Article Review: What a difference a word makes

As the ability to gather information has become easier, the entire world is using numbers and data for future decision making. Advertising companies know exactly how successful their campaigns are by tracking dollars spent vs. purchases of the product, and insurance actuaries calculate death rates in relation to insurance premiums. Every aspect of society uses data to guide where to go next. Education is slowly getting on board as communities are voting down school budgets and taxpayers are demanding greater accountability. It is no longer acceptable to use subjective information where objective data is available. There is also a call for educators to use multiple measures. In my early days of teaching, a student would be added to the Basic Skills roster because a classroom teacher felt the child needed extra help. Today, that same teacher would be required to produce multiple forms of evidence including objective support. Using data for future planning is now making its way down into the classroom.
In my district, at least in Language Arts, the teachers are being asked to make a clear distinction between “evaluation” for the purpose of gathering grades for the report card, and “assessment” for the purpose of driving future instruction. The move is toward differentiated instruction and a child centered curriculum. Teachers are asked (forced) to gather, maintain and track various kinds of information on each student. Some of this data can be used for evaluation, but much of it is used to build a total picture of a student and their progress over time. It has been a long uphill battle to get teachers to see the value of assessment, and even when they do see it, they claim that using assessment to drive instruction is too much work. The writers of this piece hit the nail on the head in the last page of the article when they claim that “developing assessment expertise goes beyond creating tests and developing rubrics”. Many teachers still feel powerful when they whip out their red pen to mark up student errors on a first attempt at an essay, and are still more concerned with the product than the process.

Involving students in their own learning and holding them accountable is a critical piece to using assessment. As Stiggins and Chappuis have stated, “students must be taught the skills they need to be in control of their own ultimate academic success”. Most teachers have never allowed students to do this and hold those who would in contempt, particularly in the intermediate grades (i.e. the student who questions why she got a B+ instead of an A and asks for the criteria used). The use of assessment to drive instruction will only come to pass if teachers are held accountable by administrators to do so, while the benefits of doing so are being made clear to them through improved ongoing student evaluations. In addition, teachers must be provided with time, both alone and with colleagues, to analyze the data they gather.

Chappuis, J. & Stiggens, R. (2006). What a difference a word makes: Assessment for learning rather than assessment of learning helps students succeed. Journal for Staff Development, National Staff Development Council, Vol. 27, No. 1.