Author Insights

By Mike Ruyle

The Evolution of Assessment

As schools continue to evolve in order to meet the needs of contemporary learners in the modern world, the new mantra of instruction for teachers is no longer “I taught it,” but rather “they got it.” As such, the role of classroom assessment and feedback must necessarily undergo a similar shift of paradigm.

A teacher’s ability to assess student learning has always been a critical component of the teaching craft. The Socratic method displayed teaching through questioning, or in essence, using assessment to determine best instructional practices and the corresponding feedback to drive learning. But today, we often equate assessment simply with tests and grades. And the grading system used in virtually every American school follows the A-B-C-D-F model correlating with percentage scores that was originally developed from the “Alpha Test” used in World War I, which was designed to assign new soldiers to military positions based on their scores. Our testing practice in schools today, however, should not be used to sort and select students, or simply to justify a grade. We need a better definition of assessment that is more widely accepted that allows for assessment to better measure growth toward goals. As Bob Marzano recently said, “We need more assessments and fewer tests.”

Although measurement theory can be traced in its current form to Thorndike over 120 years ago, assessment in this form remains a soft science used to measure something that’s quite difficult to measure in reality. Formative assessment provides information to teachers and feedback to students about how students are doing relative to specific learning goals and how they are progressing through the learning process. Frequent assessment has been shown to positively impact achievement. And research shows conclusively that formative assessment improves learning when it is directly linked to processes in the classroom, and when it helps modify instructional practice. Quoting W. James Popham, Dylan Wiliam said, “you cannot call it ‘formative assessment’ unless instruction is improved.”

We cannot prove that students are learning in our classes without valid, reliable assessments. And providing solid, meaningful feedback from sound assessment practice is a skill in which teachers must be better trained. In Classroom Assessment and Grading that Works (2006), Marzano indicated that a 49-percentile increase in teacher skill in assessment practice could predict a 28-percentile increase in student achievement. Education is about development, and our assessment/feedback strategies must evolve to meet this purpose if we are to move our schools forward into the future.

“You can’t learn without feedback... It’s not teaching that causes learning. It’s the attempts by the learner to perform that cause learning, dependent upon the quality of the feedback and opportunities to use it. A single test of anything is, therefore, an incomplete assessment. We need to know whether the student can use the feedback from the results.” —Grant Wiggins

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