Do you step on the bathroom scale in the morning? How about in the evening, also? Do you glance at your reflection in the mirror? More than once each day? Do you check your rear view and side mirrors while driving? Do you look through the window to check the weather before venturing outdoors? How about the temperature of water in your shower? I do. We do these and many other rituals because we want and we need to know and the information we obtain is knowledge for our daily living. Information guides what we think about our “now” and informs what we need to do “next”. Information tell us to stop doing things are not working for our benefit and to start doing things that will. The option of not knowing makes life a guessing game.
Assessment is what I am talking about. Assessment is a part of life. We all do it, consciously and unconsciously, because we want information that we think is important to our living. A good working definition of the word assessment is this – assessment is evaluating or considering the nature, quality, or ability of someone or something that is of interest to you and to others. I believe, as educators, we should start at the end of this definition first. We assess because we are interested – I add, because we care. And then look at assessment as evaluating or considering the nature, quality or ability of our interest in teaching and learning.
Interest and care are huge words in the world of education. Parents enroll their children in our schools to be taught and to be cared for and to grow annually on their path toward college and career readiness. From their perspective, parents expect educators to be engaged in a decade-plus, nine-month-a-year, work-day long continuing education and care of their children. School becomes the major factor in a child’s life from age 4 to 18. In response, there is ample evidence that teachers demonstrate many of the characteristics of caregivers to their students as teachers are called not only to teach but to affect each child’s social, emotional, mental, nutritional, and physical health. Interest in and care for children in school abounds.
Why we assess. The intellectual education of children is not guess work. If teaching and learning were so happenstance as guess work, we would follow the guidance of Rousseau. We would turn all children lose in the proverbial innocence of a natural world and see what happens. To the contrary, schools adopt programs and curricula and design experiences for the education of children. Educators are constantly interested in both sides of this work –how well are the school programs, curricula and experiences causing their planned outcomes, and, how well is each child learning. Though it sounds like a bumper sticker – educators work at the education of children.
Most of our daily, adult, personal assessments are made subjectively. We don’t need exact data for safety, comfort, preference and casual decisions. We read and we listen. We look and we observe. We feel and we smell and we taste. We make estimations and approximations based upon the information we glean from our world. Detail usually does not matter, if our perception is close enough to what we expect.
Other decisions require more critical and exact information. We like meat grilled to a medium rare and know about what medium rare looks like on the exterior of the meat, but sticking a meat thermometer into the meat ensures that 120 -130 degree flavor we seek. Adding a half tsp or a whole tsp of baking powder to cookies makes a difference. We need to know if a guest in our home has a food allergy and the nature of that allergy. Pre-information guides us when downloading a movie – there is a difference between X, R, M and PG. Each of these is an assessment we make about the nature or quality of things in our world that matter to us. In these instances, the details in the information matter.
Our student learning committee learned to ask a significant question when talking about school curricula, programs and how well our children do. How do we know this? If the conversation does not include a qualitative and/or quantitative statement based upon fact, the committee knows it is hearing opinion and the committee needs to ask different and deeper questions. How we know is as important as what we know when we are talking about the education of children.
Teaching and learning are the application of cause and effect. These are not random or accidental. They are not unplanned. We teach in order to cause children to learn a vast amount information and ideas, to learn and improve a wide variety of skills, to find value in what they are able to do, and to understand how others see and value them as learning children. Teaching is a purposeful act with a beginning and an ending and knowing what the ending acts and looks like is essential. If not, children would be reading Dick and Jane books K through 12. Good teaching knows when the next teaching is required. And, that is why we ask “how do we know this?” How do we know that a child has learned and is ready for our next teaching? Just as importantly, how do we know that a child has not learned or not learned well enough and we must teach again and differently?
I understand those who chant “too much time is wasted on assessment and schools over test.” We must be certain in our management of teaching and learning that we assess properly and frequently enough to inform teaching and learning. Knowing is accrued in many ways. Proper assessment is as non-invasive as listening and watching. A teacher listening to a first grader read aloud will know as much about that child’s immediate reading abilities as any test could provide. An Algebra teacher watching a child think through and write out the steps of math problem has instant information about what a child knows and does not know well enough. A band director listening to horn players in solo or ensemble knows that these students have learned or need further instruction. We do not need large scale testing to know everything we need to know. We assess constantly everyday because we care that all children are successful learners.
I, on the other hand, worry we do not assess enough or well enough. I am not writing about testing, though testing is an important form of assessment. I repeat that proper assessment is a powerful “I care about you and your learning statement”. I observe that we diminish listening to children as they grow older. Elementary teachers listen to children read aloud. They listen to children explain their thinking aloud. Elementary teacher teach in close proximity to children as they learn. Close listening, watching and proximity are important to the monitoring and adjusting of teaching to cause student learning of knowledge, skills and dispositions. As children get older, teachers allow “space” to develop. We believe that children are embarrassed when they are required to read aloud or to explain aloud their reasoning and thinking to problem solutions. They, older children, want the product or their answer to speak for itself. “Why do I have to show my work or tell you how I found that answer if it is right?”, they complain. And, teachers give into the argument. Teaching and learning in high school classes operates with too much space between teacher and student. Without the intimacy of listening and watching and knowing, we rely upon tests to know, because know we must. We too often fail in the area of informal assessment of high school children.
In a better educational setting, all assessment would be personal and direct between teacher and child. “Tell me, show me, help me to know what you have learned and how well you have learned it.” Listening and watching are as important to knowing about the education of a senior in high school as it is a child in Kindergarten. However, time is not on our side. One-to-one assessment in a class of 25 secondary students engaged in complex and complicated learning requires too much time. Hence, whole group testing is the way we know about the quality of what large groups of children have learned.
Assessment frequency and exactitude increases when educators need incremental information. Our committee is deeply engaged in improving student phonemic coding and decoding skills within phonics-based reading instruction. Knowing which children have these skills and which do not and the degree of their skills attainment requires frequent observational and tested information. The better the assessed information, the better the instructional response to each child’s needs. Frequency and exact measures work to the benefit of children.
An unpublicized part of the assessment/testing scenario is knowing when to stop testing or to stop using a test that provides less than the required information. We are phasing out our current universal screener for EC – 3rd grade children and replacing it with an assessment that is more definitive in specific reading skills. At the same time, we are questioning the need for end of the year assessments because the intervening summer months causes this information to be out of date in informing us about beginning of the school year instruction. Instead, September and January assessment places assessment information directly in front of newly informed instruction. Frequent, exacting and wiser assessment a constant pursuit for educators.
For those who remain skeptical about school assessments, I encourage you to continue asking questions and to focus your inquiry on “How is this assessment improving my child’s immediate and future education?”. If teachers cannot provide a solid and satisfactory answer, we are not doing our job of knowing and we deserve your criticism. That is my assessment.