Personal Assessment Philosophy

Part of becoming a teacher means learning how implement assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of your instruction. Education today seems to be overrun with standardized assessments mandated by state governments to determine how schools in different institutions compare to each other in regards to student achievement. However, these tests are often criticized for not presenting a true picture of what students are learning in school. Recently, there has been a call for “authentic assessment” in classrooms in the form of both formative and summative assessments as an attempt to develop a more complete understanding of what students are learning and to provide a basis for instructional decisions.

        It can be difficult to define authentic assessment since researchers and educators cannot seem to agree on an all-encompassing definition. In my personal philosophy, I agree with Newman, Brandt, and Wiggins (1998) who stated that authentic assessment should “have meaning or value beyond success in school.” This would be the goal that I would use when creating my own authentic assessments. The other concepts that Frey, Schmitt, and Allen (2012) identified during their analysis of publications on authentic assessment, such as performance-based tasks, student collaboration, and cognitively complex tasks, are characteristics that I will use when creating authentic assessments when they apply.

Now that I have defined and identified characteristics of authentic assessments, it has become clear that this type of assessment is a very valuable classroom tool. First, it is clear that authentic assessment can be beneficial to student learning. Adams and Findlay (2015) interviewed teachers from Alberta, Canada using a new inquiry-based curriculum and found that the they felt that the assessments allowed students to look at learning as an ongoing process and encouraged students to reflect upon their learning.  This process of formative assessment benefited the students by allowing them to constantly monitor their own learning and helped the teachers to identify and help students when they were struggling (Adams & Findlay, 2015). This concept of student’s assessing their own learning is further supported by Andrade (2007/2008) who encourages having student grade and revise their own work so that students can get instant feedback about where they are struggling and what they are doing well. The other idea that teachers in the study from Adams and Findlay (2015) conveyed in their interviews was that their performance-based assessments allowed them to test students on multiple skills at once which gave students multiple ways to solve problems. In this way, authentic assessment is beneficial to students because the flexibility that comes with performance assessment makes it possible for students who vary in their styles of learning to do well on tasks that assess a wide range of skills.

Ultimately, it seems that authentic assessments excel where standardized assessments fail.  The problems that they present to students have implications that extend past the walls of the classroom and provide an insight into each student’s ongoing learning process. There are many clear benefits to using authentic assessment in the classroom, but I personally share the concern of many individuals that using standardized authentic assessment may not be practical. A  2007/2008 article by Robert Sternberg demonstrates that authentic standardized assessment can be effectively used to better or further assess students, but does not address the time-consuming nature of scoring this type of assessment. Sternberg (2007/2008) does state the importance of creating thorough rubrics, which may help with the concern about subjectivity. It would be worth doing more research to determine if there have been other authentic standardized assessments that have been implemented and to become aware of the challenges that were faced in the process. According to a study in Chicago, students who are exposed to authentic assessment do tend to have higher performance on state-mandated standardized tests (Newmann, Bryk, & Nagoka, 2001). As standardized tests are refined and reformed, it may still be possible to change our in-class assessments and maintain or even improve our students scores on state-mandated tests. However, this is clearly an area where more research should be done.

As things in the assessment world currently stand, there seems to be a large disconnect between what students are learning in the classroom and what standardized assessments test. Developing authentic classroom assessments will help teachers gain a better understanding about the learning that is occurring within the classroom, but much work still needs to be done to create the bridge between authentic learning in the classroom and authentic nationwide assessment of that learning.

References

Adams, P., & Findlay, C. (2015). Transforming pedagogy and practice through inquiry-based curricula: A study of high school social studies. One World in Dialogue, 3(2), 28-36.

Andrade, H. (2007/2008, December/January). Self assessment through rubrics. Educational Leadership, 65(4), 60-62.

Frey, Bruce B., Schmitt, Vicki L., & Justin P. Allen (2012). Defining authentic classroom assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 17(2). Available online: http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=17&n=2

Newmann, F., Brandt, R.. & Wiggins, G. (1998). An exchange of views on semantics, psychometrics, and assessment reform: a close look at 'authentic' assessments. Educational Researcher, 27(6), 19-22.

Newmann, F. M., Bryk, A. S., & Nagaoka, J. K. (2001). Authentic intellectual work and standardized tests: Conflict or coexistence?. Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Sternberg, R. J. (2007/2008, December/January). Assessing what matters. Educational Leadership, 65(4), 20-26.