Category Archives: Assessment

ASSISTments: A Forward-thinking Formative Assessment AI Ready to Use in Your Classroom Today

October 23, 2020AI in Education, Assessment, Written by: Sarah HamptonSarah Hampton

by Sarah Hampton

In my last post, I discussed the ways AI can enhance formative assessment. In this post, let’s take a look at the AI example I’m most excited about and how it’s already benefited 11,000 teachers!

ASSISTments seems both practical and forward thinking, a unique combination. Sometimes it can be frustrating getting excited about new technologies when they’re still in development and not yet ready for the classroom. But, unlike many cutting edge projects I read about, ASSISTments is ready to implement now.

In their own words, “ASSISTments is more than an assessment tool. It improves the learning journey, translating student assessment to skill building and mastery, guiding students with immediate feedback, and giving teachers the time and data insights to drive every step of their lesson in a meaningful way.”

ASSISTments works through a 4 step process to help you get started:

Create assignments.
Teachers select questions from existing or custom question banks. I was really impressed with the number and variety of sets already on the site. There are question sets from select open educational resources, textbook curricula, and released state tests ready to be assigned. There are also pre-made general skill-building and problem-solving sets. Note, everything the students see is assigned by you, the teacher.

Assist students through immediate feedback.
As students complete their assigned problems, they might receive hints and explanations to help them understand. Check out these screenshots of the platform. (See more in The ASSISTments Ecosystem: Building a Platform that Brings Scientists and Teachers Together for Minimally Invasive Research on Human Learning and Teaching)

Figure: An ASSISTments message shown just before the student hits the “done” button, showing two different hints and one buggy message that can occur at different points.

Students immediately know if they’re right or wrong and can answer multiple times for partial credit, and, at the end of each assignment, each student receives an outcome report detailing their performance.

Assess class performance.
Data is also available to the teacher. Check out how easy they make it for teachers to gauge student progress.

Figure. An easy way to visualize student performance.

Figure. A popular ASSISTments report organizes student homework results in a grid–with tasks in columns and students in rows and enables teachers to quickly identify which problems to review and what the common errors were, as indicated by the annotations.

Analyze answers together (with your students).
After teachers see which problems were routinely missed, class time can be spent on the most needed concepts. As the ASSISTments site says, “Homework and classwork flow seamlessly into instruction of new material.” You can use the information you gain from the reports to determine what you will cover the next day. If everyone gets a concept you can move on and not waste valuable class time covering material that is understood. ASSISTments can also help support groups or personalized work.

This four-step process models what needs to happen in effective formative assessment, which was discussed in the second post of this series. Students engage in an assessment for learning (in this case it’s their homework), receive specific, supportive, timely, and focused feedback on how to close the gap between their current and desired understanding, and the results of the assessment are used to drive the next learning encounter.

Based on the undergirding principles of formative assessment, it’s no surprise that ASSISTments meets the rigorous What Works Clearinghouse standards without reservation, and receives a strong rating as an evidence-based PK-12 program by Evidence for ESSA. Based on a randomized controlled trial examining 2,728 seventh grade students in Maine, on average, the use of ASSISTments “produced a positive impact on students’ mathematics achievement at the end of a school year” equivalent to a student at the 50th percentile without the intervention improving to the 58th percentile with it. In addition, as seen in other formative assessment studies, the largest gains were seen by students with low prior achievement. (Online Mathematics Homework Increases Student Achievement) ASSISTments helps you by helping the students who need it the most and seems to allow you to be in multiple places at once!

One of the reasons I’m so excited about this program is because it was thoughtfully designed with teachers and students in mind. Neil and Cristina Heffernen, the co-creators of ASSISTments, write this in The ASSISTments Ecosystem: Building a Platform that Brings Scientists and Teachers Together for Minimally Invasive Research on Human Learning and Teaching.

“In many ways the list of problem sets in ASSISTments is a replacement for the assignment from the textbook or the traditional worksheet with questions on it. This way the teachers do not have to make a drastic change to their curriculum in order to start using the system. But more importantly they can make more sense of the data they get back since they are the ones who selected and assigned the problems.This is in contrast to the idea of an artificial intelligence automatically deciding what problem is best for each student. While this is a neat idea, it takes the teacher out of the loop and makes the computer tutorial less relevant to what is going on in the classroom.”

