ASSESSMENT OF STUDENT

LEARNING
(Tue & Fri 5:00 – 6:30 PM)

EMMANUEL D. DUMASIG
Instructor
Initial activity:

What is your
expectations in our
subject, in your
classmates and your
instructor?
 What is assessment?
• Assessment involves the use of empirical data on student learning to refine
programs and improve student learning.
• Assessment is the process of gathering and discussing information from
multiple and diverse sources in order to develop a deep understanding of
what students know, understand, and can do with their knowledge as a
result of their educational experiences; the process culminates when
assessment results are used to improve subsequent learning.
• Assessment is the systematic basis for making inferences about the learning
and development of students. It is the process of defining, selecting,
designing, collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and using information to
increase students' learning and development.
 Purpose
• The major purpose of assessment in schools should be to provide
interpretative information to teachers and school leaders about their
impact on students, so that these educators have the best information
possible about what steps to take with instruction and how they need to
change and adapt. So often we use assessment in schools to inform
students of their progress and attainment. Of course this is important, but it
is more critical to use this information to inform teachers about their
impact on students. Using assessments as feedback for teachers is
powerful. And this power is truly maximized when the assessments are
timely, informative, and related to what teachers are actually teaching.
 Types of Assessment
• How do you use the different types of assessment in your classroom to promote student
learning?
• School closures and remote or hybrid learning environments have posed some challenges for
educators, but motivating students to learn and grow remains a constant goal.
• Some students have lost a portion of their academic progress. Assessing students in
meaningful ways can help motivate and empower them to grow as they become agents of
their own learning.
• But testing can contribute to math anxiety for many students. Assessments can be difficult to
structure properly and time-consuming to grade. And as a teacher, you know that student
progress isn't just a number on a report card.
• There’s so much more to assessments than delivering an end-of-unit exam or prepping for a
standardized test. Assessments help shape the learning process at all points, and give you
insights into student learning.
Six types of assessments are:
• Diagnostic assessments
• Formative assessments
• Summative assessments
• Ipsative assessments
• Norm-referenced assessments
• Criterion-referenced assessments
What's the purpose of different types of assessment?
Different types of assessments can help you understand student progress
in various ways. This understanding can inform the teaching
strategies you use, and may lead to different adaptations.
In your classroom, assessments generally have one of three purposes:

• Assessment of learning
• Assessment for learning
• Assessment as learning
Assessment of learning
Assessments of learning are usually grade-based, and can include:
• Exams
• Portfolios
• Final projects
• Standardized tests
They often have a concrete grade attached to them that communicates
student achievement to teachers, parents, students, school-level
administrators and district leaders.

Common types of assessment of learning include:

• Summative assessments
• Norm-referenced assessments
• Criterion-referenced assessments
 Assessment for learning
Assessments for learning provide you with a clear snapshot of student
learning and understanding as you teach -- allowing you to adjust
everything from your classroom management strategies to your lesson
plans as you go.
Assessments for learning should always be ongoing and actionable.
When you’re creating assessments, keep these key questions in mind:
• What do students still need to know?
• What did students take away from the lesson?
• Did students find this lesson too easy? Too difficult?
• Did my teaching strategies reach students effectively?
• What are students most commonly misunderstanding?
• What did I most want students to learn from this lesson? Did I
succeed?
There are lots of ways you can deliver assessments for
learning, even in a busy classroom.
• We’ll cover some of them soon!
• For now, just remember these assessments aren’t
only for students -- they’re to provide you with
actionable feedback to improve your instruction.
• Common types of assessment for learning include
formative assessments and diagnostic assessments.
Assessment as learning
• Assessment as learning actively involves students in the
learning process. It teaches critical thinking skills, problem-
solving and encourages students to set achievable goals
for themselves and objectively measure their progress.
• They can help engage students in the learning process,
too! One study "showed that in most cases the students
pointed out the target knowledge as the reason for a task
to be interesting and engaging, followed by the way the
content was dealt with in the classroom."
 Douglas B. McLeod

“Students develop an interest in mathematical

tasks that they understand, see as relevant to their
own concerns, and can manage. Recent studies of
students’ emotional responses to mathematics
suggest that both their positive and their negative
responses diminish as tasks become familiar and
increase when tasks are novel”
 Six (6) Types of
assessment to use in
your classroom
1. Diagnostic assessment
Let’s say you’re starting a lesson on two-digit multiplication. To make sure the unit goes
smoothly, you want to know if your students have mastered fact families, place value and
one-digit multiplication before you move on to more complicated questions.
When you structure diagnostic assessments around your lesson, you’ll get the information
you need to understand student knowledge and engage your whole classroom.
Some examples to try include:
• Short quizzes
• Journal entries
• Student interviews
• Student reflections
• Classroom discussions
• Graphic organizers (e.g., mind maps, flow charts, KWL charts)
Diagnostic assessments can also help benchmark student progress. Consider giving the
same assessment at the end of the unit so students can see how far they’ve come!
 2. Formative assessment
• Just because students made it to the end-of-unit test,
doesn’t mean they’ve mastered the topics in the
unit. Formative assessments help teachers understand
student learning while they teach, and provide them with
information to adjust their teaching strategies accordingly.
• Meaningful learning involves processing new facts,
adjusting assumptions and drawing nuanced conclusions.
 Points to Ponder

