Assessment Overview
Assessment Process
It is often said that assessment drives student learning. But what does this mean? Does it mean that tests freak students out? Because they do! Doesn’t assessment tell you if kids have learned their assignments? They might, if well-designed, but they frequently tell you more about who has survived the test rather than the quality of their learning, which in some cases is useful information. The reason why assessment use in the last ten years is so closely tied to school reform is the discovery that assessment drives the learning your students do and it can radically improve the quality of that learning experience, if designed well.
For example, if you just give a multiple-choice test, kids don’t have to explain their ideas, they merely select from your already provided answers. This helps them take advantage of the assessment and do a lot of guessing. Performance assessment, where students demonstrate their learning, provides better evidence of student learning, provides information for improving student learning by revealing what students understand instead of just what they know and what they don’t know, and provides administrators with information to improve programming. Performance assessments and the tasks they engender are more authentic evaluations of what students know and can do.
Most importantly, good assessment communities place student learning at the top of what can be improved! When this is the priority of education departments, assessment is a continuous feedback process for both the department and the theatre in general. When the assessment process is fair across a wide diversity of student learners and is clear and direct in its feedback, it helps to crystallize the teacher/student relationship. And when it is offered in a non-judgmental but accurate way, the process of assessment can launch student learning far beyond what normal classroom instruction usually produces. For a more detailed set of definitions and descriptors of this process, see below:
Assessment
Assessment and Standardized Tests
Performance Assessments
A Task and a Rubric
Valid and Reliable
Assessment
Assessment, from the French, meaning to sit next to, is the metaphorical process of sitting next to students to evaluate their learning. Assessment reform tries to de-emphasize high-stakes testing in favor of more informal, formative (ongoing) assessment models such as observations, surveys, portfolios and performance tasks, rather than traditional standardized tests that do yield content memorization information, but are more a snap-shot of student achievement. Snap-shots are fine for summative types of evaluation, but performance assessments are more formative and much more authentic in revealing student learning.
Assessment and Standardized Tests
One of the more important issues to understand is the use we make of assessment results versus the use we make of testing results in America. Testing is now the central reform strategy of the No Child Left Behind law of 2001 and is used as a high-stakes policy tool to hold schools and states accountable for student learning. Assessment has almost always been used to help teachers teach better, help students understand the progress of their learning, help all involved diagnose learning disabilities and help theatres and schools change programming. As critics of testing point out, the law’s use of testing had not resulted in anything more than a narrowing of the curriculum, a focus on test-prep and a failure to really change schools for the better. That is why the use of assessment to improve the process of teaching and learning is on the rise.
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Performance Assessments
Unlike a multiple-choice or true-false test in which a student is asked to choose one of the responses provided, a performance assessment requires a student to perform a task, to generate his or her own response and to make meaning of the curriculum content. For example, a performance assessment in writing would require a student to actually write an extended response, rather than simply answering some multiple-choice questions on grammar or punctuation. Punctuation is important, and should be assessed, but it is more of a basic skill of writing and not a proxy for higher order thinking skills that reflect quality student writing. (From Chicago Public Schools website)
A Task and a Rubric
A performance assessment consists of two parts, a task and a set of scoring criteria or "rubric." The task may be an academic product, a performance, or an extended written response to an academic prompt. Some examples of performance assessment tasks from different subjects include written compositions, speeches, works of art, scenes from the theatre, science fair projects, research projects, musical performances, and open-ended math problems. Existing classroom instructional activities may be transformed into a performance assessment by specifying how the activity becomes an important task, that is required of all students, with the addition of suitable scoring criteria.
The arts have long been grounded in this kind of demonstration of learning. To show your work through a performance, an art opening, a recital, a portfolio, etc., is an arts-grounded way for students to demonstrate their understanding and achievement. (From Chicago Public Schools Intranet)
Valid and Reliable
We should try to assess what we value and value what we assess. The same concept should hold true in schools and theatres. An assessment is valid if it accurately measures what it is intended to measure in student learning. An assessment is reliable if it accurately measures student learning across a group of students. For example, in an audience survey for theatres, we may ask about the comfort of the seats, but if we intend to do nothing about the seats, why assess it? Do we really care if an audience survey is anonymous, or would we rather have respondents take a more personal approach to answering the questions, which might mean that we change the survey to a personal interview protocol? Do we need to survey every Wednesday afternoon audience, or would a random sample give us a better view of what we value? Can we increase our validity if we target theatre-goers who are more regular and care more about our theatre? Can we then check our reliability by changing the survey based on increased validity, and sampling from every Wednesday audience to see if our instrument has good reliability? Honing our assessment instruments by increasing their validity and reliability helps improve what we learn from them and how we ultimately improve our theatre programming.
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