Exactly! I want formative assessment–in and out of the classroom–to meaningfully guide my instruction. Furthermore, I really appreciate that ASSISTments was designed to give teachers assistance in the workflow, to inform them about what students are learning, and, more importantly, not learning, so that teachers can make an informed decision on how to best help their students. I hope including teachers in the design process and helping teachers work more effectively with their students becomes a standard for educational AIs.

You need a school verified Google Classroom or paid Canvas account to use it, but ASSISTments itself is free! Unfortunately, our school uses a basic Canvas account, but customer service at ASSISTments allowed me to have a teacher role using a personal account so I could fully explore the program. I’m hopeful that this can be a transformative homework solution for math students! I think it will be worth your time to see what ASSISTments can offer you.

Note, I am not affiliated with ASSISTments and was not paid or asked to write about ASSISTments. I learned about it from CIRCL, and I was intrigued because I teach mathematics, but everything I discovered about it was through my research and my excitement about its potential is my own.

Watch this short video to learn more about ASSISTments, and read more about co-creator Neil Heffernen in his CIRCL Perspective.

Thank you to ASSISTments’ co-creator Cristina Hefferenen and to James Lester for reviewing this post. We appreciate your work in AI and your work to bring educators and researchers together on this topic.

AI and Formative Assessment

August 31, 2020AI in Education, Assessment, Written by: Sarah HamptonSarah Hampton

by Sarah Hampton

In my last post, I talked about effective formative assessments and their powerful impact on student learning. In this post, let’s explore why AI is well-suited for formative assessment.

AI can offer individualized feedback on specific content.
AI can offer individualized feedback that helps students learn how to learn.
AI can provide meaningful formative assessment outside of school.
AI might be able to assess complex and messy knowledge domains.

Individualized Feedback on Content Learning

I think individualized feedback is the most powerful advantage of AI for assessment. As a teacher, I can only be in one place at a time looking in one direction at a time. That means I have two choices for feedback: I can take some time to assess how each student is doing and then address general learning barriers as a class, or I can assess and give feedback to students one at a time. In contrast, AI allows for simultaneous individualized feedback for each student.

“AI applications can identify pedagogical materials and approaches adapted to the level of individual students, and make predictions, recommendations and decisions about the next steps of the learning process based on data from individual students. AI systems assist learners to master the subject at their own pace and provide teachers with suggestions on how to help them.” (Trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) in education: promises and challenges)

Going one step further, AI has the ability to assess students without disrupting their learning by something called stealth assessment. While students work, AI can quietly collect data in the background such as the time it takes to answer questions, which incorrect strategies they tried before succeeding, etc. and organize them into a dashboard so teachers can use that data to inform what to focus on or clear up the next day in class. Note: As a teacher, I want the AI to help me do what I do best. I definitely want to see what each student needs in their learning. Also, as a teacher, I want to be able to control when the AI should alert me about intervening (as a caring human) instead of it trying to do something on its own that it isn’t capable of doing well.

Feedback That Helps Students Learn How to Learn

“Two experimental research studies have shown that students who understand the learning objectives and assessment criteria and have opportunities to reflect on their work show greater improvement than those who do not (Fontana & Fernandes, 1994; Frederikson & White, 1997).” (The Concept of Formative Assessment)

In the last post, I noted that including students in the process of self-assessment is critical to effective formative assessment. After all, we ultimately want students to be able to self-regulate their own learning. But, as one teacher, it can sometimes be difficult to remind students individually to stop and reflect on their work and brainstorm ways to close the gap between their current understanding and their learning goal. By contrast, regulation prompts can be built into AI software so students routinely stop and check for understanding and defend their reasoning, giving students a start on learning how to self-regulate.

For example, this is done in Crystal Island, an AI game-based platform for learning middle school microbiology, “students were periodically prompted to reflect on what they had learned thus far and what they planned to do moving forward…Students received several prompts for reflection during the game. After completing the game or running out of time, students were asked to reflect on their problem-solving experience as a whole, explaining how they approached the problem and whether they would do anything differently if they were asked to solve a similar problem in the future.” (Automated Analysis of Middle School Students’ Written Reflections During Game-Based Learning)

In-game reflection prompt presented to students in Crystal Island

Meaningful Formative Assessment Outside of School

Formative assessment and feedback can come from many sources, but, traditionally, the main source is the teacher. Students only have access to their teacher inside the classroom and during class time. In contrast, AI software can provide meaningful formative assessment anytime and anywhere which means learning can occur anytime and anywhere, too.

