Assessment

Formative and summative assessments are both important and useful but require different approaches and interpretations

Formative assessments provide information about gifted students that is useful in making decisions about curriculum, instructional strategies, grouping and acceleration. Summative assessments are useful in evaluating gifted students’ learning progress, and the effectiveness of curricular and instructional practices, and the overall educational program.

Tips for teachers

Using formative assessments can result in important increases in student learning when teachers:

• Clearly communicate and involve the gifted students in the purpose of each lesson.
• Use lessons and other classroom experiences to monitor and collect evidence on gifted students’ learning.
• Use this evidence to help understand what gifted students know and adjust plans, enriching and accelerating learning as appropriate.
• Align the assessments with appropriate learning goals for gifted students.
• Use authentic, above grade level, and differentiated assessments to identify what gifted and advanced students know and don’t know.
• Develop long- and short-range goals based on multiple types of assessments that consider each gifted student’s abilities, achievement levels, needs and interests.
• Engage gifted students in determining whether they have met these goals.
• Use formative assessment continually to adjust curriculum and pace instruction based on the learning capabilities of gifted and advanced students.

Students’ skills, knowledge and abilities are best measured with assessment processes grounded in psychological science with well-defined standards for quality and fairness

In a gifted education setting, evidence about an assessment’s validity is particularly noteworthy because of the consequences associated with an assessment’s outcome (e.g., consideration of ethical and equity issues involved with the labeling of children as “gifted” or “not gifted” and the educational and social opportunities afforded because of the label).

Tips for teachers

Ways in which teachers can improve the quality of the assessments they use in their classrooms include:

• Being mindful that assessments should be used for the specific purpose for which they were developed.
• Using a sufficient number of questions overall and a variety of question types (e.g., multiple-choice and constructed response) that allow for the full range of student responses and mastery beyond grade level.
• Using item analysis to minimize bias. For example, teachers can easily check the relative difficulty of questions in general to ensure there is not a ceiling for gifted learners and also with regard to student subpopulations (e.g., native speakers compared with English language learners).

Making sense of assessment data depends on clear, appropriate and fair interpretation.

Scores from any assessment should generally be used only for the specific purposes for which the assessments were designed. In a gifted education setting, assessment data generally result from four different sources:

• Data from identification processes and procedures.
• Data from accountability systems (e.g., state, program).
• Data from gifted program evaluations.
  
• Data from classroom settings.

Tips for teachers

To provide appropriate and fair interpretations of student data, teachers must:

• Recognize that all assessments contain degree of error (i.e., are imprecise) and thus provide incomplete evidence about student performance; therefore, assessments should be combined with other sources of evidence for making important decisions.
• Use assessment that allow for the full range of content-area knowledge and skills to be demonstrated so that appropriate instructional decisions can be made on the basis of accurate interpretations.
• Understand there might be positive (or negative) social consequences for students identified and labeled as gifted. Considering the implications of interpretation (i.e., false positives and false negatives) is important because of the potential social consequences (e.g., identity issues) for learners.