Formative Assessment
FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT: DOES IT HAVE A ROLE IN TODAY’S CURRICULUM AND EVALUATION CAULDRON? W. James Popham University of California, Los Angeles CTA Summer Institute Instruction and Professional Development Strand UCLA August 6, 2014
The Lesson Plan for August 6, 2014 • Jim presents persuasive, two-part rationale for California teachers to use formative assessment in a Smarter Balanced era. • Jim provides informative, enthralling description of formative assessment. • Attendees practice applying the formative-assessment process to Common-Core-like curricular aims.
Why California Teachers Should Routinely Employ Formative Assessment • School Accountability: Because students’ performances on the Smarter Balanced tests will play a key role in determining a school’s success. • Teacher Evaluation: Because the best evidence of student growth in teacher evaluation is apt to be students’ prepost performance on classroom tests.
A Turn & Talk Task Please turn to one or two nearby colleagues, if possible selecting persons who seem relatively bright, then take turns trying to convince each other that teachers should use formative assessment on the basis of either (1) school accountability or (2) teacher evaluation. Then choose the other reason and, once more, take turns.
Formative Assessment: Four Topics, Tersely Tackled
• • • •
What It Is and What It Isn’t What It Can Do and What It Can’t Why Partitioning It Can Pay Off Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk
Formative Assessment: What It Is and What It Isn’t
Formative assessment is a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students’ status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures or by students to adjust their current learning-tactics.
Formative Assessment: What It Is and What It Isn’t
• It is not a test. • It is not an interim test administered every few months by schools or districts. • It is not the unplanned, serendipitous use of student cues to adjust teaching.
FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
=
A Planned Process to Base Adjustment Decisions on Assessment Evidence
A Turn & Talk Task Please turn to one or two nearby neighbors, and assume they are not educators but, rather, laypeople who are concerned about public schools. They have just asked you to tell them what is meant by this “formative assessment stuff.” Alternately, describe to each other what this label means.
Formative Assessment: What It Can Do and What It Can’t In a research review based on 250 empirical studies of classroom assessment that had been drawn from more than 680 published investigations, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam concluded: “The research reported here shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning.” (Assessment in Education, 1998)
Formative Assessment: What It Can Do and What It Can’t Two Other Quotes from the Research Review: • The student gains in learning triggered by formative assessment were “amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions.” • “Significant gains can be achieved by many different routes, and initiatives here are not likely to fail through neglect of delicate and subtle features.”
Formative Assessment: What It Can Do and What It Can’t It cannot raise scores sufficiently on instructionally insensitive external accountability exams. As California moves toward use of Smarter Balanced tests, the instructional sensitivity of those assessments must be monitored.
Instructional Sensitivity Defined Instructional sensitivity is the degree to which students’ performances on a test accurately reflect the quality of instruction specifically provided to promote students’ mastery of what is being assessed.
A Turn & Talk Task Turning to a colleague (If you seem to be running out of bright neighbors, you might move to another group.), assume that your colleague is not familiar with instructional sensitivity. Thus, please explain to your colleague what instructional sensitivity is, and how it can intrude on the accurate evaluation of teachers or schools. Then switch roles.
Why Partitioning It Can Pay Off We will sneak a quick peek at two partitioning proposals, a four-levels approach and a five-applications approach. Although each of these cleaves to the essence of researchratified formative assessment, they are intended to help teachers clamber aboard the formative-assessment flotilla. Do you think they do?
Four Levels of the FormativeAssessment Process • Level 1: Teachers’ Instructional Adjustments • Level 2: Students’ Learning-Tactic Adjustments • Level 3: Classroom Climate Shift • Level 4: Schoolwide Implementation
Level 3 Shifts
Four Levels of Formative Assessment
Level 4 Strategies
1.
Learning Expectations
1.
Professional Development
2.
Responsibility for learning
2.
3.
Role of classroom assessment
Teacher Learning Communities
Level 4: Schoolwide Implementation Level 3: Classroom-Climate Shift Level 2: Students’ Learning-Tactic Adjustments Level 1: Teachers’ Instructional Adjustments
Learning Progressions Teachers’ Level 1 Steps
Students’ Level 2 Steps 1.
Consider adjustment occasions.
1.
Identify adjustment occasions.
2.
Consider assessments.