In the next post, we’ll look at how one AI tool, ASSISTments, is using formative assessment to transform math homework by giving meaningful individualized feedback at home.

Assessing Complexity and Messiness

In the first post of the series, I discussed the need for assessments that can measure the beautiful complexity of what my students know. I particularly like the way Griffin, McGaw, and Care state it in Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills:

“Traditional assessment methods typically fail to measure the high-level skills, knowledge, attitudes, and characteristics of self-directed and collaborative learning that are increasingly important for our global economy and fast-changing world. These skills are difficult to characterize and measure but critically important, more than ever. Traditional assessments are typically delivered via paper and pencil and are designed to be administered quickly and scored easily. In this way, they are tuned around what is easy to measure, rather than what is important to measure.”

We have to have assessments that can measure what is important and not just what is easy. AI has the potential to help with that.

For example, I can learn more about how much my students truly understand about a topic from reading a written response than a multiple choice response. However, it’s not possible to frequently assess students this way because of the time it takes to read and give feedback on each essay. (Consider some secondary teachers who see 150+ students a day!)

Fortunately, one major area for AI advancement has been in natural language processing. AIs designed to evaluate written and verbal ideas are quickly becoming more sophisticated and useful for providing helpful feedback to students. That means that my students could soon have access to a more thorough way to show what they know on a regular basis and receive more targeted feedback to better their understanding.

While the purpose of this post is to communicate the possible benefits of AI in education, it’s important to note that my excitement about these possibilities is not a carte blanche endorsement for them. Like all tools, AI has the potential to be used in beneficial or nefarious ways. There is a lot to consider as we think about AI and we’re just starting the conversation.

As AI advances and widespread classroom implementation becomes increasingly more possible, it’s time to seriously listen to those at the intersection of the learning sciences and artificial intelligence like Rose Luckin. “Socially, we need to engage teachers, learners, parents and other education stakeholders to work with scientists and policymakers to develop the ethical framework within which AI assessment can thrive and bring benefit.” (Towards artificial intelligence-based assessment systems)

Thank you to James Lester for reviewing this post. We appreciate your work in AI and your work to bring educators and researchers together on this topic.

We are still at the beginning of our conversation around AI in Education. What do you think? Do the possible benefits excite you? Do the possible risks concern you? Both? Let us know @CIRCLEducators.

Formative Assessment

August 24, 2020Assessment, Learning, Written by: Sarah HamptonSarah Hampton

By Sarah Hampton

In my last post, I talked about how artificial intelligence can improve standardized summative assessments. In the next three posts, I want to: 1) consider how focusing on formative assessments could be even more helpful, 2) explore why AI is well-suited for it, and 3) showcase how one AI tool is using formative assessment to transform math homework.

For this post, let’s begin by comparing summative and formative assessments and the value they bring to the education table.

High stakes standardized summative assessments and end-of-course exams are designed to give states, districts, and schools broad data based on average scores of many students to help them evaluate program effectiveness. While these assessments may also give a snapshot of a student’s overall understanding in a course and hold value for student placement the following year, the resulting data is not intended to help students learn more about the subject. For example, Jonathan Supovitz states in his article, Is High-Stakes Testing Working?, “These studies have typically found that data [from high-stakes assessment] provide general information about student performance but lack the nuance to provide fine-bore instructional guidance.”

On the other hand, formative assessments are designed to give a snapshot of a student’s specific content understanding with the goal of improving student learning based on the results.

“Teachers and schools can use formative assessment to identify student understanding, clarify what comes next in their learning, trigger and become part of an effective system of intervention for struggling students, inform and improve the instructional practice of individual teachers or teams, help students track their own progress toward attainment of standards, motivate students by building confidence in themselves as learners, fuel continuous improvement processes across faculties, and, thus, drive a school’s transformation.” Maximizing the Power of Formative Assessments

Note: End of term or end of the year grades given by a teacher are also a summative assessment, but are different than standardized tests and have different issues. Those issues are beyond the scope of this post.

While reading more about types of assessments, I realized one of the reasons I feel the tension between teaching for students and teaching for tests is because we [policy makers, administrators, teachers, families, etc.] keep focusing on summative assessments to do a job they were never intended to do. If our goal is to improve student learning, then we should use the tool designed for that and leverage more formative assessment. As stated in chapter five of New Assessments and Environments for Knowledge Building, “Assessment reform requires a radical shift from a ‘summative assessment which ranks individuals’ to a ‘formative assessment of the learning environment that helps all the students reach the next level of learning.’”

