Knowledge Quest on the Web:
November/December 2000
Special full-text reprint with embedded links of the "Homepage" column
"Leveraging Assessment for Learning" (p. 9-10)
exclusively on the KQWeb
Leveraging Assessment for Learning
Debbie Abilock, Editor
During the first week of high school physics, my son was placed in a team of three students and asked to devise an improved wheelchair design that would prevent the wheelchair from falling over backwards when ascending a steep incline. His team worked nonstop, using the textbook as reference and the teacher as mentor. He loved physics that year.
The next year he entered college determined to be a physics major, but by the end of his freshman physics class he had changed his major to computer science. That was ten years ago; he's now a software engineer, one of those dot-com'ers who always has several interesting projects going. I called him this morning and asked why he had changed his mind about majoring in physics. "All we did in college physics was bookwork—just read and do problems," he answered without hesitation.
Alfred North Whitehead refers to this latter kind of learning as "inert."1 Possessing knowledge does not ensure that it can be applied in new contexts. Grant Wiggins would call the wheelchair problem "educative assessment" because it combines an authentic task with "performer-friendly feedback."2 You can see other examples of constructivist student assessment in the recent book Assessment as Inquiry.3 The goal of such assessment is to educate students for our society in the most profound sense. We need to produce independent learners who can self-assess and self-adjust, who can generalize their learning across contexts, and who can flexibly navigate, maintain focus, and learn in a "world of high-velocity change."4
The stakes are high. Newman and Wehlage's research analyzed the achievement results of high school students in relation to the amount of authentic instruction provided.5 "An average student who attended a 'high authentic instruction school' would learn about 78% more mathematics between grades 8 and 10 than comparable students in a 'low authentic instruction school.'"6 The stakes also are high because our results are visible to the community—they can be publicly reported and monitored as evidence of student achievement, as Lawton, Nevins and Spicer report in this issue.
Technology offers additional promise for recording data and reporting student learning. Both SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning and the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies are researching the use of assessment software applications on handheld devices such as Palm Pilots. "We have field-tested an application that can be used by teachers or students aimed at helping them to measure different aspects of collaboration, such as staying on task, sharing work equitably, and monitoring one another's comprehension."7
The online posting of curriculum maps is another example of the use of technology to drive assessment. Jacobs' article in this issue shows us how the collection of honest, descriptive data about the curriculum from online maps can support learning and teaching in an entire school or district. Educators employ real-time technology to "glean information from student assessment and feed it back into our school sites in order to adjust both vertically K–12 and horizontally across grade levels and departments." However, as my school enters our third year of curriculum mapping, I have learned that face-to-face conversations about gaps and repetitions, as well as the process of identifying potential areas for integration, also are a compelling impetus for staff development and self-assessment. Notice how the power of reflection can move learners to higher achievement in Wahrman and Palmquist's column about an assassinations project that they originally described several years ago in Knowledge Quest.8 The recent work of Charlotte Danielson and Thomas McGreal can help your school conceptualize a teacher-evaluation system that differentiates between the assessment needs of novices and experienced practitioners.9 We can settle for less. In this issue's "On My Mind," Braxton reminds us that when assessment is merely grade "labeling," students' behavior operates at the lowest level of ethical responsibility. Conversely, Butler's new series will ask the adults in your school to model ethical use of intellectual property out of a sense of social responsibility.
So what does educative assessment look like? Shannon's "IP2" column and Pearle's new column "Ears to the Ground, Eyes on the Stars" invite us to make visible our best practices for our profession. Fitzgerald's seminal work provides us with multiple examples of how we can apply her research on the characteristics and phases of evaluation to student learning. "Net Worth" points to what SLMS and other educators have proposed as strategies and tools for Web evaluation.
Finally Kroll, Persson, and Salmon propose that assessment can become a tool of leadership to change policy. Thus we have come full circle—from making our own and student achievement visible to leveraging it strategically in the service of student learning.
References
- Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1929).
- Grant Wiggins, Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
- Diane Stephens and Jennifer Story, eds., Assessment as Inquiry: Learning the Hypothesis-Test Process (Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000).
- Price Pritchett, "Ground Rules for Job Success in the Information Age," Knowledge Quest 27, no. 3 (Jan./Feb. 1999): 38.
- F. M. Newman and G. G. Wehlage, Successful School Restructuring; A Report to the Public and Educators (Madison, Wis.: Univ. of Wisconsin Education Center, 1995).
- Ibid, 25.
- Bill Penuel, "[WWWEDU] Handheld Computers Turn to Schools," 16 Aug. 2000, (16 Aug. 2000).
- Jo Ann Wahrman, "The Impact of Assassinations," Knowledge Quest 27, no. 1 (Sept./Oct. 1998): 33–34.
- Charlotte Danielson and Thomas L. McGreal, Teachers Evaluation to Enhance Professional Practice (Princeton, N.J.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2000).
Debbie Abilock, Editor, is the Assistant Head of The San Francisco School, San Francisco CA.
Copyright © 2000 American Association of School Librarians,a division of the American Library Association.
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