Technolandy

Day 110 (of 2024/25) assessment discussion when communicating a grade/proficiency: quality v quantity v effort | independent work vs ‘grade/age level expectation’

It is ‘that time of year’ when we are looking at second editions of Learning Updates (still colloquially referred to as report cards) and sharing what students have done and how students are doing…. Compared to themselves… not compared to others (though we still use exemplars and standards about what ‘grade level expectations may look like’. 

And I love some of the key conversations that develop upon synthesis of assessment:

1. Is it about what learners do or what they try? The logical part of the education brain defaults to ‘what they do’ – but is that really a measurement of learning…? What if a student already has the schema needed to exceed expectations in a course that already has its curriculum locked in… if they perform tasks they could do before the enrolled in the course… are they learning? As opposed to a student who may have no understanding of the big ideas, competencies or anything – and if they make big gains…. They ‘learn’ more than the first example… but if their artifacts aren’t as ‘good’, they are punished for learning more (if we are comparing to each other as per bell curve et al – or reporting on achievement). Even more so, what if someone takes big risks but misses? If they are trying to overshoot what the curricular organizers intend… how does this get measured in>

2. Is it about effort? If certain material comes easier to some than others (eg reading) do we take that information into consideration? I know many want that to work in subjects ‘they’ don’t teach… fine for the English major to say effort matters in PE, and vice versa… but often ‘we’ want more than effort in the subjects we chose/excelled in ourselves. But, beyond a comment, could the amount of time play a factor in the end communication? If it is ‘easy’ for someone and they are doing less work/effort… should that always be rewarded?

1. What about quantity? Is it more important to have one task done that covers all the courses big ideas (like a project) or to have a hundred small tasks that are not done as … well. Can both options be true at the same time? A lot of work put into surface level learning = a lot of work put into a deeper dive? Depending on the learner… and their own goals for ‘success’?  Can their voice be heard in ‘how much can be done’?
2. Does everything have to be finished? Can a variety of work being 3/4 of the way ‘done’ count too? Worked for da Vinci… 

3. What about that ‘standard’. For decades I have heard about (and used) thinks like ‘grade level standards’ and ‘age appropriate standards’ and exemplars… I do worry that due to the nebulous nature of them, they are kinda like the old studies that indicated things like ‘how many hours of tv is watched a week’ and I knew that was waaaaaay off. And I wonder two subsets

1. Are the standards to be trusted? Much like the current iteration of this experiment of ‘school’, there was not a lot of diversity included in the design thinking experiment. So ‘who says’ the reading passages we are given are accurate and appropriate? 
2. Ought we redefine and personalize the term ‘success’ – Does everyone need to show proficiency by reading the same books? The curriculum does not say ‘by reading Lord of the Flies’ (thank goodness because the colloquial language has only grown more archaic each decade – though a great book imo) and doesn’t even say ‘read Shakespeare’ – again, the bard is a foundation piece, but…
3. When we do assessments ought we not look at the reader reading at an independent level (whether pre-primer or Ulysses) and assess the synthesis that is ‘grade level’? And maybe ‘check the oil’ by having a ‘grade level passage’ read and responded to, but without bias knowing that the schema may make any passage easier or harder (hard to know all the terms to a writing about a live performance if you have no idea what that is). 

4. Within our province, we are moving away from ‘averages’ and more working with holistic overviews of communicating student learning. This can be a challenge when (I’ll use myself as an example) a student may be very strong in one unit of study (algebra) but still ‘an area of growth’ in another (geometry) and to arrive at a ‘final’ can be agreed to!

Anyways, each of these have larger writings dedicated to them in my upcoming book challenging us to do more assessment WITH the learning (not just as/of/for learning)