Formative assessments are really powerful when used the right way. Take a look at these two studies.

The authors of Using Formative Assessment and Metacognition to Improve Student Achievement share, “In a series of landmark review articles, Black and Wiliam (1998a, 1998b, 2009) dramatically highlighted formative assessment’s contribution to precollege student learning. They concluded that achievement gains generated by using formative assessment across a range of content domains were among the largest ever reported for education interventions. Notably, the largest gains were realized among low achievers.” Of the over 250 publications Black and William analyzed, approximately 20 demonstrated effect sizes that would represent “a gain that is roughly double the average growth U.S. children in the upper primary to lower secondary grades would be expected to make on standardized tests in a school year.” (The Impact of Formative Assessment and Learning Intentions on Student Achievement)

Similarly, the authors of Formative Assessment and Next-Generation Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity? highlight a review of 196 studies on feedback (an essential component of formative assessments) which “reported that feedback had an average effect size of 0.79 standard deviation – an effect greater than student prior cognitive ability, socioeconomic background, and reduced class size (Hattie & Timperley, 2007, p. 83).”

Notice that I said when used the right way. According to Black and Wiliam (2009), effective formative assessment involves all of these:

teachers making adjustments to teaching and learning in response to assessment evidence
students receiving feedback about their learning with advice on what they can do to improve
students participating in the process through self-assessment

In addition, Valerie Shute explains in Focus on Formative Feedback that feedback should be:

non evaluative
supportive
timely
specific
valid
objective
focused
clear

Dr. Shute goes on to give an analogy comparing formative feedback to ‘a good murder’ that made me laugh: “Formative feedback might be likened to ‘a good murder’ in that effective and useful feedback depends on three things: (a) motive (the student needs it), (b) opportunity (the student receives it in time to use it), and (c) means (the student is able and willing to use it).”

Effective teachers continually use different strategies for formative assessment. “All too often, the term ‘formative assessment’ conjures images of quizzes and tests, while in reality, formative assessment is a process used by teachers and students during instruction that provides feedback to adjust ongoing teaching and learning.” (Formative Assessment and Next-Generation Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity?) Formative assessment could be something as quick and simple as reading body language and then intervening with prompts or asking good questions and then offering constructive feedback. At times, it might be more sophisticated like analyzing data from an ungraded quiz that incorporates student regulated components and then using the results to determine what content will be taught the next day and how it should be approached.

I feel empowered knowing that there are many ways I can impact student learning daily by incorporating formative assessments. This is something within my control that’s been shown to work!

As part of completing lesson plans at my school, teachers are encouraged to plan the types of formative assessment they will use throughout the week. I appreciate the reminder to intentionally incorporate different strategies. These links are a few of the practical resources I like.

7 Smart, Fast Ways to Do Formative Assessment
56 Examples of Formative Assessment
Focus on Formative Feedback (specifically the tables on pg 177-181)

In addition, you may find Kip Glazer’s recommendations particularly helpful for virtual learning in her post called Why Assessment?

In the next two posts, we’ll look at how AI can be used for formative assessment and then explore ASSISTments, a successful AI math homework tool.

Thank you to James Lester for reviewing this post. We appreciate your work in AI and your work to bring educators and researchers together on this topic.

The photo in this post is by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash

Three Visionary Projects Using AI in Education

August 14, 2020AI in Education, Assessment, Classroom TechnologySarah Hampton

by Sarah Hampton

One of my favorite things about our Summer of AI is learning about cyberlearning projects and how they might benefit future students. In this post, I want to showcase three projects that caught my attention because they use AI in different ways and for different ages. When we began in June, I was thinking AI might be mostly about robots in STEM classes or general AIs like Siri or Alexa. But now, after learning about these three example projects and many more, I realize that the future might be more about specialized AIs giving teachers information and ways to personalize learning. Sometimes this is behind the scenes, like the first project I highlight. Sometimes, like the third project, a robot is used in Mandarin class (instead of in a technology class). Let us know what you think about these projects and their potential to change how you teach and learn @CIRCLeducators!

Project:

Human/AI Co-Orchestration of Dynamically-Differentiated Collaborative Classrooms

Figure 1. Left: A teacher using Lumilo while her students work with Lynette, an ITS for equation solving, in class (from Holstein et al., 2018b); Right: A point-of-view screenshot through Lumilo.

