Image credit: dieselbug2007 via Flickr Yesterday I had the privilege of spending the day with Sycamore District 427's middle- and high-school teachers, where we discussed how to construct quality assessments. My audience was (and still is!) a great group of teachers who are more than willing to improve their craft in order to help their students learn--there was such a buzz of positive energy throughout the entire day that was great to see.While I have written before about whether or not we actually need summative assessments anymore (shouldn't we always be using data gathered from assessments to help our students improve their learning and ourselves improve our instruction?), this district is still in the early stages of the PLC process and has just finished writing summative assessments for courses. Knowing that, we started with a process for creating clear learning targets for students (what we call "I can" statements in my district), and then moved on to aligning their newly-written summative assessments to those clear learning targets. We then concluded with how to develop formative assessments that mirror the summative assessments, and discussed how formative assessments should give students multiple chances to practice mastering the skills and concepts being assessed before taking the summative assessment--because it's all about setting students up for success, not trickery, on the final assessments. I have included the presentation below for your perusal. I am going to include the examples referenced in the presentation at a later date (I have to perform some technological acrobatics first before I can get them in electronic form).
If you have any questions about the presentation or ideas for writing quality assessments, please feel free to share them in the comments.