“Current research indicates that acquired

knowledge is not simply a collection of concepts
and procedural skills filed in long-term memory.
Rather, the knowledge is structured by
individuals in meaningful ways, which grow and
change over time.”
Formative assessments help you track how student knowledge is growing and
changing in your classroom in real-time. While it requires a bit of a time
investment — especially at first — the gains are more than worth it.
A March 2020 study found that providing formal formative assessment evidence such as written feedback
and quizzes within or between instructional units helped enhance the effectiveness of formative assessments.
• Some examples of formative assessments include:
• Portfolios
• Group projects
• Progress reports
• Class discussions
• Entry and exit tickets
• Short, regular quizzes
• Virtual classroom tools like Socrative or Kahoot!
When running formative assessments in your classroom, it’s best to keep them short, easy to grade and
consistent. Introducing students to formative assessments in a low-stakes way can help you benchmark their
progress and reduce math anxiety.
 How it will helps you deliver formative assessments?
• Makes it easy to create, deliver and grade formative assessments
that help keep your students engaged with the learning process
and provide you with actionable data to adjust your lesson plans.
• Use your dashboard to create an Assignment and make formative
assessments easy!
• Assignments assess your students on a particular skill with a set
number of questions and can be differentiated for individual
students or groups of students.
3. Summative assessment
• Summative assessments measure student progress as an assessment
of learning. Standardized tests are a type of summative assessment
and provide data for you, school leaders and district leaders.
• They can assist with communicating student progress, but they don’t
always give clear feedback on the learning process and can foster
a “teach to the test” mindset if you’re not careful.
• Plus, they’re stressful for teachers. One Harvard survey found 60% of
teachers said “preparing students to pass mandated standardized
tests” “dictates most of” or “substantially affects” their teaching.
But just because it’s a summative assessment, doesn’t mean it can’t be
engaging for students and useful for your teaching. Try creating assessments
that deviate from the standard multiple-choice test, like:
• Recording a podcast
• Writing a script for a short play
• Producing an independent study project
• No matter what type of summative assessment you give your students, keep
some best practices in mind:
• Keep it real-world relevant where you can
• Make questions clear and instructions easy to follow
• Give a rubric so students know what’s expected of them
• Create your final test after, not before, teaching the lesson
• Try blind grading: don’t look at the name on the assignment before you mark it
4. Ipsative assessments
• How many of your students get a bad grade on a test and get so
discouraged they stop trying?
• Ipsative assessments are one of the types of assessment as learning
that compares previous results with a second try, motivating students
to set goals and improve their skills.
• When a student hands in a piece of creative writing, it’s just the first
draft. They practice athletic skills and musical talents to improve, but
don’t always get the same chance when it comes to other subjects
like math.
• A two-stage assessment framework helps students learn from their
mistakes and motivates them to do better. Plus, it removes the instant
gratification of goals and teaches students learning is a process.
You can incorporate ipsative assessments into your classroom with:
• Portfolios
• A two-stage testing process
• Project-based learning activities
One study on ipsative learning techniques found that when it was used with higher
education distance learners, it helped motivate students and encouraged them to act on
feedback to improve their grades.
In Gwyneth Hughes' book, Ipsative Assessment: Motivation Through Marking Progress, she
writes: "Not all learners can be top performers, but all learners can potentially make progress
and achieve a personal best. Putting the focus onto learning rather than meeting standards
and criteria can also be resource efficient."
While educators might use this type of assessment during pre- and post-test results, they can
also use it in reading instruction. Depending on your school's policy, for example, you can
record a student reading a book and discussing its contents. Then, at another point in the
year, repeat this process. Next, listen to the recordings together and discuss their reading
improvements.
5. Norm-referenced assessments
Norm-referenced assessments are tests designed to compare an individual
to a group of their peers, usually based on national standards and
occasionally adjusted for age, ethnicity or other demographics.
Unlike ipsative assessments, where the student is only competing against
themselves, norm-referenced assessments draw from a wide range of data
points to make conclusions about student achievement.
Types of norm-referenced assessments include:
• IQ tests
• Physical assessments
• Standardized college admissions tests
Proponents of norm-referenced assessments point out that they accentuate
differences among test-takers and make it easy to analyze large-scale trends.
Critics argue they don’t encourage complex thinking and can inadvertently
discriminate against low-income students and minorities.
Norm-referenced assessments are most useful when measuring student
achievement to determine:
• Language ability
• Grade readiness
• Physical development
• College admission decisions
• Need for additional learning support
While they’re not usually the type of assessment you deliver in your classroom,
chances are you have access to data from past tests that can give you
valuable insights into student performance.
6. Criterion-referenced assessments
• Criterion-referenced assessments compare the score of an individual student to a
learning standard and performance level, independent of other students around them.
• In the classroom, this means measuring student performance against grade-level
standards and can include end-of-unit or final tests to assess student understanding.
• Outside of the classroom, criterion-referenced assessments appear in professional
licensing exams, high school exit exams and citizenship tests, where the student must
answer a certain percentage of questions correctly to pass.
• Criterion-referenced assessments are most often compared with norm-referenced
assessments. While they’re both considered types of assessments of learning, criterion-
referenced assessments don’t measure students against their peers. Instead, each
student is graded to provide insight into their strengths and areas for improvement.
 How to create effective assessments
• You don’t want to use a norm-referenced assessment to figure out
where learning gaps in your classroom are, and ipsative
assessments aren’t the best for giving your principal a high-level
overview of student achievement in your classroom.
• When it comes to your teaching, here are some best practices to
help you identify which type of assessment will work and how to
structure it, so you and your students get the information you need.

