Assessment as a Conversation

“Assessment is not a spreadsheet, it’s a conversation.”

–  Joe Bower

Boy, do I wish that I had heard this simple description of assessment before I entered the field. Or maybe I did, but I was so bogged down and stressed out that I never put it into practice as a new teacher.

If I were to ask my students what assessment is, they would tell me that it is a grade or a mark… as in the familiar questions, “Is this for marks? Will this be graded? What do I need to do to get an EU on the next test?” When I think about what assessment is to me, however, it is a way to see if a student has a grasp on a particular outcome taken from the curriculum.

Çekiç & Bakla recognize that there are two forms of assessment that are used in education: summative assessment and formative assessment.

They say that summative assessment “… refers to the practice of assessing learning at the end of the learning process, usually for making decisions regarding success or failure.”

Furthermore, Çekiç & Bakla describe formative assessment as the monitoring of students’ performance in order to pinpoint incomplete or missing knowledge/skills and to try to fill these gaps.

For this blog post, I’m going to focus on summative assessment, and how it can be more of a conversation than spreadsheet, with the help of technology. 

I was scrolling on Pinterest over the February break when I came across this revision sheet from Scaffolded Math.

This school year, I have always allowed students to take assignments or tests back, fix their corrections, and hand them back in to me to have another look at or to re grade them. This revision sheet looked like an even better way to do that, because there is a spot for students to explain why their new answer is correct, and even why they made the mistake in the first place.

Naturally, I stapled it to the back of our last unit test. When I returned tests back to students, I explained that they needed to take it home to show parents, and that the revision sheet was there if they wanted to fix their mistakes. I told them that the “Explain” boxes were there so that they can tell me WHY they got the question wrong, and how they corrected that error.

I was thrilled to see what happened next! Students took their tests home and figured out exactly what went wrong with the mistakes that were made. They were able to find the error, figure out WHY they made that error, and explain it to me. It felt more like a cognitive approach (focus on the mental process and problem solving), or even a constructivist approach (feedback to continue learning) to assessment.

Why haven’t I done this before? TIME. This is the first year in a while that I have felt I could set aside the time to do a second check of the assessments and update scores… although it didn’t take very long at all. What I wish is that the feedback could have been more immediate for a true constructivist approach…

Photo by Alexandra_Koch on Pixabay

So what about online assessment? Maybe that could help with the immediate feedback dilemma.

I like to think that I can use the immediate feedback from online assessment to drive my instruction in the right direction (more of a formative assessment tool). The other day, I started math off with a round of 99math, focusing on rounding decimals, and found that my students weren’t yet comfortable with that concept. We spent the rest of that class reviewing how to round decimals, and everyone finished with some drill-and-practice that I was able to quickly and easily assign with 99math.

To use online assessment in a summative manner, I am interested in the idea of using AI to correct spelling and grammar on student essays, so that I can put more of my time into the content and structure of their writing. This would allow me to get through those 27 essays a lot quicker than I have been so that students can get feedback sooner and then go back to make those changes. I’m going to try to do that before the end of this school year.

Now, for someone who is feeling overwhelmed by all of the assessment options and has no idea where to start… what can you do? As Alonzo et al explains, we can use online tools and social media to enhance those conversations… using it as a tool for students to grow and develop their ideas by interacting not just with their teacher, but with each other.

What would happen if we replaced the word “assessment” with the word “conversation” as Bower describes? Keeping in mind that to have a conversation is to have a back-and-forth between two or more people, and not just one person delivering words to another person.

Something to think about…