Evaluating Learning: AEE 412 Weekly Writing #8

If there is one phrase that I think makes most students at the very least cringe, if not break out in tears, it's the following: "Alright class, clear off your desks except for a writing utensil, it's time to take the test/exam/quiz/etc..."

Evaluations and assessments can sometimes feel like necessary evils in a classroom - students usually don't want to take them and teachers don't necessarily want to grade them, but everyone knows they're required to show proof of learning. Now while assessments in some form are required to show evidence of student performance in our classrooms, there's no right or wrong answer as to how we can deliver our assessments. There are many different forms and types of evaluations and assessments, especially depending on if they are being used as formative (during learning) assessments or summative (final, at the end) assessments. 

Equal Testing =/= Fair Testing

Some assessments may be performance or skill based; others can be project based, focusing on the process and end-product of a project. In-class questioning, ticket outs, writing assignments, informal check-ins and of course the almighty test/exam/quiz are also all types of assessments, and any of these can be utilized based on your preferences and your students' learning styles but what is really important regardless of assessment type are the questions - "Does this assessment accurately test my students' knowledge and/or skills that I wanted them to learn? Is the assessment fair for all of my students? And what other factors could prohibit my students from performing well on the assessment?"

Answering these questions can be difficult depending on the type of assessment chosen, but necessary to ensure that they are really measuring student learning based on the learning objectives you had for the lesson/unit. You also want to make sure that your assessments are fair for all your students, but that does not always mean that all students need to take the same exact assessment. In my junior year of high school, my American History teacher would give everyone what appeared to be the same exam at the same time to complete during the class period after we had finished a unit. However, if you looked the exams side by side, you could see that there were usually three different versions of the exam with differing amounts of multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and essay questions, but all of the exams tested on the same content. When I came back as a college student and he showed me this, he said he used the different exam formats based on the students' ability to perform on each type of test and that he would adjust which format he gave each student depending on his perception of how they were grasping the material (if a student seemed to be struggling with certain information they got Test C, Test B, etc.). He utilized this technique because he said at the end of the day he was able to determine if all of his students had comprehended the basic information he wanted them to, and he was able to minimize the number of poor class grades due to assessments.

This question tests a student's ability to read and answer questions, but not necessarily the content taught.
There shouldn't be loopholes in our assessments for students to find.

In addition to determining if our assessments are evaluating our students' comprehension of the learning objectives, and determining the fairest way to evaluate all of our students, we also need to know what other factors can impact our students' performance on assessments. Test anxiety is typically the biggest factor impacting student performance on assessments and can be influenced by many different things. While this is usually associated with the traditional written tests/exam/quiz formats, anytime a student feels "tested" they can become overwhelmed with their stress and anxiety, negatively impacting their performance. This testing anxiety can be impacted by the student's internal feelings towards testing, their ability to strategize and prepare for the assessment, the other students' behaviors/attitudes towards testing and possibly the performance of their peers, and the teacher/classroom atmosphere. Teachers should be calm about assessments, stressing their importance on the students' learning growth and less about the grade, without downplaying its value too low. Teachers should also be positive about assessments - teachers who are upset on test day make students stressed on test day. Teachers can also teach students strategies to prepare for assessments and manage stress which can help students walk into an assessment less anxious and then continue to decrease their anxiety during the assessment. If teachers decide to use different assessments for different students, they need to also remember to not draw attention to these differences or the reasons for them, as that could lead to the other students assigning a stigma to that student, increasing the testing anxiety. This is something that I think my history teacher did very well as it was never apparent that there were multiple test forms because he made them all look the same and he individually passed them out so you didn't notice anything different. This also meant that if you struggled on one unit and shifted to a different format for the next test to help, you didn't know it so you (as the student) never felt dumb based on the test format.  

The biggest take-away I have from our readings is that as long as we remember to address those three questions above (Learning Objectives, Fairness, Other Impacting Factors) the assessment format does not matter. What really matters is that we remember that we are teaching our students content and that we will use various forms of assessment to evaluate their grasp of the content. We are not teaching our students how to do well on assessments and then also teaching content. Student learning is our first priority, not the ability to perform well on standardized tests (though if our students understand the content well, they should perform well on the tests).

To help us move forward in our teaching careers, I found the following three resources that I think can be helpful when thinking about and/or developing evaluations and assessments for your students: Here is a link to tips and strategies for students, parents and teachers relating to reducing test anxiety. This is a list of over 20 different strategies teachers can use everyday in their classrooms as assessments. See the table below for a great chart connecting types of learning objectives with example assessments: