As the 2019-20 school year comes to a close, administrators and educators have begun to reflect on the rapid transition to distance learning. At the same time, administrators are looking forward and planning ahead for the 2020-21 school year, with long-term remote and/or hybrid learning a real possibility in many schools.

Education author and professor Dr. Scott McLeod conducted numerous conversations with schools in his interview series Coronavirus Conversations. From these conversations, he created a chart indicating different phases in the response to COVID-19 school closures.

The first phase focuses on providing families access to devices and the Internet. After achieving basic access, the focus shifts to delivering learning opportunities, first at a subsistence level. This includes teachers learning how to interact with their students (e.g., through video conferencing platforms) and how to collect and share materials (e.g., Google Classroom). Once students gain access and teachers feel comfortable using basic digital tools, the focus then becomes providing deeper learning experiences. Teachers might begin to incorporate authentic learning opportunities, interactivity, real-world connections, and student agency. Now, with the transition to summer, teachers might begin to look ahead in designing future learning opportunities, perhaps incorporating some elements of deeper learning.

What about assessments?

How do teachers know if the experiences they design make an impact on student learning? Assessments help teachers determine to what extent students meet desired learning goals. Assessment, thus defined, is squarely centered on the purpose of learning. Without a purpose, without goals, how can teachers know if students are really learning? 

In a presentation on Collaborating and Improvising to Improve Grading and Performance, researcher Dr. Thomas R. Guskey shared survey results from educators who provided several other purposes for grading, including: communicating performance to parents and students, identifying student needs, motivating students to perform, evaluating instructional methods, and documenting student effort.

Assessments can be designed to measure knowledge and deeper understanding, or to provide opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of a topic. To measure different learning goals, assessments need to involve multiple methods of gathering evidence. Furthermore, assessments can be formal or informal evaluations of student learning and can be formative (continual) or summative (e.g., at the end of a unit, module, semester).

Traditionally, schools emphasize summative assessments taken in formal, monitored conditions. (Think of AP tests or final exams.) However, these types of assessments are difficult, if not impossible, to conduct during remote learning. Students might struggle with access, creating an unlevel playing field. Students that do have access might seek answers from their peers or on the Internet and their assessment responses might not demonstrate authentic knowledge or understanding (at least, not without external support). If teachers are not able to monitor students during summative assessments, there is a lack of accountability for what students do or do not do. These conditions are quite different from the typical on-site conditions during summative assessments. As such, with distance learning, teachers need to rethink their assessments and successfully adapt to a different environment.

Thinking Ahead

With COVID-19 school closures looking to extend into next school year, a fundamental question becomes “How can we create environments that demonstrate student learning and understanding without a reliance on traditional assessment methods?”

Answering this question requires transition into phases three and four of the school response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also raises more questions. To what extent can we incorporate authentic, real-world problems or scenarios into the curriculum? How can we create a curriculum that is applicable in demonstrative ways to students’ current or future selves? To what extent are we empowering students to take control over content creation and learning within our classrooms?

To answer these questions, we need to think carefully about student voice and how it will appear in assessments.

In rethinking assessment, teachers should leverage a formative approach to assessment, meaning it should occur frequently and monitor students’ ability to know, think, feel, and understand. Frequent, formative assessments make student thinking and understanding visible, so that teachers can determine if students have met desired learning goals. In online learning environments, evidence of student learning can come from a variety of digital tools including: audio and video, drawings and images, and the written word. It can be asynchronous (live) or synchronous, anonymous or student-specific. Formative assessment is highly personalized and provides a wealth of data to help inform the student learning experience and teacher instruction.

In repositioning our focus from summative to formative assessment we can uncover a new set of possibilities and strategies to make student learning visible.

In my next blog post I’ll discuss how to implement formative assessment during the time of COVID-19.