2.
Select assessments.
3.
Consider adjustment triggers.
3.
Establish adjustment triggers.
4.
Adjust learning-tactics?
4.
Make instructional adjustments?
Five Applications of the Process • Immediate Instructional Adjustments (based on assessments or self-reports) • Near-Future Instructional Adjustments • Last-Chance Instructional Adjustments • Students’ Learning-Tactic Adjustments • Classroom Climate Shifts
The Formative-Assessment Process
Immediate Instructional Adjustments
Near-Future Instructional Adjustments
Last-Chance Instructional Adjustments
Students’ Learning Tactic Adjustments
ClassroomClimate Shifts
Formative Assessment: Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk A learning progression is a sequenced set of building blocks—that is, subskills and/or bodies of enabling knowledge—it is thought students must master en route to mastering a more remote, target curricular aim. These progressions are necessary for successful formative assessment.
Target Curriculum Aim X
Subskill B
An Illustrative Learning Progression
Enabling Knowledge B
Subskill A
Enabling Knowledge A
A Horizontally Represented Learning Progression
Enabling Knowledge X
Enabling Knowledge Y
Subskill Z
Target Curriculum Aim Q
Formative Assessment: Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk
Learning progressions provide a framework for the formativeassessment process because near the end of instruction directed toward each of the learning progression’s building blocks, assessment-elicited evidence permits sound adjustment decisions to be made.
To travel more suavely along the formative-assessment trail, read one or more of these encapsulations of wisdom: • Heritage, M., Formative Assessment: Making It Happen in the Classroom, 2010, Corwin • Popham, W.J., Transformative Assessment, 2008, ASCD • Popham, W. J., Transformative Assessment in Action, 2011, ASCD • Wiliam, D., Embedded Formative Assessment, 2011, Solution Tree
A Small-Group Exercise A written set of guidelines has been distributed that will provide more details about this activity. However, the essence of the exercise is for members of your group to think through how, by focusing on smaller-grain curricular targets, an instructional approach featuring formative assessment can be employed to promote mastery of desired outcomes.
Three Tips from the Top When, two weeks ago, I specifically asked two high-ranking officials of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium what I could tell a crowd of CTA clods at UCLA on 8/6 to help them teach toward what’s to be assessed, they replied: (1) practice test, (2) do the online panel level-setting, and (3) preview the digital library.
The Smarter Balanced Practice Tests Your genial presenter, a technology dullard, went to Google, entered Smarter Balanced Practice Tests and even I was able to find them. I found both training tests and practice tests. I was told by Smarter Balanced staff that the practice tests would be a better choice for you than the training tests.
Online Panel for Smarter Balanced Achievement Level Setting
•
• • • •
Why: Opportunity to provide input on how much students should know and be able to do in order to be considered proficient at the grade-level standards
Who: Thousands of K-12 educators, higher education faculty, parents, and other interested parties What: In up to 3 hours online, participants will: – Complete a short orientation – Review test questions – Recommend a score for grade-level proficiency When: Register today and select a two-day window between October 6 and 17, 2014 How: Register today at SmarterBalanced.org/OnlinePanel
Digital Library Resources Assessment Literacy Modules
Instructional Modules
Education Resources
• Interactive, multi-media Professional Learning Modules • Resources for educators, students, and families • Frame Formative Assessment within a Balanced Assessment System • Articulate the Formative Assessment Process • Highlight Formative Assessment Practices and Tools • Interactive, multi-media Professional Learning Modules • Instructional coaching for educators • Instructional materials for students • Demonstrate/support effective implementation of the Formative Assessment Process • Focus on key content from and shifts in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts • High-quality vetted instructional resources and tools by educators for educators • High-quality vetted professional learning resources by educators for educators • Reflect and support the Formative Assessment Process • Reflect and support the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts • Promote online collaboration among educators in member states
Slide 29
Digital Library Preview The Digital Library preview runs from June 3 to September 30, 2014. You must be a registered user in a Smarter Balanced member state to participate in the Digital Library preview. Contact your district assessment coordinator to request your login credentials. Slide 30
A Final Turn & Talk Task Why, despite substantial empirical evidence to support formative assessment, are most of CA teachers not actually using it in their own classes? Please explore this question in your small group. Can you come up with any fixes that might ameliorate this vexing situation?
