So What Exactly is Assessment?

So what exactly is assessment?  According to Ric Stiggins (2018),  assessment is gathering student achievement to make educational decisions. Stakeholders use student assessment not only to measure student success but to also measure and evaluate local schools and educational teachers and leaders. This data assists in determining teachers' and districts' strengths and weaknesses, allowing leaders to tailor professional development to increase teachers’ effectiveness.  By increasing teacher effectiveness, students would also show more significant academic growth.

But what does this mean exactly?  Every year in Georgia, Milestone scores are generally released during the summer months.  Parents, teachers, and stakeholders review these scores to see where their students, schools, and districts measure up to others across the state. Using these test scores and data, Local School Improvement Plans (LSPI) are created to address areas of needed growth for the upcoming year by determining long-term goals and yearly objectives (Gwinnett County Public Schools, n.d.).

However, as a teacher, this widely publicized assessment score represents just one of many classroom assessments.  While this score is a summative assessment meant to measure a student's overall achievement throughout the previous year, students and teachers engage in consistent formative assessment throughout the year that guides daily instructional practices and decisions. Formative assessments occur throughout instruction and provide feedback to students and teachers about their progress in learning specific standards (Boyd et al., 2019).  Formative assessments can take many forms, including ticket out-the-doors, 3-2-1's, journal entries, think-pair-shares, and open discussions within the classroom (Briggs, 2014).

Backward design is a student-centered approach focusing on learning outcomes rather than just the topics to be covered (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, n.d.).  When determining lesson objectives for an assessment, teachers must start with the end goals in mind.  Teachers first determine what learners should be able to do (goals and objectives) after a unit, determine acceptable evidence to show they have met these goals and objectives (assessment), and then design instruction to ensure that students will be prepared and can produce evidence of their learning(Hall, 2018). 


Briggs, S. (2014). 21 ways to check for student understanding. InformED. https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/21-ways-to-check-for-student-understanding/

 Gwinnett County Public Schools (n.d.). Local school plan for improvement (LSPI). https://www.gcpsk12.org/Page/33012

Hall, M. (2018). Using backward design for course planning. John Hopkins University. https://ii.library.jhu.edu/2018/07/30/using-backward-design-for-course-planning/

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (n.d.) Where to start: Backward design. https://tll.mit.edu/teaching-resources/course-design/backward-design/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CBackward%20Design%E2%80%9D%20is%20an%20approach,of%20topics%20to%20be%20covered.

Stiggins, R. (2018). Better assessments require better assessment literacy. Educational Leadership, 75(5), 18–19.


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