[AnE] Assessment for Inquiry-Based Approaches

I have been meaning to write about assessment for a while now.  Things kept getting more and more overwhelming in my life, so it had to sit on the backburner.  Another reason that this kept getting pushed back has to do with the content itself.

I have been interested in assessment ever since I stepped foot into education.  I have always grabbed onto the constructivist framework of education - specifically the inquiry-based approaches that has been promoted by people like Darling-Hammond, Boaler, and more recently from the blogosphere, people like Meyer (both of them [@doingmath]), Doran @nik_d_maths , Nguyen @fawnpnguyen, .... and so many more.  The question for me has always been - how do we appropriately assess these approaches? (this was in fact the question that I asked @ddmeyer when I met him a year ago)

Mathematics Assessment is in fact the focus of my M.A.  All the research I deal with are primarily built on the foundation of inquiry-based learning, and necessitates standards based grading.  With the emergence and acceptance of inquiry-based approaches, the challenges of assessments has taken a drastic turn.  How do we develop appropriate assessments for the way that we are facilitating discussions?  An activity like this where students are engaged in the process of learning, and are effective in demonstrating their understanding of various concepts... how exactly would we assess this? (my concerns are currently the summative and evaluative functions... which I will explain later) In my mind, there is a huge disconnect between the way that we are facilitating learning, and the way that we are presenting our evaluative assessments.  All this stuff is precisely what I am (have been, will be) working on.  It sounds like I gave a lot of detail on what my thesis entails... but my topic is actually a lot more specific.  I will probably write about it later.

Which is why the recent growing interest in assessment in the blogosphere is exciting news to me.  Daniel  @mathymcmatherso and Tina @crstn85 , for example, were one of the ones that have written about assessment recently.  I have yet to figure out a way to fully engage these people in the same room for conversation, but I am sure that'll happen down the road.  Another reason why I haven't approached them for these conversations is that our concerns are currently at different places.  They are concerned with written assessments and establishing the how-to's for those.  The development process is rich, and is probably not something I should impose on.  Swimming around in the sea of research, as well as various reform efforts for assessment around Ontario, I have developed a way of doing it.  I don't want to interfere with others, because I am interested in seeing what comes out first before we engage in conversation.  I am actually genuinely interested, and excited, to see the evolving product.

In any case, I thought I might start off what will likely be a series of posts about assessments, beginning with my general understanding of assessments (I won't say it is THE way to think about it, for obvious reasons!).

Assessments are not just in written form.  There, I said it.

It seems like a silly distinction to make, but it's actually a very useful one.  It's difficult to narrow down a one-liner definition for assessment, but we can begin to unpack this big idea by looking at the associated functions of assessment: formative, summative, and evaluative.

These three functions are huge ideas, but I will talk about them generally and separately.  I will just tackle the formative function first.

The formative function of assessment is a huge piece of student learning.  It's not just a buzz word that's being thrown around in interviews or teachers college.  Dylan Wiliam, in my mind, brought this idea of formative function out to the forefront back 2 decades ago.  The main concepts behind formative assessments have not changed.  However, the details have been altered throughout the years.  The most recent one that I am aware of states: "An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of that evidence."

Heavy sentence, I know.  Wiliam unpacks some features of this definition:

• it is based on the function served by the information yielded by the assessment, rather than a property of the assessment itself.
• the assessment can be carried out by the teacher, the learner, or her peers.
• the focus of the definition is on decisions regarding next steps in instruction, rather than intentions or outcomes.
• the definition is probabilistic
• the assessment need not change the direction of instruction (it might merely confirm that the planned subsequent actions were appropriate).

Now, you may be wondering why I wrote "formative function" instead of "formative assessment."  Isn't that easier to write?  Well, that's actually exactly what I've been trying to avoid.  I don't believe that assessments should solely be formative -- and since "formative assessment" implies that it has a singular purpose, that phrase is not as useful to me.  What do I mean?  Well an assessment is what it is.  It's an assessment.  It is what we do with it that determines the function.  Let's say it's an assessment in written form.  If you decide to have them write it, give it back, then have the kids discuss and generate answers together -- then that's formative, and probably summative as well.  I think a lot of teachers jump straight to the evaluative function of assessment, and they develop separate special "formative assessments."

Everything we do as teachers is for the sake of facilitating effective student learning.  Assessment is a huge part of this.  In a way, teachers are like researchers.  We are gathering information about our subjects so we can accurately construct a picture of their learning.  Any puzzle pieces that we obtain -- are assessments.

I plan on writing more on assessments and what I have learned about assessments in the future.  I will likely explore more of the conceptual structure of assessment.  If you are more interested in the pedagogical concerns, let me know.  I can share how standard-based grading functions in my classroom, or how I deal with open-questions and why my tests have never had marks on them?...etc.

See, this is another reason why I didn't get to this blog post... It's such a giant topic for me.  I have way too many things that I want to talk about that it's hard to break it down to manageable pieces.  Oh well, one step at a time :)

Hopefully this roused some interests and questions for you to explore too!

*Click here to continue to read about my assessment practices