By Jaya Carrier
I hope everyone has had a good week so far! We’ve been doing lots of thinking about assessment practices this term, and therefore I was interested to see the following article on Edutopia which looks at evidence-based practices in designing assessments. Objectives:
To understand how evidence-based practices for assessment can be applied to the designing of assessments. Summary:
The author of the article recommends the following practices for designing and implementing assessments:
1) Support students in getting good test preparation habits - in particular, students often overestimate their preparedness for a test, so the author recommends that teachers ask students to show a detailed revision plan, including the kinds of activities they are going to undertake.
2) Consider the level of difficulty in an assessment carefully - in particular, overly difficult tests have been shown to have decreased motivation, as well as being a more likely cause for students to remember wrong answers. The author recommends that students who study moderately should be getting 70-80% in the assessment.
3) Consider the question order - in particular, put easier questions first. Recent studies have shown that students are more likely to do worse on tests if the difficult questions are at the start.
4) Be aware of implicit bias - in particular, consider the question phrasing and construction. Girls have been shown, for example, to answer consistently better on open-ended questions. The author recommends combining different question types - multiple-choice, short answer, essays - with creative, open-ended assessments.
5) Break up assessments - in particular, space them out across a sequence of work.
6) Get students to write their own tests - some research shows that students who did this regularly got on average 14% better marks.
7) After assessment work - the author recommends not seeing tests as an endpoint, but as an ongoing journey, and a valuable opportunity to address misconceptions or gaps in knowledge. One strategy promoted is ‘exam wrappers’ which are short metacognitive writing tasks that get students to review their performance on the test. How does this impact me and my practice?:
Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:
- How am I designing and implementing assessments currently?
- What of these practices am I already using?
- What assessment practices would you like to improve upon further?
Thank you Jaya. I'm excited for the discussions we'll have across the teaching staff about what it means to be "assessment-capable". There are so many ways to assess learning and, while external exam prep, will of course be an important element of our assessment approaches, I wonder how far we'll broaden our schoolwide assessment repertoire to include things like authentic assessment tasks (identified openly at the start of a period of learning, rather than a surprise pen and paper assessment) and differentiated assessment. Exciting stuff - thanks again!
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