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 assessments, sometimes referred to as authentic assessments, are used to guide and shape classroom instruction directly. Summative assessments are used to produce an overall judgment of children’s learning progress or the effectiveness of educational programs. Although these two types of assessments are designed to address different questions, they should complement each other in an effort to produce valid, fair, useful and reliable sources of information and insight into young children’s learning and development.
Tips for teachers
Employing formative assessments can result in important increases in children’s learning when teachers:
Have a sound knowledge of child development.
Have, over time, developed the skill of observation and documentation of young children’s learning and development.
Use lessons and other classroom experiences to collect evidence on children’s learning.
Teachers can improve the effectiveness of formative assessments when they:
Focus systematically on setting appropriate learning goals for individual children, and then determine whether children have met these goals.
Consistently consider how to improve their instructional practices.
Keep the length of time between the formative assessment and subsequent instruction relatively short; as this is when the information from the formative assessment is most accurate and relevant.
Principle 19: Children’s skills, knowledge, and abilities are best measured with assessment processes grounded in psychological science with well-defined standards for quality and fairness.
Teachers and leaders are working in an era when assessments are a constant topic of discussion and debate. Assessments that are both reliable and valid help teachers, administrators and policymakers make appropriate inferences about children’s knowledge, skills and abilities.
Tips for teachers
Teachers can improve the quality of the assessments they use by:
Only assessing material that has been taught or discussed.
Using a sufficient number of questions and a variety of assessment formats in which children may demonstrate their knowledge and skill on the same topic.
Avoid questions that are too hard or too easy and are not providing sufficient differentiation in knowledge.
Being mindful that assessments that are valid for one use or setting may not be valid for another.
Basing high-stakes decisions on multiple measures instead of a single test result.
Monitoring children’s outcomes to determine whether there are consistent discrepancies across the performance or outcomes of children from different cultural groups.
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 the assessments were designed.
Effective teaching depends on teachers being informed consumers of educational research, effective interpreters of data for classroom use, and good communicators with children and their families about assessment data and resulting decisions that affect children. Teachers can weigh curricular and assessment choices to evaluate whether those resources are supported by research evidence and are suitable for use with diverse learners.
Tips for teachers
To interpret assessment data effectively, teachers should address the following about any assessment they use:
What was the assessment intended to measure?
How are the assessment results to be used? Are the results aligned to the goals for which the assessment was designed?
What comparisons are the assessment data based on? Are children being compared to one another? Or, instead, are children’s responses being directly compared to samples of acceptable and unacceptable responses that the teacher or others have provided?
What are the criteria for cut-points or standards? Are the children’s scores being classified using a standard or cut-point, such as a pass/fail category, letter grades, or some other indicator of satisfactory/unsatisfactory performance?
