Category: Assessment

If there’s one thing I’m constantly reflecting on, changing, and rethinking, it’s my assessment practices in the classroom. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel like I’ve found a way to track my students’ progress that works for me 100%, but I’m getting close! I’ve spent some time recently chatting with colleagues about how I assess my students, and based on the feedback I’ve gotten from them, I decided I would share my general assessment practices here in case anyone might find them helpful.

My assessment binder has a variety of components: class lists with a bunch of little checkboxes where I track completed work, marks, and so on; class lists with a comment box after each student where I write anecdotal notes about specific tasks; a large table where I keep sticky notes with anecdotal observations throughout the week; other pages I find helpful along the way. I’ll try to address these all specifically in this blog post.

Daily/Ongoing Assessment

I start every day with a discussion or a small task designed to reinforce something my students learned the day before. Discussion questions provide my students with the opportunity to practice their language skills in a relaxed way. Questions range from silly what-if situations to more serious topics like bullying. While my students are discussing the topic, I make notes about their speaking and listening skills on small post-it notes (one per student). These notes not only record students’ strengths and areas of need, but also inform my teaching in the sense that I can target my lessons to common areas of need or errors being made by many students. I try to focus on different students each day so that by the end of the week, I’ve noted something about every student in the class. When I have a moment, the post-its go on a laminated table I have.

The table has a box for each student in my class. Throughout the week, as I write down notes about students, I keep the post-its on the table in my assessment binder. At the end of the week, I transfer those notes into an electronic document for each student. I have one document for each student, which allows me to look back over the year and see my observations for that student all in one place. After I’ve transferred the notes to my computer, I usually shred the post-its. Sometimes the post-its are about specific subjects rather than learning skills or behaviours, and in those cases I may choose to keep them elsewhere rather than my computer files. I have an area of my binder for each subject, so it’s easy to keep the post-its in the appropriate part of the binder when necessary.

Sometimes I have a question or two on the board which I ask students to answer in writing rather than having a discussion. For example, this past week I have been teaching my students about light, so occasionally when they come into the room in the morning I have asked them to answer questions about what we’ve learned. This shows me who is understanding the material, who needs a bit more guidance, who is totally off-base, etc.

Task-Specific Assessment

When I want to keep notes about students’ achievement relating to a specific task, such as a project or presentation, I use a class list with a comment box next to each student’s name. I keep notes on feedback I provide to students, collaboration with peers, etc. in those boxes. This way, when I provide feedback to students, I still have a copy of what I said to them on-hand and can see the whole class at a glance. I keep those sheets divided by subject/strand in my assessment binder. They’re used for reporting and evaluation of student progress in specific subject areas.

Reading Assessment

I do GB+ evaluations (the French equivalent of PM Benchmarks) every two months with my students. These running records get placed in alphabetical order in a section of my assessment binder specifically for them. I like to keep all of the running records from the beginning of the year to the end.

Those are the three primary ways in which I track student progress. It works reasonably well, though there are definitely improvements I could make to my system. I find it easy to find information when I need it, which is handy when meeting with students’ families or trying to look back on the feedback I’ve provided to a specific student over the past few months.

One last piece of advice, regardless of what system you use to track student progress: back everything up. Whether you use a paper system, an electronic system, or a combination thereof, make sure you have a copy of your notes somewhere. You never know when something might go awry with your binder, your computer, your files… speaking as someone who has lost a term’s worth of data unexpectedly? Don’t be that person who has to scramble to figure out student marks and comments at the last minute when your hard drive fails!

What’s the difference between thinking and understanding? More specifically, how might one distinguish between the activity of thinking and having understanding. Is there even a difference? This got me thinking… How I might invite educators to a conversation about assessment practices using a common understanding of assessment through the lens of Ontario’s standardized assessment rubric, The Achievement Chart. Most of the assessment resources that I usually refer to spoke more about the assessment process and the importance of assessment as, for and of learning, but seldom did I find any descriptions that were specific to using the Achievement Chart as the standard lens for engaging in the assessment of student learning itself. My investigation then lead me to the most basic of resources for determining distinction – the dictionary. Well to be honest, I simply Googled it, but these days, that’s pretty much the same thing. So what did I find out? The word think is a verb. It speaks to the process of using one’s mind to reason about something. On the other hand, understanding is a noun. Is speaks to what one comprehends or the insight one has acquired.

To be fair, simply reading the introduction of any Ontario Curriculum document would immediately highlight this distinction. What I wanted was to first get an unbiased definition that would then be solidified once I referred to the definitions used in the documents. According to the curriculum, language around understanding speaks of having comprehension in subject specific content. Thinking, however, speaks of the uses of planning skills and thinking processes. Eureka! So assessing thinking is actually assessing the process – the series of actions or steps taken. This was the pivotal distinction: The achievement chart calls for teachers to assess the process of thinking and not merely the thought or understanding one arrives at itself.

This revelation may not be new, but surely one that we should be reminded about. We are constantly engaging in the assessment process, however, this conversation (or me at least) highlighted the importance of being more intentional and slowing down the thinking process by scaffolding metacognition. By doing so, students can be more aware of their own thinking when it is happening and demonstrate the process they’ve engaged with when they arrive at their own understanding. This also reminded me of the importance to focus on process as well as product when assessing student learning and as such, the importance of actually teaching students a variety of thinking processes (i.e. creative thinking, critical thinking, design thinking, integrative thinking, etc.). What might this actually look like in terms of assessing student thinking? Perhaps it would be focusing on the process students engage with for writing an essay (ie. the writing process) along with the finished process. It might also mean assessing students strategies for problem solving, in addition to the accuracy of their answers. The most important thing to be mindful of is to value the distinction between engaging in thinking and having an understanding. They are not diametrically opposed, but rather are complementary and in knowing so, students can then be invited to see the distinction which will affirm the importance that is placed on both the process and the product.