“This project will create and demonstrate new technology that supports dynamically-differentiated instruction for the classroom of the future. This new vision centers on carefully-designed partnerships between teachers, students, and artificial intelligence (AI). AI-powered learning software will support students during problem-solving practice, providing either individual guidance (using standard intelligent tutoring technology) or guidance so students can effectively collaborate and tutor each other. These learning activities are constantly adjusted to fit each student’s needs, including switching between individual or collaborative learning. The teacher “orchestrates” (instigates, oversees, and regulates) this dynamic process. New tools will enhance the teacher’s awareness of students’ classroom progress. The goal is to have highly effective and efficient learning processes for all students, and effective “orchestration support” for teachers.”

Why I’m Interested:

Capitalizes on the strengths of students, teachers, and technology
Creatively addresses differentiation and individualized instruction
Promotes collaborative learning
Relevant for all subjects

Learn More:

http://kenholstein.com/JLA_CodesignOrchestration.pdf
Teacher smart glasses (Lumilo)

Project:

Using Gaze in a Reading Tutor

Icon of person reading a book

“The big question the PIs are addressing in this project is how to unobtrusively track silent reading of novice readers so as to be able to use an intelligent tutoring system to aid reading comprehension…This pilot project builds on previous work in vision and speech technology, sensor fusion, machine learning, user modeling, intelligent tutors, and eye movements in an effort to identify the feasibility of using eye tracking techniques, along with other information collected from an intelligent reading tutor, to predict reading difficulties of novice/young readers.”

“The project’s most important potential broader impacts is in establishing a foundation for exploiting gaze input to build intelligent computing systems that can be used to help children with reading difficulties learn to read and read to learn.”

Why I’m Interested:

Targets reading comprehension which would help students in all subjects
Could decrease student frustration
May identify and intercept issues early translating to great academic gains over time
Interacts personally with all students simultaneously in ways one teacher could not
Allows for meaningful individual reading practice

Learn More:

Perhaps because this was a pilot program, no further information has been published. As a teacher looking toward the future and wanting to shape the conversation as it’s happening, I want to know more! I want to know what happened during this exploratory project and how similar projects could build on their work.

Project

Transforming World Language Education using Social Robotics

Figure 2. Students interacting with RALL-E robots.

“The social robot being developed in this project is designed to act as a language partner for students learning a foreign language, in this case those learning Chinese. It augments classroom instruction, providing for the learner a robot companion to converse with. The hypothesis is that social robots can make interactions with language speakers more exciting and more accessible, especially for less commonly taught languages. The embodied robot is designed not only to converse with learners but also to point and nod and gesture at particular people and objects, helping to direct the attention of learners and interact socially with learners in ways that a non-embodied simulation cannot.”

Why I’m Interested:

Opens access for learning languages like Mandarin and Hindi that are spoken by hundreds of millions of people around the world but are not routinely offered in American schools
Could easily be used in formal and informal settings
Applies robotics beyond STEM subjects

Learn More:

https://circlcenter.org/interactive-robot-for-learning-chinese/

Thank you to James Lester for reviewing this post. We appreciate your work in AI and your work to bring educators and researchers together on this topic.

References

Holstein, K., McLaren, B. M., & Aleven, V. (2018b). Student learning benefits of a mixed-reality teacher awareness tool in AI-enhanced classrooms. In C. Penstein Rosé, R. Martínez-Maldonado, U. Hoppe, R. Luckin, M. Mavrikis, K. Porayska-Pomsta, B. McLaren, & B. du Boulay (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED 2018), 27–30 June 2018, London, UK. (pp. 154–168). Springer, Cham. http://dx.doi.org/doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93843-1_12

Why assessment?

August 9, 2020Assessment, Guest Author, LearningPati Ruiz

by Kip Glazer Ed.D.

Summary

In a distance learning environment, assessment can become much more challenging. This article makes six suggestions as to how a high school teacher can assess students effectively to improve student learning.

Introduction:

In my first article, I made four suggestions to support our staff in a distance learning environment. This article will focus on the importance of assessment and how we should leverage that in the new era of learning, sometimes only remote and sometimes without large-scale standardized assessments. I suggest teachers consider six different ways to leverage assessment to improve student learning:

Ask your students to create tests and quizzes
Integrate student-created tests and rubrics
Focus on critical assessing skills
Give students a place to interact meaningfully
Leverage peer evaluation to scaffold student learning
Create consistency in grading across all similar courses

Background

Many teachers are trained to create learning experiences for our students known as teaching. Especially for secondary teachers, teaching includes creating lesson plans that deliver specialized content to our students and then giving the students assessments (i.e. quizzes and tests) to gauge what the students have learned. However, in an online learning environment, traditional assessments such as quizzes and tests are not as effective due to altered learning environments.

