Nothing has changed more in our field than the way we assess students in our public schools. Intuition ruled the day back in the 80s when I began in education. We relied largely on our own instincts (which were generally pretty accurate) but we had little quantitative data to back things up. We may have relied more on qualitative data, a trend that we may be losing sight of in modern times. Now…we have numbers. Lots of them.
Sue Brookheart, who has written often on assessment for ASCD, presented this morning on “Different Kinds of Data” at the ASCD Annual Conference in Houston. I just tweeted my notes from the session…(and already 47 people are viewing them). Side note-the growth of positive social media in the years at the Annual ASCD Conference is really amazing.
Major takeaways:
- With so many assessments, we have to categorize what we do in order to realize the purpose of each assessment. (See graphic above).
- We cannot use our current interim assessments as both formative and summative. Let each category rule the day and serve its own purpose.
- Interim assessments can’t only be used to determine if a student can read or complete basic math…our intuition already tells us that. We have to be committed to using these assessments to disaggregate to sub-skills and determine the real cause behind a lack of progress in a particular area.
- Be very careful with cut points and what is truly proficient or not. Or…let’s not take numbers at face value. This is cliche, but how often in our rush do we not analyze data enough before we use that data to change a child’s instructional program?
