In a short reflection, respond to some of the points that Grant Wiggins makes in his two articles on Authentic Assessment: Are his ideas especially apt for technology infused lessons? Are there implications for the "Leave No Child Behind" or "Race to the Top" classrooms? Explain.
Defining Assessment / Show What You Know as You Go
Authentic Assessment
ReplyDeleteWhat is authentic assessment? Well you have to go ‘back’ to answer that question. If your goals were to have the students learn some content and concepts then your assessment should reflect that. There is no problem with an exam that considers how the student is coming along with information, as Grant Wiggins would say that would be like taking a snapshot. It is more difficult to assess the develop of thinking and performance skills with a objective test if your goals are also to develop in the students critical thinking skills, and foster positive attitudes toward the discipline. You might also have as your goals to develop in the students some metacognitive skills in other words have them learn how to learn so that they can continue after the class is over.
Perhaps a learning log or learning journal would allow the student to have more of a chance to self evaluate. This would be a written description of what a student has learned and still wants to learn. I like this idea a great deal. I want to include this in my students’ lab notebooks at the end of each investigation and experiment. What else needs to be considered and how might we design a further way to consider that question. This gives the student a way to not only assess concept knowledge but also a gives them a metacognitive tool. I would like to include in my classes next year long term experiments were students could simply record observations and write down what they see is happening. They could state what they believe they are learning at the start and then over time they might conclude something different. This way they will learn that it’s ok to change the direction of their thinking. Along these lining I also want to include more concept maps. If I ask them to construct a concept map at the beginning of a unit and at the end both the student and I could better assess how things are going with their learning. The map is a visual representation of the student’s understanding. Again if my goal were to develop new schema and give a metacognitive tool this would work better than just a multiple choice test.
I find that the learning the skills of the scientist is one of the more important goals I have in teaching Biology. The thinking routines as well have how to use a variety of equipment in the lab. As of now my classes are so small that I believe I can assess how they are coming along in that area however that being said I should and could do much more in the area of performance assessment. I would like the students to value and evaluate those skills too. In the end if the class grade is weighted heavily on exams then that’s what they will gravitate toward. I agree with Grant, I want to hear my students asking each other or me, "How can I improve this lab design?" or "How can I find more evidence to support my conclusion?"
I think Ray is right on with the learning log or learning journal. Most certainly I think that reflection is an important step in the learning and assessment process. For one, I think reflection reveals more authentically what a student is learning or thinks he/she is learning, while at the same time, if presented correctly, helps steer students away from simply stating "what the teacher wants." Furthermore, reflection leads to a more clear understanding/articulation of the learning goals and shows evidence of the intent to synthesize the skills/knowledge gained in a future project.
ReplyDeleteI am drawn to Grant Wiggins' utopian vision of assessment in the second article, especially the complete record of individual assessment measured againist well-defined benchmarks of progress. At the end of the second article, he mentions that these practices are currently being used in various places. I found myself wondering where these places are and wished he'd mentioned some.
It makes sense to me that different kinds of assessments are warranted at different stages in the learning process. Indeed, one size certainly does not fit all. I have to further admit that Wiggins' approval for the inclusion of non-authentic testing, something I'd like to deem "sometimes testing," made me think twice about the use of such forms of assessment. Usually I find myself staunchly against this type of informational testing, but I think I was able to glimpse how they can sometimes have value through Wiggins' eyes.
I would, overall, like to see students move further away from pleasing the teacher, I.e. "doing school well," and move toward a more self-directed mode of inquiry. I think, however, that this can only be attained through smaller classroom sizes. Reading this article, I was brought back to my student teaching last semester. After class, during lunch and after school, I had a steady stream of students coming by to "check their grade" and it was always so much about what got turned in and how many points were received, so much less focused on quality of work and what each student did well, how much they'd improved individually. The whole process had such an assembly line feel that I regretted at the time... It was nothing even close to the ideal scenario Wiggins describes. But when faced with 36+ kids and getting new ones all the time more times than not it feels like damage control.
When I get my own class long term I hope to develop a system from the beginning that will allow me to more authentically track student progress. I do think with today's technology it is possible.
Considering the strong emphasis on accountability in education that has taken place in the last twenty years in the United States, the Grant Wiggins’ articles on authentic assessment have helped me to better understand the key points about assessment.
ReplyDeleteThanks to his broad expertise on the fundamental topic of authentic assessments, Grant Wiggins informs the readers of some fundamental issues in direct and enlightening ways in these two insightful articles. Subjects such as the distinctions between audit (to test if students learned the facts taught in the classroom) and assessment (to improve students’ performance and success), the vital linkage between teaching goals and assessments that makes possible the assessment of project-based learning, or the role of technology in supporting and enhancing assessment are discussed in these articles.
