledge to successfully demonstrate

their understanding while avoiding unintended barriers due to students’ culture, language, or

ability (Taylor & Nolen, 2008).

Assessment is part of an unending cycle of instruction and planning. Each is completely

dependent on the other to create informed student-focused decisions in our classrooms. A

fundamental aspect of creating successful assessments is to know your students. We are not only

teaching content, but we are also teaching individuals. Effective assessments place the focus on

the process of learning and not only the product. By providing multiple means of

representation, engagement, and assessment, we are empowering our students to become expert

learners, students who understand their weaknesses and strengths, who know which modalities

best suit their learning styles, and who can thus advocate and become proactive in their education

and learning experiences.

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References

Landrigan, C., & Mulligan, T. (2013). Assessment in perspective: Focusing on the reader behind

the numbers. Stenhouse Publishers.

Sousa, D.A., Tomlinson, C.A. (2011). Differentiation and the brain: How neuroscience supports

the learner-friendly classroom. Solution Tree Press.

Taylor, C. S., & Nolen, S.B. (2008). Classroom assessment: Supporting teaching and learning

in real classrooms (2nd ed.). Pearson.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). Association for

Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).