Planning Assessment as Learning

Why am I assessing?

In order to know what steps to take to support students’ independence in learning, teachers use assessment as learning to obtain rich and detailed information about how students are progressing in developing the habits of mind and skills to monitor, challenge, and adjust their own learning. For their part, students learn to monitor and challenge their own understanding, predict the outcomes of their current level of understanding, make reasoned decisions about their progress and difficulties, decide what else they need to know, organize and reorganize ideas, check for consistency between different pieces of information, draw analogies that help them advance their understanding, and set personal goals.

What am I assessing?

In assessment as learning, teachers are interested in how students understand concepts, and in how they use metacognitive analysis to make adjustments to their understanding. Teachers monitor students’ goal-setting process and their thinking about their learning, and the strategies students use to support or challenge, adjust, and advance their learning.

What assessment method should I use?

Teachers can use a range of methods in assessment as learning, as long as the methods are constructed to elicit detailed information both about students’ learning and about their metacognitive processes. Teachers teach students how to use the methods so that they can monitor their own learning, think about where they feel secure in their learning and where they feel confused or uncertain, and decide about a learning plan. Although many assessment methods have the potential to encourage reflection and review, what matters in assessment as learning is that the methods allow students to consider their own learning in relation to models, exemplars, criteria, rubrics, frameworks, and checklists that provide images of successful learning.

How can I ensure quality in this assessment process?

Quality in assessment as learning depends on how well the assessment engages students in considering and challenging their thinking, and in making judgements about their views and understanding. Teachers establish high quality by ensuring that students have the right tools and are accumulating the evidence needed to make reasonable decisions about what it is that they understand or find confusing, and what else they need to do to deepen their understanding.

Reliability

Reliability in assessment as learning is related to consistency and confidence in students’ self-reflection, self-monitoring, and self-adjustment. As students practise monitoring their own learning and analyzing it in relation to what is expected, they eventually develop the skills to make consistent and reliable interpretations of their learning. In the short term, however, teachers have the responsibility of engaging students in the metacognitive processes. They do this by scaffolding students’ understanding; providing criteria, exemplars, and resources to help them analyze their own work; teaching them the necessary skills to think about their own learning in relation to their prior understanding and the curricular learning outcomes; and gathering evidence about how well they are learning.

Reference Points

The reference points in assessment as learning are a blend of curricular expectations and the individual student’s understanding at an earlier point in time. Students compare their own learning over time with descriptions and examples of expected learning.

Validity

Students are able to assess themselves only when they have a clear picture of proficient learning and the various steps that need to be taken to attain the desired expertise. Students need clear criteria and many varied examples of what good work looks like, as well as opportunities to compare their work to examples of good work. They need to reflect on their own and others’ work in the context of teacher feedback and advice about what to do next.

Record-Keeping

Students are the key players in record-keeping, as they are in all the other components of assessment as learning. They need to develop skills and attitudes that allow them to keep systematic records of their learning, and these records need to include reflections and insights as they occur. Their individual records become the evidence of their progress in learning and in becoming independent learners.

How can I use the information from this assessment?

Students use assessment as learning to gain knowledge about their progress, show milestones of success that are worthy of celebration, adjust their goals, make choices about what they need to do next to move their learning forward, and advocate for themselves.

Feedback to Students

Feedback is particularly important in assessment as learning. Learning is enhanced when students see the effects of what they have tried, and can envision alternative strategies to understand the material. When feedback enhances understanding and provides models for independent learning, students tend to be diligent and more engaged. Although assessment as learning is designed to develop independent learning, students cannot accomplish it without the guidance and direction that comes from detailed and relevant feedback. Students need feedback to help them develop autonomy and competence. Complex skills, such as monitoring and self-regulation, become routine only when there is constant feedback and practice using the skills. Effective feedback challenges ideas, introduces additional information, offers alternative interpretations, and creates conditions for self-reflection and review of ideas. It provides students with information about their performance on a task, and how they could come to the conclusions on their own.

If all feedback does is provide direction for what students need to do—that is, if the feedback doesn’t refer to students’ own roles in moving forward to the next stage of learning—they will be perpetually asking questions like Is this right? Is this what you want? Rather, feedback in assessment as learning encourages students to focus their attention on the task, rather than on getting the answer right. It provides them with ideas for adjusting, rethinking, and articulating their understanding, which will lead to another round of feedback and another extension of learning. Although teachers are the main providers of feedback, they are not the only ones. Peers, family, and community members also are important players. Students learn a great deal within their families and their communities. When students encounter new information, they filter it through their existing beliefs and ideas and those of their community and culture. They compare the new information to the beliefs and ideas held by the people around them.

Differentiating Learning

When assessment lies in the hands of students as well as teachers, students are practising their own metacognitive skills of self-reflection, self-analysis, interpretation, and reorganization of knowledge. When these skills become well developed, students will be able to direct their own learning. They will have learned to ask for support, search out new information, and reinforce or challenge their decisions by reviewing and discussing them with others. Assessment as learning provides the conditions under which students and teachers can discuss what the students are learning, what it means to do it well, what the alternatives might be for each student to advance his or her learning, what personal goals have been reached, and what more challenging goals can be set.

Reporting

Reporting in assessment as learning is the responsibility of students, who must learn to articulate and defend the nature and quality of their learning. When students reflect on their own learning and must communicate it to others, they are intensifying their understanding about a topic, their own learning strengths, and the areas in which they need to develop further. Student-led parent-teacher conferences have become a popular reporting forum that fits with assessment as learning. However, the success of these conferences depends on how well they are structured and how well the students prepare. The students need to have been deeply involved in assessment as learning throughout the instructional process, and be able to provide their parents with evidence of their learning. The evidence needs to include an analysis of their learning progress and what they need to do to move it forward.