Jungle Jim’s e-mail address: [email protected]
The Lesson Plan for August 6, 2014 • Jim presents persuasive, two-part rationale for California teachers to use formative assessment in a Smarter Balanced era. • Jim provides informative, enthralling description of formative assessment. • Attendees practice applying the formative-assessment process to Common-Core-like curricular aims.
Why California Teachers Should Routinely Employ Formative Assessment • School Accountability: Because students’ performances on the Smarter Balanced tests will play a key role in determining a school’s success. • Teacher Evaluation: Because the best evidence of student growth in teacher evaluation is apt to be students’ prepost performance on classroom tests.
A Turn & Talk Task Please turn to one or two nearby colleagues, if possible selecting persons who seem relatively bright, then take turns trying to convince each other that teachers should use formative assessment on the basis of either (1) school accountability or (2) teacher evaluation. Then choose the other reason and, once more, take turns.
Formative Assessment: Four Topics, Tersely Tackled
• • • •
What It Is and What It Isn’t What It Can Do and What It Can’t Why Partitioning It Can Pay Off Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk
Formative Assessment: What It Is and What It Isn’t
Formative assessment is a planned process in which assessment-elicited evidence of students’ status is used by teachers to adjust their ongoing instructional procedures or by students to adjust their current learning-tactics.
Formative Assessment: What It Is and What It Isn’t
• It is not a test. • It is not an interim test administered every few months by schools or districts. • It is not the unplanned, serendipitous use of student cues to adjust teaching.
FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
=
A Planned Process to Base Adjustment Decisions on Assessment Evidence
A Turn & Talk Task Please turn to one or two nearby neighbors, and assume they are not educators but, rather, laypeople who are concerned about public schools. They have just asked you to tell them what is meant by this “formative assessment stuff.” Alternately, describe to each other what this label means.
Formative Assessment: What It Can Do and What It Can’t In a research review based on 250 empirical studies of classroom assessment that had been drawn from more than 680 published investigations, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam concluded: “The research reported here shows conclusively that formative assessment does improve learning.” (Assessment in Education, 1998)
Formative Assessment: What It Can Do and What It Can’t Two Other Quotes from the Research Review: • The student gains in learning triggered by formative assessment were “amongst the largest ever reported for educational interventions.” • “Significant gains can be achieved by many different routes, and initiatives here are not likely to fail through neglect of delicate and subtle features.”
Formative Assessment: What It Can Do and What It Can’t It cannot raise scores sufficiently on instructionally insensitive external accountability exams. As California moves toward use of Smarter Balanced tests, the instructional sensitivity of those assessments must be monitored.
Instructional Sensitivity Defined Instructional sensitivity is the degree to which students’ performances on a test accurately reflect the quality of instruction specifically provided to promote students’ mastery of what is being assessed.
A Turn & Talk Task Turning to a colleague (If you seem to be running out of bright neighbors, you might move to another group.), assume that your colleague is not familiar with instructional sensitivity. Thus, please explain to your colleague what instructional sensitivity is, and how it can intrude on the accurate evaluation of teachers or schools. Then switch roles.
Why Partitioning It Can Pay Off We will sneak a quick peek at two partitioning proposals, a four-levels approach and a five-applications approach. Although each of these cleaves to the essence of researchratified formative assessment, they are intended to help teachers clamber aboard the formative-assessment flotilla. Do you think they do?
Four Levels of the FormativeAssessment Process • Level 1: Teachers’ Instructional Adjustments • Level 2: Students’ Learning-Tactic Adjustments • Level 3: Classroom Climate Shift • Level 4: Schoolwide Implementation
Level 3 Shifts
Four Levels of Formative Assessment
Level 4 Strategies
1.
Learning Expectations
1.
Professional Development
2.
Responsibility for learning
2.
3.
Role of classroom assessment
Teacher Learning Communities
Level 4: Schoolwide Implementation Level 3: Classroom-Climate Shift Level 2: Students’ Learning-Tactic Adjustments Level 1: Teachers’ Instructional Adjustments
Learning Progressions Teachers’ Level 1 Steps
Students’ Level 2 Steps 1.
Consider adjustment occasions.
1.
Identify adjustment occasions.
2.
Consider assessments.
2.
Select assessments.
3.
Consider adjustment triggers.