In an in-person learning environment, many teachers rely on the publisher’s test bank or textbook questions for assessment for a variety of reasons including a teacher’s desire to align his or her assessment to the approved curriculum that a teacher is asked to deliver. Others use them to save time; some use them because they don’t feel confident enough to create their own assessments. Over the years, I have worked with many teachers who were not terribly thrilled with the quality of the publisher’s assessments yet used them because they felt that they were not skilled to create test questions. Even if a teacher is well-trained in generating effective assessments, they often struggle to create them as constructing valid assessments takes time and expertise. Furthermore, high school teachers have the added pressure of preparing students for high stakes standardized tests such as the SAT, ACT, or AP that are created by experts. Even if a teacher knows and wants to implement skill- or competency-based assessment, the pressure to prepare his or her students for standardized tests can create tension. I personally experienced this as an AP English Literature teacher for many years.

Scope

Having only had high school teaching experiences, I do not presume to know a lot about how this article will apply to the K-6 setting. Although some of the suggestions will likely be applicable to the 7-12 setting, I do not presume to be an expert in every subject being taught in secondary schools. I intend to provide a few examples and strategies that are grounded on sound learning theories so that the teachers can augment their instructional practices should they find this article useful.

Needs

High school teachers need their instructional leaders to provide a clear and concise standard for instruction and assessment as the results of assessment lead to grades that are reviewed by the colleges as a factor in the college-admission decisions. Variability in assessments, therefore, is directly related to many practical and long-lasting consequences. Furthermore, having a clear understanding of what is being assessed and how it will be assessed can guide instructional practices. Having good assessments is vital in measuring the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

Suggestions

In order to maximize the impact of the assessment, I suggest 6 assessment practices. The suggestions are rooted in Papert’s Constructionism.

Learning, according to Papert, is both situated and pragmatic, and the construction of artifacts to demonstrate learning are not only useful but imperative (Papert & Harel, 1991). I argue that we focus on moving towards more student-created assessments.

1. Ask your students to create tests and quizzes

I suggest that the teachers use fact-based and time-bound quizzes and tests as learning tools rather than as grade-bearing assessments by allowing your students to create them.

In an online environment, students tend to have more resources available on their fingertips including their peers. It is not uncommon for your students to have additional off-line conversations while they are in your class, known as the “dual-screen interactivity” (Nee & Dozier, 2017, p.5). Examples of dual-screen interactivity include searching for additional information in addition to looking at the primary screen, connecting with others who are interacting with the same content, and creating external posts such as social media posts or memes. (Nee & Dozer, 2017). In fact, a teacher should expect this behavior to happen. Rather than fighting against them, I suggest you leverage them for learning.

For example, consider giving a group of students a section of a textbook to create multiple-choice, true-false, or sequential questions. I used this strategy often when I taught social studies where the knowledge of facts is very important. Not only did each group have to create the quiz questions, but each group also had to explain why they chose the topics and the content to be included in the test. Once the students created the questions, I had others in the class take the quiz to verify that the questions were of high quality based on the justifications provided by the authors of the questions. Then I as the teacher chose questions that I thought were great and added them to the official assessments. This practice allowed my students to interact with the materials multiple times without having to listen to a lecture. Also, this taught the students to look for critical information rather than focusing on obscure facts to trick each other. Finally, this allowed me, the teacher, to leverage the four out of five principles of game-based learning, such as competition and goals, rules, choices, challenges, (Charsky, 2010) as students to compete for the coveted position of becoming the author of the final assessment. Even if a group chose to find the questions online, they had to figure out the justifications and answers, which was harder to copy.

2. Integrate student-created tests and rubric

If you are teaching a course such as English, where foundational skills development becomes the center of the course rather than acquiring more discrete information, I suggest you encourage your students to create the rubric that they can use to grade their own learning as student-created tests and rubrics can improve student agency in learning. I used to have my students research various rubrics and evaluate them and create their own to evaluate each other’s work.

According to Garrison and Ehringhaus (2007), students learn best when they are involved in the assessment process. By allowing the students to be a part of their rubric creation, a teacher can not only improve student learning but also assess what they know about the skills that they are being taught.