Make a rubric
• Students do their best work when they know what’s expected of them and how
they’ll be marked. Whether you’re assigning a cooperative learning project or an
independent study unit, a rubric communicates clear success criteria to students
and helps teachers maintain consistent grading.
• Ideally, your rubric should have a detailed breakdown of all the project’s individual
parts, what’s required of each group member and an explanation of what
different levels of achievement look like.
• A well-crafted rubric lets multiple teachers grade the same assignment and arrive
at the same score. It’s an important part of assessments for learning and
assessments of learning, and teaches students to take responsibility for the quality
of their work.
• There are plenty of online rubric tools to help you get started -- try one today!
 Ask yourself why you're giving the assessment
While student grades provide a useful picture of achievement and help you communicate
progress to school leaders and parents, the ultimate goal of assessments is to improve
student learning.
Ask yourself questions like:
• What’s my plan for the results?
• Who’s going to use the results, besides me?
• What do I want to learn from this assessment?
• What’s the best way to present the assessment to my students, given what I know about
their progress and learning styles?
This helps you effectively prepare students and create an assessment that moves learning
forward.
Don't stick with the same types of assessment — mix
it up!
• Let’s say you’re teaching a unit on multiplying fractions. To help you plan your lessons, deliver a diagnostic
assessment to find out what students remember from last year. Once you’re sure they understand all the
prerequisites, you can start teaching your lessons more effectively.
• After each math class, deliver short exit tickets to find out what students understand and where they still have
questions. If you see students struggling, you can re-teach or deliver intervention in small groups during station
rotations.
• When you feel students are prepared, an assessment of learning can be given to them. If students do not meet the
success criteria, additional support and scaffolding can be provided to help them improve their understanding of
the topic. You can foster a growth mindset by reminding students that mistakes are an important part of learning!
• Now your students are masters at multiplying fractions! And when standardized testing season rolls around, you
know which of your students need additional support — and where.
• Build your review based on the data you’ve collected through diagnostic, formative, summative and ipsative
assessments so they perform well on their standardized tests.
Final thoughts about different types of
assessment
• Remember: learning extends well beyond a single score or assessment!
• It’s an ongoing process, with plenty of opportunities for students to build
a growth mindset and develop new skills.
Additional Type of Assessment

• Scenario-based assessment
• Oral assessment
• Gamified assessment
• Skill assessment
Scenario-based assessment

• Scenario-based assessment is based on interactive scenarios that support

active learning. A hypothetical setting is constructed where students are
expected to apply their theoretical knowledge under the scenario
provided.
• This assessment type allows students to broaden their learning beyond the
constraints of a textbook or lecture by applying their knowledge in real-
world situations. It also enables the teacher to assess a student’s
comprehension of the subject matter more precisely by observing how
students would apply newly learned information in practical situations.
Oral assessment

• Frequently prompted by questions or brief tasks, oral evaluations use the

spoken word to evaluate students’ knowledge and skills. It provides a clearer
picture of their skills, thought processes, and conceptual misunderstandings.
Additionally, it fosters a stronger sense of connection between teachers and
pupils.
• Oral assessment can take the form of:
• Presentations on a prepared topic (individual or group, live or recorded)
• Interviews or discussions
• Simulations
Gamified assessment

Gamified assessments are a more sophisticated form of traditional assessments that include Gamified
assessments are a more sophisticated form of traditional assessments that include game-based components
in aptitude and personality exams. These are quick and engaging due to their game format. However, The
tests are based on science and statistics, even though they are meant to be enjoyable.
This assessment boosts participation and aids in analyzing several crucial skills and behaviors among test
takers. They may include:
• A series of short tests to assess specific skill sets
• Long games to evaluate personalities and reactions in complex scenarios
• Job simulation experiences
• Trivia-based quizzes
Skill assessment

• Skill assessment is a test created to examine a student’s abilities

concerning a specific skill or set of skills. When taking this test, students are
asked to demonstrate their knowledge of a particular topic, subject, or
problem. This knowledge is then contrasted with what is expected of them
according to the applicable standards. These exams are intended to
determine if students possess the skills that meet the curriculum’s
expectations