As teachers and administrators in OCSU continue to deepen their knowledge of formative assessment, many of us are focusing on having students engage in self-assessment. Why is self-assessment important? The website eduplace.com has this to say:
 
"When students are collaborators in assessment, they develop the habit of self-reflection. They learn the         qualities of good work, how to judge their work against these qualities, how to step back from their work to assess their own efforts and feelings of accomplishment, and how to set personal goals (Reif, 1990; Wolf, 1989). These are qualities of self-directed learners, not passive learners. As teachers model, guide, and provide practice in self-assessment, students learn that assessment is not something apart from learning or something done to them, but a collaboration between teachers and students, and an integral part of how they learn and improve."
(https://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/litass/self.html)

And the site, studentsatthecenterhub.org, has lots of information on self-assessment. I’ve taken some key bits directly from that website:

"Self-assessment is simply a matter of having students identify strengths and weaknesses in their own work and revise accordingly. Effective self-assessment involves students comparing their work to clear standards and generating feedback for themselves about where they need to make improvements. It is a tool that can promote learning if it is used while the learning is taking place. In order for self-assessment to be effective, students must be able to use their self-generated feedback to revise and improve their work before it is due for grading. After students self-assess and revise their work, they can turn it in for teacher feedback.

Effective self-assessment involves at least three steps:

1. CLEAR PERFORMANCE TARGETS
In order for self-assessment to be effective, students must have clear targets to work toward. In other words, students must know what counts! Clear criteria for assignments that will be graded should be made available to students before work on the task begins. The assessment criteria can be created by the teacher or co-created with students. The criteria can be arranged in a simple checklist or in a rubric.

2. CHECKING PROGRESS TOWARD THE TARGETS
This is where the actual self-assessment takes place. Once students know the performance targets (step 1), they create a draft of the assignment, compare the draft to the targets, and identify areas of strength and areas for improvement.

3. REVISION
Using the self-generated feedback from step 2, students revise their draft, trying to close the gaps between their work and the targets. This step is crucial. If students don’t have the chance to revise and improve their work, they are unlikely to take the self-assessment process seriously."

​Check out studentsatthecenterhub.org for more information about self-assessment, and leave a comment below to let us know how you are engaging your students in self-assessment.

Are you interested in incorporating peer assessment into your instruction? Are you wondering what peer assessment looks like for your grade level and/or content area? Are you not quite sure what peer assessment really means?
 
Peer assessment is actually just one of the four clusters of the Keeping Learning on Track Activating Peers pyramid. This pyramid refers to ways that students can act as instructional resources for each other. The four clusters are outlined in a bit more detail below.
 
Sounding Board

• Students use each other to work our their ideas or questions
• No expertise is required of the peer resource
• There is no expectation of student understanding or proficiency

 
Pooling Thinking

• Students work cooperatively to develop the best product
• Does not assume that any one student has a better understanding or higher proficiency than another
• Does assume students can work together to identify quality work
• All students participate and provide a portion of the ideas, questions, and/or final product

 
Peer Assessment

• Students provide feedback on each other’s work
• All students have some level of understanding of content or proficiency with the skill
• Students use shared criteria for success to assess and provide feedback to move their peers’ learning forward
• Peers must have adequate understanding of the learning expectations and success criteria.
• Students must be given time to use the feedback to improve their learning and/or the quality of their work

 
Peer Tutoring

• One student acts as teacher for another
• Assumes that at least one student has a greater level of understanding of some specific content or greater proficiency with a skill, than at least one other student does

 
These clusters are not exclusive; one technique can be listed under multiple clusters. The most important idea is to consider how the technique you are using is impacting learning and teaching.
 
How do your students act as instructional resources for each other? Share your ideas by posting comments!
 

To conclude our focus on the formative assessment strategy of sharing learning expectations we consider a couple of common misconceptions and some tactics for avoiding them.

Misconception #1: Informing the students of the learning target by telling them what it is or by writing it on the board is sufficient. The assumption behind this practice is that writing the objective on the board puts the objective inside the students' heads.

Misconception #2: Sharing a rubric with students will ensure they understand the criteria for success. Sharing a rubric with students is a good start, but as with the objective, you need to check for student understanding of what the criteria mean.

                                                Tactics for Avoiding Misconceptions
Questioning:

• Teachers check for understanding by asking for student questions or by asking students to put learning goals in their own words.
• Teachers use directed discussion or warm-up questions.
• Students think-pair-share what they think they will be learning, why it's important, and how it relates to previous learning.