Mr. Wiggins acknowledges that digital technology is of great importance when considering authentic assessment. It is important for at least two reasons. The first one is addressed to students. “Technology allows assessments to be personalized to reflect the goals and current areas of focus of each individual student, using past achievements as benchmark for assessing new gains”. The second involves teacher’s performance by allowing “monitoring of student learning at a level of detail never before practical, so teachers can focus activities much more directly to the specific needs of a single pupil or group of students”. Therefore both reasons are pivotal to making possible a type of assessment that contains information for improving, authentic assessment. In this context it is important to know that both the “Race to the Top” contest and the “No Child left Behind” act bring to the forefront the importance of high performance of students while transferring their learning in context, and high performance of teachers when instructing effectively.
Additionally, the advantages of technology have moved to the developers of the Common Core State Standards to consider computer-based exams that include fewer selected and constructed response test items, reducing the multiple-choice questions that are typically seen in current standardized tests
Both articles reminded me of my dream and objective before becoming a teacher in Korea.To be a teacher in Korea, I took
ReplyDeletean official Teachers' exam and get a good grade to compete with other candidates. To take the test, I'd studied ten subjects
such as Philosophy of Education or Methodology of Education.While reading hundreads of pages and memorizing a number
of knowledge, I wondered if memorizing the knowledge in the ten subjects related to Education would guarantee teachers' qualification.
Of course, a teacher should know what Education is and what a good teacher is. But I believe whether the teacher is qualified or not can be proved while the teacher actually shows how to teach. Therefore, when I became an English teacher at a public school,I made myself a promise that I would emphasize students' actual language performances rather than their writing and memorizing skills and design more performance-based tests than paper-and-pencil tests.As Wiggins mentioned, I thought that authentic assessment considering lesson objectives should be considered more than paper-and-pencil tests.
However, I couldn't keep the promise because I didn't know how we could assess the students objectively through portpolios or authentic projects. Both articles explained the advantages of authentic assessment with proper reasons,but they didn't mention how objectively teachers could assess the students. The reason why teachers prefer standardized tests is that they can assess their students objectively according to assessment criteria, and the students can also accept their test results. When I designed a group play as a performance-based test to assess my students' language performance, all of the students showed their language skills really well and all the plays were excellent. But it was not easy for me to grade them. In addition, in case of online projects, because I had the students do their work at home due to lack of computers at school, some students asked their parents' help and finished their work successfully. In the end,I had to assess the students' family's skills.
For me, performing authentic assessment is utopia. I'd like to ask prof.Cosgriff and my DML classmates if there is a good way to assess the students' performance objectively.
These articles really resonated with me. I work at a career college, and the concept of authentic assessment is particularly relevant to my work. Our school’s raison d'être is to prepare students for a career and then place them in a job. I’m currently working on ways to assess our graduates using real-world criteria such as we'd find in the workplace, so Wiggins’ ideas were of particular interest to me.
ReplyDeleteI think that private, for-profit colleges in particular need to have more ongoing student assessments. Wiggins states, “this information is needed long before the end of a lesson or a year so that adjustments can be made before it is too late.” It seems unethical to charge tuition for a class if students don’t really know how they’re performing until they get a grade on their final exam or project. Currently, too many colleges are cashing tuition checks despite knowing that it’s too late for some students to succeed.
I like Wiggins’ argument for the importance of assessing the ways in which students actually utilize the feedback they’ve been given. Too often, feedback comes in the form of a final grade or critique, and once it is given, the student has already moved on to the next class. I like the idea that “part of what is being measured is the degree to which a student solicits, ponders, and effectively uses the feedback.” This gives the student a second chance to improve their work, which is an authentic process – it happens in the workplace frequently; a manager says, “not good enough…I recommend these improvements…bring it back when you think it’s up to snuff.”
Assessing project-based learning is a real challenge for arts colleges. When art criticism is so subjective, then how does one create objective criteria for assessing the quality of art? We've decided it's impossible to do so, but it is possible to assess the creative process. A final project can turn out a million different ways, but there is an objective process or craft to most creative practices. We’re working on finding these ways of saying, "I have evidence. I can make the case that you learned something substantial and significant that relates to school objectives."
I agree with Wiggins that it is important to document these processes. I think my school could do more to emphasize the importance of the digital portfolio. Students tend to discard a lot of work that isn't "good enough" for the portfolio, when perhaps that work should stay in as a way of documenting and tracing what the student has accomplished and how the student got there. Perhaps even employers would appreciate seeing this documentation rather than just the final projects.
I've lately become intrigued with the concept of self-assessment. If I create an excellent rubric, then couldn’t I have the students assess themselves against this rubric, and make a case for why they met or exceeded expectations? I like Wiggins’ suggestion that this type of practice would “prompt them to think about what they are learning, to recognize high-quality work, and to plan how they can perform better in the future.” That truly sounds authentic. Don’t we continually do these types of self-assessments in our professional lives?
