Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Teachers’
classroom assessments are high stakes. They are the basis for decisions about
promotion of students from one grade to the next, the awarding of graduation
diplomas and scholarships, and they are often consequential for admission to
post-secondary studies.
High stake
decisions are not the only purposes to which classroom assessments are put.
Teachers use classroom assessments to inform students about whether they have
mastered the knowledge they are supposed to have acquired, to plan and modify
the teachers’ instructional plans, to provide opportunities for students to
practice and apply what they have learned, to determine the knowledge and
understanding students need to progress to the next level, to communicate to
the student and the student’s parents how the student is doing, to motivate
students and more.
Teacher
classroom assessment occurs daily and is labour intensive. Observation of
student performance happens frequently albeit unsystematically throughout the
day. Teachers create numerous kinds of assessments. Assessments include
quizzes, tests, and opportunities for demonstration and oral presentations.
Appraising performance on each of the teacher-created assessments is
time-consuming.
The
challenge with teacher assessment is that there isn’t agreement among teachers
about what should be assessed. Teacher assessments are driven by a teacher’s
professional judgment and, thus, by the teacher’s values. Some teachers believe
that assessment should be confined to performance in the subject being assessed.
Others believe that assessment should consider student attitude, motivation, or
work ethic. Most teachers are aware that a student’s background, gender
orientation, and/or personality are not relevant considerations for assessment.
Some teachers
argue that assessment should be confined to the student’s performance in the
classroom. Others say that homework is an extension of the classroom. Those
opposed to assessing homework point out that homework is a form of practice –
the most important facet of which is the teacher’s feedback. Others take a
developmental perspective, arguing that a formal assessment of homework (beyond
just the teacher’s feedback) is acceptable, but that teachers should take a
developmental perspective by weighting the assessments more heavily the closer
they are to the end of the unit. Some teachers are opposed to assessing
homework because it is difficult to determine whether the student worked
independently or with the assistance of others.
Teachers sometimes
say that colleagues place too much value on print-based assessments (quizzes,
tests, essays, reports, etc.) penalizing students who understand the material
but have difficulty demonstrating what they know in writing. These teachers
supplement written assessment with other demonstrations of understanding (oral
presentations, dramatizations, diagrams, use of manipulatives, etc.).
Educational
researcher Susan Brookhart and her colleagues reviewed the literature devoted
to grading over the past 100 years with a particular emphasis on the meaning and
value associated with grades. Among the many important findings of this review
were:
· Teachers primarily assess achievement using tests.
· Teachers assess many non-academic factors in assigning grades, including effort, improvement, perceptions of student ability, completion of work, and other student behaviour.
· The relative emphasis teachers assign to academic and non-academic factors differs markedly across teachers.
· Assessment varies considerably by grade level.
The
conclusion that Brookhart and her colleague draw is worth quoting at length:
This review suggests that most teachers’
grades do not yield a pure achievement measure, but rather a multidimensional
measure dependent on both what the students learn and how they behave in the
classroom. This conclusion, however, does not excuse low quality grading
practices or suggest there is no room for improvement. One hundred years of
grading research have generally confirmed large variation among teachers in the
validity and reliability of grades, both in the meaning of grades and the
accuracy of reporting.
Their
conclusion is troubling. Inconsistency in the assessment process means that
teachers other than the one who made the assessment find it difficult to know
how to interpret their colleague’s assessment. It takes a leap of faith to
believe that, in the aggregate, teacher assessments can support the high stakes
decisions on which they are based.
Some
ministries and school boards try to reduce the variability of teacher
assessments by encouraging the use of performance standards and separating the
appraisal of academic and non-academic factors. While those efforts are to be
commended, those practices are also inconsistent across jurisdictions.
Notwithstanding
these efforts, much more work is needed to improve classroom assessment,
including clarifying the purpose of assessment, distinguishing between academic
and non-academic factors, improving teacher preparation in assessment and in
communicating results of assessment to students, parents, and others who make
use of assessment results.
_______________
Brookhart,
S. M., Guskey, T. R., Bowers, A. J., McMillan, J. H., Smith, J. K., Smith, L.
F., Stevens, M.T., Welsh, M.E. (2016). A Century of Grading Research: Meaning
and Value in the Most Common Educational Measure. Review of Educational
Research, 86(4), 803-848.