Examples:

• Kevin, can you tell me one thing about the water cycle you already know? … Jacob, can you tell me one other thing about the water cycle? … Jaden, can you put those two things together so we have a definition of the water cycle?
• Why is it important to know about the water cycle?
• What would a good report on the water cycle look like?
• Donna, what do you think of Matthew's idea about the way to do a picture of the water cycle?

Planning and Envisioning:

• Students list what they know and want to know.
• Students make planning charts for individual or group work.

Examples:

• Groups working on water cycle reports plan a week of work, including library research, reading, writing, drawing, editing, and planning a presentation.
• Students use these planning charts to keep track of progress. The teacher uses these planning charts for interim assessment of student progress and for asking questions about what students learn along the way.
• The teacher asks for interim assessments as checkpoints along the way—for example, a list of sources after library day, an outline as the report is planned, a draft as the report is written, a list of students' roles for an oral presentation.

Using Examples:

• Students look at good examples and make a list of what makes them good.
• Students look at a range of examples, sort them into quality levels, and write descriptions of the levels that turn into draft rubrics.

Examples:

• Here are the five best water cycle reports from last year. What do you notice about them?
• Can you organize these things you notice into categories?
• Put these water cycle reports into three piles: Good, OK, and Not Good.
• What makes the Good ones good? How are the OK reports different from the Good ones? From the Not Good ones?

Using Rubrics:

• Students use teacher-made rubrics to assess examples.
• Students rephrase teacher-made rubrics into their own words.
• Students use rubrics to assess their own work and revise.

Examples:

• Here are some water cycle reports from last year. Discuss with your group how you would evaluate them using this rubric, and why.
• Here is the rubric we will use for your water cycle reports. How would you describe these qualities to another student?
• How do you think your water cycle report measures up on this rubric? Use a highlighter to show the descriptions in the rubric that you think describe your work. Is there anything you want to revise?

Information from this post comes from:
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109031/chapters/Leveling-the-Playing-Field@-Sharing-Learning-Targets-and-Criteria-for-Success.aspx
 
More information about formative assessment can be found in the professional development school on the OCSU Rubicon Atlas site.

This week we continue to learn more about the formative assessment strategy: Learning Expectations and Success Criteria.

One of the key strategies in formative assessment is sharing learning expectations and success criteria. If we are to have engaged students it is critical that they know what is being learned and why it is important. It is also important to share the criteria for success with students so they know what it looks like when they have met the expectations. Learning expectations may be posted in your classroom, but more importantly they should be referred to throughout the lesson. Learning expectations are what the students are expected to learn NOT the tasks or activities they will participate in during the lesson.
 
Something to consider:
Do you have clear learning expectations for every lesson? How do you know if students learned what you expected them to learn? (comment below to share your ideas with others)

During December we’ll focus on the formative assessment strategy: sharing learning expectations and success criteria. Below are some reasons why it is important to share with students the learning expectations for every lesson.

• providing student-friendly learning expectations to students benefits all students but, in particular, low-performing students; it may help to close the achievement gap
• learning expectations set the stage for activating students as instructional resources for one another and owners of their own learning
• sharing learning expectations at the start of a lessons sets the stage for learning and creates a context for students to ensure connections with prior understandings
• revisiting and revising learning expectations at the end of a lesson may give the teacher and students more information to determine if and how to adjust future instruction to ensure that students meet intended learning goals
• it is essential that teachers infuse in their students a view that ability is incremental, rather than fixed... a growth mindset
• students must understand the criteria for success in their learning in order to fully benefit from feedback and to be active learners

Something to consider:
How do you share learning expectations and success criteria with students?


More information about formative assessment can be found in the professional development school on the OCSU Rubicon Atlas site.

For the 2nd year in a row, all OCSU teachers and administrators are focusing on formative assessment and developing goals around that topic. As we work towards these goals it is important that we’re all working from the same definition of formative assessment:

     On an on-going basis,
     Students and teachers use evidence of learning
     To provide specific feedback
     Tied to the standards
     And to adapt teaching and learning
     To meet immediate learner needs.

We are not necessarily talking about point in time formative assessments that we administer throughout the year. While those are a piece of the picture, we are talking about something much bigger. The larger picture includes the following key strategies:

• Sharing Learning Expectations and Success Criteria
• Questioning
• Feedback
• Activating Self
• Activating Peers

Future posts will include more information about each of these strategies.

Additional information about formative assessment can be found in the professional development school on the OCSU Rubicon Atlas site.