The assessment conundrum — how to evaluate learning without scores
As educators, we are constantly wrestling to fill the gap between what is practical and what we believe to be most valuable when it comes to assessment. From a practical standpoint, simplified metrics such as grades, percentage scores, report card comments are easy to understand and digest. While summative scores and formative feedback can be useful, I believe that as educators, we see so many more things that show student brilliance and potential that never get captured using standard metrics. Whether it is an insightful student comment that you wish you can share, or an amazing creation by a student, these experiences that students have get reduced to comments and scores that don’t necessarily resemble the actual rich experience.
To this end, I have experimented a lot with trying to better document student work by video interviewing them, collecting pictures and statements in various forms, creating screencasts and having students talk about their work etc.. I thought that if I could find an effective method of capturing student work, then this could revolutionize assessment! The problem is that documenting individual experiences is highly time-consuming, not to mention the challenging nature of collecting things that you think are most valuable. Through this work, I came across this concept in documentation that I initially disagreed with, but now I agree with. I’ve had multiple discussions with educators around the globe about this, and the conclusion is this: documenting student work only has meaning if you have a specific audience in mind. In other words, if you just document for the sake of documentation without knowing who it is for, then it is meaningless. As one school head described it, it would be “documenting for the wastebasket”. It bore some relation to Reggio Emilia schools where documentation and multiple perspectives are a deep part of their educational philosophy, but I won’t go into that. In my case, I was so busy trying to capture great work by students, that I never stopped to think who it was for. On the contrary, I was thinking of documentation as a one stop process where the audience was everybody, whether it was students, teachers, parents, or anybody else. I wanted it to be meaningful for ALL audiences.
Documenting student work only has meaning if you have a specific audience in mind
The idea of an audience is compelling, because when we assess students, we never really ask who the assessment is meant to serve. I would say that assessment is typically a one stop process that tries to do everything, from informing a students how to improve, tell parents their child’s achievement scores, and also be used for admissions to other schools or institutions. It is all a jumble if the reporting mechanism such as grading for university acceptance is the metric that parents need to be aware of to help students satisfy certain scores, when in fact, focusing on the metrics isn’t necessarily what is going to help a student learn.
As a progressive educator, I feel that the student learning process and experience is what we want to focus on the most, but cannot deny the inherent value that traditional metrics have. As an entrepreneur, we often hear that you can’t improve something you can’t measure, and this makes sense too. But from an assessment perspective, excessive measurement of individual achievement scores can be seen as a detriment to authentic learning, especially because research shows that retention rates are extremely low when it comes to students doing well on achievement tests.
So what am I getting at here?
This has been a rather lengthy preamble to understanding, what exactly is the value of education? What are we preparing students for in this work that we do as educators? We are increasingly living in a world where individual talent and creative thinking, collaborative skills are being required. Anything less is no longer becoming useful. While it is great that well practiced high test scores are regarded as an indication of potential, these metrics no longer represent what is valuable in post school industry. We have google executives, HR departments and companies talking about seeking talent and abilities outside the scope of traditional metrics, and that schools need to prepare students for these 21st century skills, however, from an assessment standpoint, we MUST be able to more effectively capture and preserve these accomplishments and creations that progressive environments provide.
Despite progressive missions and projects, and great intent to promote more authentic learning, we tend to fall back on traditional metrics. Even rubrics that are an indication of qualitative learning, all get reduced to a numeric score that can be processed in some way, which is fine, because the value of the score is in certain qualities of the student output. However, can we not for once just step away from converting achievements into a quantity? And of course, it has to be practical to implement too.
Even rubrics that are an indication of qualitative learning, all get reduced to a numeric score that can be processed in some way
In the next post, I propose a completely new way to assess learning using technology. It is about keeping learning as is without any quantitative conversions. It is also about being able to present student learning with an audience in mind, and that the representation of learning caters to the audience. It is about using technology and media to its fullest so that creativity, collaboration, and rich learning experiences can be conveyed as is, in a way that speaks to the kinds of great learning that we know is happening in schools. It is about creating an assessment that amplifies the voice of the student, contribution of the teachers, and the value of amazing schools. Stay tuned.
