The Changing Nature of Assessment

The Changing Nature of Assessment

When I first started school, I can remember the report cards that came home with a bunch of letter grades and a small square with comments from the teacher and the competition was on to see how many A's a person got.  I used to get a fair number of A's but my handwriting was always atrocious and my grade in Physical Education left a great deal to be desired.  By the time I was ready to be a teacher, things hadn't changed much.  I remember distinctly making a table using my class list and having a column for each assignment and what mark the students received whether it was on a small quiz or a major assignment and then adding up all the marks, even if it was out of 425 and figuring out the percentage out of 100 and THEN transforming that to a letter grade with a plus or a minus for some wiggle room. What a crock of shit.  Even then, I realized that that was not the best way to assessment students.  Now we have come a long way in the almost fifty years since I first worked in a classroom.  We now know so much more about what assessment is and what it is not and why we do it.  We know that we assess for growth......how much or how little did a student grow in knowledge, skills and affect as a result of a period of time spent on a particular subject.? Is there a difference between demonstration of knowledge,skills,  and affect while working away and what a whole term of work is like.  We ask questions about strengths, weaknesses and next steps.  Are there reasons why students do better in one term and worse in another term?  I write about this today because there has been so much discussion and introspection about the ground lost by students due to the pandemic.  So many teachers and jurisdictions are worrying about the loss of time in school and how to gain ground as a result.  What the pandemic is drawing attention to is the huge disparities between students and how to program so that every child makes progress.  Like curriculum, the new methods of assessment draw attention to the fact that it has to be all about individual differences between students.  If we focus on formative assessment for each child than we can focus on what they are making ground on and what they are lagging behind on.  We can set goals for learning for each student separately and the job of the classroom teacher becomes helping each child progress to the best of their ability. Two students in Grade 6 can have missed the exact same amount of time, but one child, upon return, can be much further behind because no two. learners are the same.  I have to try and take each student where they are at and move them forward.  If we focus on the need to find strengths and weaknesses in each student, then we can plot next steps much easier.  If you think about my old ways of assessing, it is much harder to make it realistic when I have some standard of achievement that I measure everyone in my  class against. It penalizes one group of students and rewards other groups of students and education shouldn't be about that, at all.