3. Focus on assessing critical skills

When I say skills, I mean quoting, citing, summarizing, paraphrasing, and video creation. Because students have unrestricted access to additional resources, being able to create new content to demonstrate what they learned is becoming increasingly important. No matter how much teachers try to secure their assessments, a student can always take a screenshot and share it with other students. If the test only requires recalling facts, it is likely to be ineffective in measuring the authentic level of learning. Rather than spending time to limit access to additional resources, I suggest teachers encourage students to add in new information and then the teachers should examine the new information to understand why the students thought it was important to include in their final products.

Mathematics teachers can also encourage students to find the problems online that assess the procedures and content of the lesson and ask the students to explain why a question should or should not be included in a future assessment. They can also take it a step further and ask the students to create an instructional video and have them evaluate each other’s video to see which one provided the clearest instruction.

4. Give students a place to interact meaningfully around the subject matter

I also suggest using a discussion forum as an assessment tool. According to Balaji and Chakrabati (2010), a robust online discussion forum has a significant positive effect on student participation and learning. However, the forum should not be used as one more place where the teacher can ask questions of their students. An online forum should be a place where students pose questions of others. Also, teachers should not consider the number of posts as the indicator of student engagement and learning (Song & McNary, 2011). Instead, teachers should encourage the students to pose better questions to each other based on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (1997, 1999 & 2005).

5. Leverage peer evaluation to scaffold student learning

As teachers leverage peer-to-peer interactions to improve earning, I suggest that teachers leverage peer feedback as a component of every assessment.

For example, I used an embedded feature of the star rating system when I used the discussion forums. Rather than posing questions for my students to answer, I asked my students to create 2-3 questions each week based on their reading. Then they would be required to answer 2-3 questions that were posed by other students in the class. If they discovered that the questions were similar or identical to what they posted, they were to post one additional question to indicate that someone else already posted the same question, which encouraged them to get to the forum quicker than the others. As they answered each other’s questions, they were also encouraged to critique the quality of the question by giving them 1-5 stars. Once again, they were to provide feedback as to why they gave the stars based on Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (1997, 1999 & 2005). After a few rounds of questioning, I asked the students to justify why they felt that DOK level 1 and 2 questions were necessary for some context.

6. Create consistency in grading across all similar courses

Finally, I suggest leveraging the Professional Learning Community (PLC) to create consistency in grading across all similar courses. Even more so in a distance learning environment, parents and students may feel that their students are not being fairly assessed based on their personal feelings and perceptions rather than what is actually happening in the class. I strongly suggest that each PLC creates common practices around the type and frequency of assessments for the benefits of all PLC members to reduce subjectivity among all its members in regards to how their students are being assessed. In a distance learning environment, sharing expertise and saving time around assessment is not only useful but also vital to all of us as it will allow us to preserve our most precious commodity: our time.

Specific considerations for Educators

As we discuss assessment, we should consider the following:

Even though a grade can be an indication of student learning, we must look at assessment independent of grades as there are many ways to assess student learning without assigning a grade.
Unfortunately, many high school students will not take an assessment seriously unless there is a grade attached. Therefore, any discussion around assessment in high school should address the connection between assessments and grades.
In an online environment, traditional assessments that are time-bound and facts-based are not as effective as many opportunities to circumvent even the most effective security measures.
Additionally for California Educators – The California Education Code 49066 (a) states, “When grades are given for any course of instruction taught in a school district, the grade given to each pupil shall be the grade determined by the teacher of the course and the determination of the pupil’s grade by the teacher, in the absence of clerical or mechanical mistake, fraud, bad faith, or incompetency, shall be final.” In other words, teachers have the final say in a grade.

Conclusion

Being able to accurately assess student learning is one of the most challenging parts of being an effective teacher. We (teachers and administrators) often used our state-based large-scale standardized assessments to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching. As states suspend these conventional tests that may not have been the most effective way to assess our teaching, we need to look to new assessment options. The absence of these tests may be a great opportunity for us to look at assessment from a completely different perspective. As we move forward with the 100% distance learning model, I urge instructional leaders to pay close attention to how teachers are assessing their students. By paying close attention to our assessment practices, we will be able to improve our understanding of student learning considerably.

Additional resources:

Authentic Assessment – Indiana University, Bloomington

Introduction to competency-based Education – Aurora Institute

References:

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