Assessing Student Work:
An Interim Report
Prepared by the Lower Division Committee on Assessment
Introduction:
What are habits of mind? The educator Theodore Sizer defines habits of mind as "the willingness to use one's mind well when no one is looking." This report is about what we would like our students to be doing when no one is looking, and how toget them there. A committee of faculty and parents has set the goal of assessing an array of habits of mind, such as persistence, creativity, and problem definition. The faculty of the lower division has agreed to work together to begin gathering observations of student habits of mind and to report these observations to parents beginning in Novermber, 1997.
The Committee:
The lower division committee on assessment consists of two parents, five lower division faculty members, and the director of curriculum development for N-12. The committee has been meeting since September 1996 to review existing means of assessing student work and to recommend changes or additions for the future. The meetings were challenging and enjoyable, and were approached from the perspective of improvement and growth. The curriculum of any great school is a work in progress; thus, we felt that to consider alternatives in assessing student work is part of the ongoing review and development in curriculum that is part of a healthy institution.
Sections of the Report:
This report consists of the following sections:
- Premises of our work
- Grounding of our recommendations
- Recommendations
- Discussion of Rubrics
- Conclusions and future directions
1. Premises of our work
The committee defines assessment as: gathering and sharing information on student performance to help students learn more and do better work. We offer an example to illustrate this definition. A tennis coach might say to a pupil, "That time the ball came to you and you hit the shot well. If the ball had been hit to the side, and you had needed to run to the ball, you might have had difficulty because you brought the racket back a bit late. Try to bring the racket back early." In this example, the coach has a vision of what the student can eventually do. The coach's assessment of where the student is on the learning curve leads to feedback and instruction.
Horace Mann teachers have always used assessment in this way. The committee has focused on recent research in learning theory that points the way to new assessment techniques. These techniques can help us gather information that helps students move toward our most deeply held goals, such as creativity, persistence and initiative.
2. Grounding of our recommendations
Our work is grounded in three distinct areas. First-- the Horace Mann tradition. We are proud to be associated with a school that has a tradition of more than a century of quality education. There is much good in the work that we do, and all of the
committee's efforts are aimed at building upon that work.
Contemporary research into learning styles and assessment techniques comprise our second area of grounding. The committee has drawn primarily on the work of four important re searchers in this field: Robert Sternberg, Howard Gardner, Grant Wiggens and Lauren Resnick.
Our third area of grounding is contemporary practice in outstanding schools around the world. Through journals, conferences, visits, and participation in consortia like the Independent School Innovation Consortium (ISIC), headed by Grant Wiggens, at the Center for Learning, Assessment and School Structure (CLASS), the entire faculty and administration at HM remain in touch with the best of current practice, especially at other schools, public and independent, that share our aspirations for ourselves and our students.
3. Recommendations
The committee recommends that curriculum and assessment development be focused on three areas: habits of mind, performance abilities, and knowledge acquisition. We stress that newly developed techniques should be merged with existing assessment approaches. We urge that a multifaceted approach to assessment be adopted.
Habits of mind are qualities that enable students to be lifelong learners. To Sternberg, these are "executive qualities" that allow students to plan and execute complex learning tasks. Typical habits of mind include:
persistence
creativity
initiative
problem identification
problem definition
selection of problem solving strategy
allocation of resources
cooperation
sensitivity to feedback
seeking patterns and connections
The above list is not meant to be exhaustive. The committee recommends that the lower division faculty work to identify those habits of mind most consistent with student development and institutional goals, and to begin to develop rubrics (see section 4) to measure those qualities. The committee envisions the emergence of clarifying definitions of essential habits of mind to emerge through ongoing collaboration and the development of rubrics.
In a similar way, the committee recommends that the faculty work to develop rub rics that help assess performance abilities and knowledge acquisition skills. Performance skills are those skills that allow the student to carry our specific tasks within the framework of a project or problem. These can be very narrowly defined, like an algorithm to add fractions, or broader, like these performance skills:
reasoning/analytical skills
language skills
mathematical skills
spatial intelligence and manipulation
body/kinesthetic
interpersonal skills
intrapersonal skills
Finally, knowledge acquisition applies to student abilities to learn, independently, whatever performance skills are necessary to carry out a task. As Douglas Heath says, "One has to have a self-image as a person who can teach oneself Mandarin or new computer technology." Typical knowledge acquisition skills include:
reading
magazines
books/texts
literature
writing in various modes
conducting interviews
observation
using the internet
listening to others
watching others
4. Discussion of Rubrics
An assessment rubric is a device to gather information about students' work in a systematic way. There are three requirements of assessment rubrics: they must be valid, transparent and fair.
valid: rubrics must gather the intended information
transparent: rubrics must be easily understood by students, teachers and parents
fair: anyone applying a rubric to a piece of student work should arrive at a similar assessment
Rubrics contain the following elements: standards or levels of excellence, the specific criteria for assessment, and the specific indicators describing what the various levels of excellence look like for each of the criteria. We illustrate these by providing three samples.
Example 1:
Assignment: construct a time-line of events leading to the civil war
Criterion: Event Selection
___Above and beyond: evidence of care taken in choosing items (either the most significant or showing cause/effect)
___Proficient: items meet requirements of assignment; few or no inaccuracies
___Limited: Includes required number of items; some inaccuracies
___Attempted: does not include required number of items
Here, the criterion of event selection is one of what could be a dozen or more used to assess the assigned time-line. The standards of excellence, above and beyond, proficient, limited and attempted, are defined by the indicators that apply to the criterion of event selection.
Example 2:
Habit of mind: make connections beyond assigned reading
___Above and beyond: I show how my reading relates to other things I know about or use ideas from my reading in other projects
___Proficient: When asked, I can use ideas from my reading in other projects
___Limited: Sometimes I can remember the ideas from one book when I am reading another
___Attempted: When I read, I try to remember other books on the same topic
This item might be applied to a number of different assignments. Still, it contains the elements of criterion, in this case making connections, the four levels of excellence, and indicators for each level. Finally, we have a third example from an assigned survey of reading habits. The students might do this to learn about others' reading habits, or their own, or as part of a study of statistics.
Example 3:
Assignment: Survey of reading habits
Criterion: persistence
___Above and beyond: worked steadily to overcome all problems and obstacles
___Proficient: in most cases, continued to work when project did not go as expected
___Limited: attempted to solve problems on rare occasions
___Attempted: always waited for assistance when project did not go as expected
5. Conclusions and future directions
The committee believes that there is much to aid us in the task of constructing rubrics to support our students as they develop habits of mind, performance abilities and knowledge acquisition skills. We recommend that the faculty work together to develop consensus on the identification and definition of these traits, and that this work can best proceed through the collaborative development of assessment rubrics in these areas. We can draw upon the work of others, but in the end, teaching is a personal act, and the rubrics will have to be our own. We are mindful of Emily Dickenson's observation: "imagination lights the slow fuse of possibility." We believe this to be true for our students, and for ourselves.
We welcome questions and comments to:
Jeffrey Weitz, Director of Curriculum Development, weitz@horacemann.pvt.k12.ny.us