When Wiggins goes on to dream of adaptive computer simulations that can provide personalized assessments, I think he’s actually being quite prescient. Adaptive systems have much potential for providing individualized experiences, but some might wonder whether they could provide an authentic experience. After all, when was the last time that your professional work was evaluated by a computer simulation? But theorists are indeed predicting that the future of the workplace will keep moving online, where data-driven performance analyses will determine employee value. So why not include similar performance analyses in schools someday soon?
In Vietnam, standardized tests are the bread and butter of our entire education system. On the surface, we can see very high test scores. However we produce generation of students who don’t know how to apply what they have learned into real life experience. Testing kills creativity. Moreover, there is an industry of private schools teaching students to pass the tests. When “leave no child behind” came into law, I was horrified. The US education system was heading to the same direction of Vietnam education system. Why do we follow a broken system? In Finland, there is no standardized testing until much later on.
ReplyDeleteAssessing students against themselves is much more authentic than among each other. How can they improve on what they already have? How can they keep on pushing the boundary in learning? It’s ok to make mistake, it’s just a part of learning process. This is where creativity is born. Students shouldn’t be punished by low test score. Why should we reward students with higher test scores while we ignore the students who need help the most? I think with today technology, it should be easier to help teachers to monitor the student’s progress and assess how much they have learned.
I have been struggling with the understanding of what is good assessment. For a long time I realized that teaching to the test is not a good assessment. I remember when I was in school and I would see the students who were considered to be smart and I could not help but think about my own intelligence. I felt less than adequate because I had a hard time with memorization. I started to realize after sophomore biology that you could be great at memorization but lacked the ability to think constructively. I went to my biology teacher and told him how hard it was for me to study and study, but still do terrible on the multiple choice exams. He told me he wanted me to tell him and show him what I had learned from the unit. He told me to teach him, to pretend he knew nothing. I sat there and verbally explained everything I learned to him. When I was done he said other than the memorization of some of the words, I knew the material. For the rest of the semester instead of taking written exams he would let me give him an oral presentation. He told me that he has tried this technique with other students who were good at memorization and not all of them could explain the concepts as well as I could.
ReplyDeleteA good assessment is hard to accomplish. I keep hoping for a magical answer, but there isn't one. I had to read the required readings several times. Grant Wiggins confused me because everyone is always telling me that standardized tests are bad but he didn't say that. He said appropriate tests are good. He gave a lot of advice about considering what the goal is in the lesson when creating assessment. The assessment should demonstrate an understanding of the goal. He referred to backwards design. Knowing where you want them be be so you can teach them how to get there.
Knowing where you want them to be... I have tried this with my daughter. She like to eat eggs over easy. She asked me to teach her how to cook them, so I did. She learned all the mechanics of doing so but the eggs would either be undercooked or overcooked. I realized she didn't have a good understanding of what a properly cooked egg should look like. Over the next couple of weeks I cooked the eggs and we would study the finished product. She got to where she knew what the consistency, color and texture should be like. With this information she could cook a perfect egg over easy every time. If you don't know what the end result is supposed to be how can you ever cook a good egg.
Wiggins also talked about why standardization is used in many cases. He said it is just the nature of government to measure how cost effective everything is. I wasn't surprised by this. He told us that the SAT's are only a measure of how a freemen would do his first semester of college. I have heard many other people say the same thing. He did say that it is still important to test an individual. I wouldn't call these tests standardized. He said group work was good for learning but the group based project was not a good assessment for individual knowledge. An individual still needs to be assessed to see if they have a mastery of the material. So there is a place for testing?
My take away from the reading is there is no defined answer to assessment and all experts like Grant Wiggins can do is to help you ask yourself the right questions when you are designing assessments.
Having taught or lectured only at the college level, my view of assessment may be different from that of someone teaching K-12. Particularly so with regards to teaching adult learners at a career college, where the specifics of a job training program much more narrowly define the student outcomes. Assessment for students at a state college or university would, I imagine, more closely match assessment needs for students that are K-12. Wiggins indicating the need to “triangulate the information,” in order to accommodate the specific data on individual student performance (within collaborative projects) is a very useful concept in a job training career college environment.
ReplyDeleteAuthentic assessment as a measure of what students will do in the “real world” is problematic for me on one level, particularly so as education seems to be increasingly framed as something to be specifically leveraged just to get a job. I went to art school, and let me tell you, very few jobs indeed will ever materialize from an art school diploma. Critical thinking skills were emphasized above all else, even far above actual art-making techniques. As much as critical thinking is important to job success, again, it was not a function of the art education to be a job placement service. The luxury of having an education that provides a student with a broader philosophical view of the world seems to be increasingly rare.
