Assessing Mastery Level of Content & Skills

As we close in on the end of the school year, I am still attempting to shoehorn some important content into the remainder of our truncated semester. One of my last units I will be teaching in World History is on genocide. We will be focusing on the Eight Stages of Genocide before looking into the Holocaust in more depth. In addition to teaching students the Eight Stages of Genocide, I am also having them practice their skills in critically secondary sources to improve the comprehension of more sophisticated texts.

To that end, I have created a small assessment to use after students read about the Eight Stages of Genocide in order to assess their understanding of the content and measure how well they comprehend the text. If you wish to review the assessment including the directions for students, click on the link in the paragraph below.

The name of this assessment is The Eight Stages of Genocide. It begins with an excerpt from an article which discussed the Eight Stages of Genocide. Students are instructed to read the text then respond to the questions that follow. Two of the questions are multiple choice and the final question is a constructed response. This assessment is given following the lesson and will serve as a springboard to making instructional decisions on which students still possess misconceptions about the topic.

Assessing My Assessment: Reinforcing Old Paradigms

In my previous blog post I explained three beliefs I have regarding student assessment:

1. Multiple choice questions are virtually worthless
2. Assessment should be integrated as a part of how students learn.
3. Assessment should be designed to provide effective feedback to students

One of my missions for this blog is to take one of my assessments and measure it against these three beliefs. Not surprisingly I have found the example I am using woefully inadequate in light of my stated beliefs.

For this particular exercise I have selected my Unit 5 test on the Age of Enlightenment and Revolutions. This test is summative in the strictest sense of the word– it is the end of the line for this unit of study, after this test it is on to the next unit. My assumptions regarding this test is that it based on dated concepts about the purpose of assessment. I did not design this assessment but it seems obvious to me– or my assumption– that this assessment instrument is a reaction to what students are expected to do during standardized tests. Most of the test is dedicated to testing trivial knowledge by means of multiple choice. Consequently, this test pretty much runs counter to all three beliefs I expressed about assessment:

1. It is made up of mostly multiple choice which tells me how prepared they are to be good at Jeopardy or Trivia night but nothing about how well they can analyze a primary source
2. This test is summative which means it is the concluding activity for the unit and as a consequence cannot be used as an instrument for students to assess their own mastery of content and skills and improve upon them
3. Getting a multiple choice question wrong or right tells the student and the teacher precious little regarding the student’s growth or how well they have constructed their understanding and schema they have been learning and practicing.

Click on image to see the entire test

After reading Shepard, I am already considering a shift in how I see number three on effective feedback. That being said there is no doubt that my assessment is an excellent– or bad–  example of an assessment informed by social efficiency and behaviorism devoid of even a glimmer of social-constructivist theory. The purpose of the test really is to produce a grade in the industrial education tradition. Moving forward, I hope to gain more insights as to how I can go about changing this in practical terms. Rome was not built in a day and revising assessments to target the thinking skills and dispositions students truly need for the world they are inheriting will not be created in a short time either

Three Things I Believe About Assessment

Microscopio de tres cuerpos para las observaciones simultáneas, University Library of Seville

As I begin diving into CEP 813: Electronic Assessment, I have been, fittingly, asked to write about three things I believe about assessment. My first three years of teaching have left little space for me to think beyond any given day or reflect on every facet of my practice. Now space has been made for me to consider my thinking about assessment. All teachers I have met in my very young career have their own beliefs about assessment and I suspect those beliefs, at least for most teachers, change over time. I am sure that will be my experience as well. So at the beginning of a class on assessment, I share three beliefs I have about assessment- it will be interesting to see how those beliefs change and shift by the end of the course.

1. Multiple choice questions are virtually worthless

For any multiple choice test item, It is nearly impossible to know if the student got it right because they have an understanding of the topic or got it wrong because they have misconceptions. A multiple choice question says little about students grasp of a concept or the implications of a historical event. Multiple choice questions can even set students up for failure even though they may have an excellent grasp of the more important facets of the topic which cannot be measured by multiple choice.

2. Assessment should be integrated as a part of how students learn

When students are invited to participate in creating an assessment that will be used to measure their growth they are given ownership of their own learning. Additionally, when students participate in creating assessment instruments, rubrics, for example, they must engage in the content in a meaningful way and form an intimate understanding of the skills that they will be learning and practicing. Students will have a thorough understanding of what mastery looks like for each skill and concept.

3. Assessment should be designed to provide effective feedback to students

If all a given assessment accomplishes is to produce a grade which supposedly represents student growth then it reduces the endeavors of the student’s learning and teacher’s instruction to an exercise of producing grades rather than genuine learning and growth. The ultimate purpose of assessment should be to tell the student how much and how well they have mastered targeted skills and content. Effective feedback does not stop at informing the student and teacher what the student has and has not mastered but should explain to the student how they can clarify misconceptions and identify errors in their thinking on a given topic.