New Frontiers in Formative Assessment

Formative assessment is an ongoing process of checking students' understanding and then adjusting instruction to best respond to student needs. This process of checking and meeting students where they are takes more teacher skill and flexibility than just marching through a pre-set curriculum, but it should lead to greater learning.

Today is the official release date for New Frontiers in Formative Assessment from Harvard Education Press. Almost two years ago the Noyce Foundation asked me to help share some of the best assessment work of our staff and grantees. I thought a book bringing together interesting work in the field might do the trick, so I put together a proposal, convinced the Harvard folks, and found a co-editor, Dan Hickey, who is an expert on assessment.

Together we solicited authors for twelve chapters on assessment projects and practices. Half the chapters describe the use of technology to aid assessment, often building it right into a learning program. Six more use simple paper and pencil tools to get at students' thinking.

The chapters are evenly divided among math, literacy, and science. It's our contention that different subjects require different approaches to assessment, and we provide plenty of real examples from the projects our authors have run. One chapter discusses techniques for teaching science vocabulary to young English language learners. Another examines how students can label and share graphs among networked computers in a classroom, and another describes a process for preparing teachers to look collaboratively and with diagnostic acumen at students' work in mathematics.

Lorrie Shepard of the University of Colorado at Boulder wrote an insightful foreword, discussing how testing can harm learning and how the chapters of the book provide an alternative. And Dylan Wiliam, assessment maven, gave us this blurb:

This is an extraordinary book. The chapters cover practical applications of formative assessment in mathematics, science, and language arts, including the roles of technology and teachers professional learning. I found my own thinking about formative assessment constantly being stretched and challenged. Anyone who is involved in education will find something of value in this book

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Working with the authors of these chapters was a privilege, and I'm proud of the book that resulted. I hope that teachers, curriculum developers, and other educators will find it useful. In coming posts I'll give short summaries of selected chapters.

Teachers Weigh in on Growth-Based Evaluation

The idea of having their evaluations based on growth in student test scores makes a lot of teachers nervous. That's not surprising. Hospitals get nervous about having surgical success rates published, because some patients are sicker than others when they enter the hospital. I suspect dentists would be worried if they were rated based on how many new cavities their patients developed under their care. There are so many variables, and our systems for measuring cavity development or student growth are clumsy, opaque, and subject to error.

Still, it would be a mistake to think of all teachers as opposed to having their performance measured. A great organization called Teach Plus has pulled together small cohorts of excellent, dedicated, mostly young, mostly urban teachers to learn about education policy and make their collective voices heard. The teaching policy fellows choose issues that matter and formulate thoughtful, practical solutions to thorny issues.

The Boston teaching policy fellows have written ten recommendations to state policy makers suggesting how assessment systems need to be adjusted to make evaluations based partly on student growth both fair and helpful. For example, the policy fellows suggest testing students at the beginning and end of each year. They point out that systems of linking teachers to their students need to be more accurate and reliable. And they point out that unless the tests are much better at measuring growth among very low and very high performers, teachers will be strongly motivated to expend less effort with these two groups than with the students in the middle.

I urge my readers to take a look at the ten suggestions. They're couched in a positive tone, idealistic but also practical. And they're the work of a set of savvy teachers who want to see improvements in teacher evaluation come without a lot of ugly unintended consequences. These fine teachers expect to be evaluated as well and rigorously in teaching as they would be in another field. They know they're doing a good job, and they will welcome signposts to help them continue to improve.