One article is dated 2002, and the other 1997. The stated view of technology is somewhat affected by these dates, but not the overall view of the impact of technology. I assess Wiggins with high marks for including a comprehensive technology support statement that involves “bringing together visual, three-dimensional, and paper-and-pencil work”. Last week I took my pencils to the beach, and so, Wiggins merely mentioning pencils gives him great standing in my eyes!
With that in mind...his idealized view of the functionality of technology troubles me just a bit. Although the dates of the articles may have something to do with his views of the possibilities of future technologies, that future functionality has not been borne out. Particularly so in light of the advancements in complexity of current computer software packages, which in turn are requiring steeper learning curves to keep pace with the depth of the software levels. Immediate feedback for a dynamic simulation? No, not really, I’m afraid. It takes weeks to get to the point where a student can competently navigate the basic menu options, let alone creatively manage a computer simulation which they intended to produce. Commercial software packages are utterly useless for scientific simulations, and are understandably avoided by science programs which want to teach a complex simulation of some physics event.
His comments about accumulated data-bases of student work, and digital portfolios are a terrific idea, of course. Having a student post their work to a blog, even for animation students for example, is a great thing. If the single blog accumulates over time, or if students have access to past blogs of other student work, then it becomes a very valuable resource for students to see examples of how problems were previously solved. Discovering a working process from past examples is can be a very valuable added process along with the viewing of the finished piece of work. A blog that accumulates work-in-progress is like an x-ray of old paintings. Hey! Look what the artist is hiding! Mistakes are valuable, we learn from them.
(I'm taking my pencils to the beach again tomorrow. Here's hoping that I'll see you there, too.)
I like the analogy that Wiggins makes about being a coach and an educator. As a coach you introduce a concept on the field (drill/lesson) Then you apply what you learned with a scrimmage (quiz)and then you see if what you were teaching is resonated onto the field (final). If what you taught does not carryover to the game, then they did not understand the concept and you start over again at the next practice. As a teacher however you may not have the opportunity to go back and teach the concept if you are moving onto another unit.
ReplyDeleteI feel the best way to access a child is to see whether or not that child is able to either explain back to another student or in front of the class what is what they learned. I find this very useful when you are teaching a math concept and a student is able to explain back with examples what it was that they learned.
I also like what Wiggins had to say about planning making a rubric for a lesson from the end point and work your way back to the beginning of the lesson. I feel for the instructor your incremental goals become more clear and concise as the lesson progresses and the student and the instructor are clear as to what is being expected. I also like what Wiggins had to say about you want an objective or the end purpose to be something that the student can either take with them the rest of their lives, or be able to apply what they learned in the work or life arena.
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ReplyDeleteWithin our cultural and political ideologies our nation has had somewhat of an obsession with test scores and ranking ourselves amongst our peers. I can help but remember the day after SAT scores were received, the chatting around the mailboxes (boarding school) and the inevitable statements of “well I guess I can get into ______ with this score).The obsession with this form of evaluation has now become detrimental in truly reviewing the work and potential of our students.
DeleteAs an educator in the elementary school field, assessment of our students is a continuing conversation. The independent schools I have worked for have had the luxury to pass on state administered standardized testing (though they opt for the ERB), they are often conflicted as to what is an appropriate form of assessing what their students have learned. As a third grade teacher I can distinctly remember the first time my students took their ERB. The ERB (Educational Records Bureau) is a common testing administered among independent schools. This was the first “testing” my students had been given and though we made extreme efforts to make no big deal of it, the students had already been trained to believe it was a hug deal. Tears and fears crept in overnight and many students were scared it show that they were “dumb” or “not smart enough.” In an instance students had forgotten all they had achieve throughout the year, the gains and successes, the learning and skills they had achieved. It seemed to vanish in the midst of a test.
While at moments I find some of Wiggin’s ideas to be a bit unrealistic, I really can agree and support his ideal role assessments in the classroom. I found his statement that assessment should be “indistinguishable from what takes place during good instruction” as the vital component to a successful assessment rather than test. If the true goal of school is to prepare students to engage in our society, they should be evaluated on how they would apply the knowledge and skills gained in the classroom, to real world scenarios and problem sets.
What I really find to be one of the strongest benefits of the “show what you know as you go” method is the ability to utilized previous student achievements as benchmarks for assessing their new achievements. Students are no longer tested and scored in comparison to their peers (or a student in a completely different part of the state or country). It serves instructors as they evaluate their delivery of information and ability to engage students in their subject. It also promotes all parties (student, teacher, and parent) to be involved and informed in the progress that is occurring. Lastly it builds an important skill for students: self-evaluation and monitoring. In the ever distracting digital and tech heavy environment, this will be essential for the success of future generations.