How can educators assess children’s progress? Principles 18–20 discuss how to provide quality assessment in classrooms.
Principle 18: Formative and summative assessments are both important and useful, but require different approaches and interpretations
Formative assessment is used to guide and shape classroom instruction directly. Summative assessments are designed to produce an overall judgment of student learning progress or the effectiveness of educational programs. Overall, the goal of formative, summative, and diagnostic assessment is fundamentally the same—to produce valid, fair, useful, and reliable sources of information.
Tips for teachers
Employing formative assessments and formative assessment practices can result in important increases in student learning when teachers:
Set achievable instructional goals and align assessments to those goals. For most students with disabilities, these instructional goals will be based on grade level achievement standards. For students with significant cognitive disabilities, review your state’s alternate achievement standards to consider how to adapt grade level content.
Use this evidence to help understand what students know and promptly redirect students as needed.
Employ principles of universal design to ensure all students can access any technology used for formative assessment (e.g., classroom clickers, quizzes).
Keep the length of time between the formative assessment and subsequent interventions relatively short; this is when effects on student learning will be strongest.
Principle 19: Students’ skills, knowledge, and abilities are best measured with assessment processes grounded in psychological science with well-defined standards for quality and fairness
There are clear standards for judging the quality of assessments of any type. These standards for assessment reference additional accessibility standards that are particularly important for students with disabilities, and mention both universal design and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Assessments that are accessible, reliable, and valid help test score users make appropriate inferences about students’ knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Tips for teachers
Ways in which teachers can improve the quality of the assessments they use include:
When selecting digital tools for assessments, request a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), search for accessibility reviews, or look for 508 compliance documents on the product website.
Be mindful that tests that are valid for one use or setting may not be valid for another. For example, tests designed for school accountability may not be valid for use in determining the readiness of a student for the next grade level.
Monitor outcomes of assessment procedures and outcomes to determine whether there are consistent discrepancies across students from different subgroups (e.g., English learners).
Review your state’s alternate achievement standards to consider how to adapt grade level content for students with significant cognitive disabilities.
Principle 20: Making sense of assessment data depends on clear, appropriate, and fair interpretation
The meaning of assessment outcomes depends on clear, appropriate, and fair interpretation. Scores from any assessment should generally be used only for the specific purposes for which they were designed. Interpretation of test data for special education students may require additional information on the manner in which the assessment was delivered.
Tips for teachers
Teachers can weigh curriculum and assessment choices to evaluate whether those resources are supported by research evidence and are suitable for use with diverse learners.
To effectively interpret assessment data, teachers should address the following about any assessment they use: What was the assessment intended to measure? What comparisons are the assessment data based on? Additionally, consider if testing accommodations were provided and used consistently when comparing data across two assessment scores.
Data gathered from any assessment are best interpreted in light of their suitability for addressing specific questions about students or educational programs, their appropriateness for individuals from a variety of different backgrounds and educational circumstances, and the intended and unintended consequences that result from using the assessment.
Awareness of the strengths and limitations of any assessment is critical. Such awareness also enables teachers to communicate caveats, such as possible imperfect reliability of scores (see more on this in Principle 19), and the importance of using multiple sources of evidence for high-stakes decisions.