3.
Establish adjustment triggers.
4.
Adjust learning-tactics?
4.
Make instructional adjustments?
Five Applications of the Process • Immediate Instructional Adjustments (based on assessments or self-reports) • Near-Future Instructional Adjustments • Last-Chance Instructional Adjustments • Students’ Learning-Tactic Adjustments • Classroom Climate Shifts
The Formative-Assessment Process
Immediate Instructional Adjustments
Near-Future Instructional Adjustments
Last-Chance Instructional Adjustments
Students’ Learning Tactic Adjustments
ClassroomClimate Shifts
Formative Assessment: Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk A learning progression is a sequenced set of building blocks—that is, subskills and/or bodies of enabling knowledge—it is thought students must master en route to mastering a more remote, target curricular aim. These progressions are necessary for successful formative assessment.
Target Curriculum Aim X
Subskill B
An Illustrative Learning Progression
Enabling Knowledge B
Subskill A
Enabling Knowledge A
A Horizontally Represented Learning Progression
Enabling Knowledge X
Enabling Knowledge Y
Subskill Z
Target Curriculum Aim Q
Formative Assessment: Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk
Learning progressions provide a framework for the formativeassessment process because near the end of instruction directed toward each of the learning progression’s building blocks, assessment-elicited evidence permits sound adjustment decisions to be made.
To travel more suavely along the formative-assessment trail, read one or more of these encapsulations of wisdom: • Heritage, M., Formative Assessment: Making It Happen in the Classroom, 2010, Corwin • Popham, W.J., Transformative Assessment, 2008, ASCD • Popham, W. J., Transformative Assessment in Action, 2011, ASCD • Wiliam, D., Embedded Formative Assessment, 2011, Solution Tree
A Small-Group Exercise A written set of guidelines has been distributed that will provide more details about this activity. However, the essence of the exercise is for members of your group to think through how, by focusing on smaller-grain curricular targets, an instructional approach featuring formative assessment can be employed to promote mastery of desired outcomes.
Three Tips from the Top When, two weeks ago, I specifically asked two high-ranking officials of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium what I could tell a crowd of CTA clods at UCLA on 8/6 to help them teach toward what’s to be assessed, they replied: (1) practice test, (2) do the online panel level-setting, and (3) preview the digital library.
The Smarter Balanced Practice Tests Your genial presenter, a technology dullard, went to Google, entered Smarter Balanced Practice Tests and even I was able to find them. I found both training tests and practice tests. I was told by Smarter Balanced staff that the practice tests would be a better choice for you than the training tests.
Online Panel for Smarter Balanced Achievement Level Setting
•
• • • •
Why: Opportunity to provide input on how much students should know and be able to do in order to be considered proficient at the grade-level standards
Who: Thousands of K-12 educators, higher education faculty, parents, and other interested parties What: In up to 3 hours online, participants will: – Complete a short orientation – Review test questions – Recommend a score for grade-level proficiency When: Register today and select a two-day window between October 6 and 17, 2014 How: Register today at SmarterBalanced.org/OnlinePanel
Digital Library Resources Assessment Literacy Modules
Instructional Modules
Education Resources
• Interactive, multi-media Professional Learning Modules • Resources for educators, students, and families • Frame Formative Assessment within a Balanced Assessment System • Articulate the Formative Assessment Process • Highlight Formative Assessment Practices and Tools • Interactive, multi-media Professional Learning Modules • Instructional coaching for educators • Instructional materials for students • Demonstrate/support effective implementation of the Formative Assessment Process • Focus on key content from and shifts in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts • High-quality vetted instructional resources and tools by educators for educators • High-quality vetted professional learning resources by educators for educators • Reflect and support the Formative Assessment Process • Reflect and support the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts • Promote online collaboration among educators in member states
Slide 29
Digital Library Preview The Digital Library preview runs from June 3 to September 30, 2014. You must be a registered user in a Smarter Balanced member state to participate in the Digital Library preview. Contact your district assessment coordinator to request your login credentials. Slide 30
A Final Turn & Talk Task Why, despite substantial empirical evidence to support formative assessment, are most of CA teachers not actually using it in their own classes? Please explore this question in your small group. Can you come up with any fixes that might ameliorate this vexing situation?
Jungle Jim’s e-mail address: [email protected]
