• The purpose of any form of assessment is to provide the teacher with information to improve learning experiences for students.
• The most effective assessment provides students with respectful tasks that give them an opportunity to demonstrate what they really know about a topic.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Approaches to Authentic Assessment and Respectful Tasks
Forms of Assessment
• Assessment can be done prior to learning to determine what students already know or what misconceptions they may have about a topic. This type of assessment is called diagnostic assessment.
• Assessment that is done during the learning to determine what changes in instruction may be needed for individuals, is called formative assessment.
• When assessment is used to measure the learning that has taken place, we call this summative assessment.
• Whether assessment is used for diagnostic, formative, or summative purposes, it should be authentic in nature, unless there is a need to assess the memorization of facts, which traditional assessments such as tests and quizzes do well.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Authentic Assessment• Authentic assessment is a concept that has evolved from many prior efforts
to connect learning and assessment into an integrated learning experience for students.
• Other terms that preceded the more inclusive concept of authentic assessment include: performance assessment (Boykoff Baron, 1989), alternative assessment (Maeroff, 1991), performance based assessment (Boykoff Baron, Forgione & Rindone, 1991), whole assessment (Nickell, 1992), and naturalistic assessment (Reithaug, 1992).
• Many provincial and territorial curriculum guidelines are vague and unclear about the types of assessments that should apply in classrooms but many support documents from the same governmental sources via Ministries of Education are very specific about philosophies and approaches to assessment.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
What is Authentic Assessment? Our conception of authentic assessment has come to be understood as strategies to measure
the real evidence of students’ learning.
This concept is juxtaposed to traditional assessment which tends to measure the acquisition of memorized facts and processes.
Authentic assessment is a strong approach because it: Has greater authenticity – The goals for learning match the approach to assessing the
learning.
Supports learning - The approaches to authentic assessment are non-intrusive, inclusive (in that they support peer and self-assessment as well as teacher assessment), and are designed to measure understanding rather than memorizing.
Is fair to students – Authentic assessment approaches consider the question, “What will I accept as evidence that students know or are able to do this?”; authentic approaches include choices that students can make about how they demonstrate their learning and provide many alternatives to traditional paper and pencil testing.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Principles of Authentic AssessmentCase (1999) identifies four principles of authentic assessment.1. Assessment focuses on measuring what really matters.• By ensuring that clear criteria for assessment are evident to students• By measuring the big ideas in the learning• By reflecting measurement attention to the elements of content, process, and
product in a carefully considered balance2. Assessments must provide valid indications of student competence.• By ensuring that the assessment strategy assesses what it purports to assess• By including realistic elements in the assessment and making them problem
embedded• By ensuring that testing and assessment is comfortable for all students• By using assessment strategies that promote the use of knowledge in real life
contexts
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
3. Assessments should encourage and guide further learning.• By developing assessments that span the full range of learning expectations• By clearly communicating learning expectations to students• By using techniques that clearly analyze the results of learning episodes• By including students in the assessments of their work through peer and self-
assessment• By ensuring that assessment is used for formative purposes as well as summative ones• By structuring self-assessment opportunities that teach students how to respond to
criteria for assessment and recognize standards for assessment• By setting standards through exposure to exemplars• By discussing assessment criteria with students before each task to guide their growth• By using rubrics as growth schemes to help guide students to produce work at the next
level of achievement• By clarifying standards to reduce inconsistencies and arbitrariness in assessments.
4. Assessments must be efficient.• By using detailed descriptors of expected performance criteria and standards in
rubrics; these provide clear visions of the targeted performance, give clear and consistent feedback in detail, and save the teacher marking time.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• Authentic assessment is rich in feedback. • The students are provided with details that support redirection
for improvement. • By using a wide variety of authentic assessment techniques,
teachers can ensure that they have several rich ways to assess the desired learning expectation(s) and can vary the assessment as needed to respond to the students' learning style preferences.
• Authentic assessment approaches include extensive and detailed feedback so the assessment itself becomes part of the learning, where students gather more information about the topic through the nature of the feedback.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• Standards help teachers to translate assessments into evaluation.
• Evaluations require that the teacher consider all of the collected evidence about the student’s work performance and make a professional judgment about the level to which it approaches the required standards.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Assessment CriteriaRelevant criteria • Criteria are based on the learning purpose of the assignment.
• The criteria reflect the main goals of the subject area (e.g., content knowledge, critical thinking, information gathering and reporting, personal and social values, and individual and collective action)
Comprehensive set of criteria• Criteria reflect the elements/qualities of content, process, and product.
Clearly articulated criteria• Criteria are expressed in a way that is understood by the age group of students.
• Criteria are specific enough to reflect the importance of the task.
• Criteria are descriptive of what is required.
• Criteria are separated so that the required qualities can be identified; the teacher or teacher and student together can use the criteria to determine if the qualities are present in the product (e.g., What should this look like? Sound like? Qualities it should reflect?)
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Designing Rubrics for Assessment• Rubrics can outline any number of levels that the
teacher requires but a clear description or explanation of how each level relates to the expected standard should be evident to both teachers and students.
• To help teachers develop specific descriptors of achievement for each level, a list of potential qualifiers that can be applied to each statement of criterion based standard can be used.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• Traditional assessment strategies can be very demanding for students whose reading and reading comprehension skills are weak.
• Traditional assessment strategies such as tests, quizzes, exams, and essays are very heavily reliant on the student’s ability to read and write fluently.
• For those students who can provide better representation of their learning through other forms of assessment, traditional forms put them at a disadvantage and may be measuring reading and writing skills more than the intended Social Studies expectations.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
To Make Assessment Effective• Whether the form of assessment being used is traditional or authentic, it
needs to be characterized by some common features that help to ensure that the approach is doing what it was designed to do.
Assessment approaches always need to: • Use explicit, detailed, and unambiguous instructions• Provide frameworks for student responses• Measure students’ understanding of big ideas, supported by
evidence/reasons• Be grounded in foci on students’ understanding of critical thinking as it
relates to their courses• Break components of the expected responses into related pieces that
provide both structure and direction for the responses
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• Traditional assessment approaches may be useful to establish students’ knowledge base before they engage more demanding authentic assessment tasks.
• Such tasks will provide evidence of learning embedded within the task and are therefore serving the dual purpose of providing a venue for learning and a product the help teachers measure the learning.
• If traditional approaches such as quizzes are used by the teacher, it must first be determined what is being measured.
• To plan for effective tests and quizzes, teachers can use a test planning framework that matches questions to two criteria:
1. The format of the question2. The level of the thinking required in the question (Bloom’s Taxonomy)
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Wording Test Questions FairlySome test questions may be difficult for students but for the wrong reasons.
Consider these two examples:
Example 1: What were the causes of the Red River Rebellion? What were the short term effects and long term effects of the Red River Rebellion on the people of Manitoba?
Example 2: Identify the main cause of the Red River Rebellion. What were three short term, and three long term effects of the Red River Rebellion on the people of Manitoba?
Answer: Main cause of the Red River Rebellion: __________________________________________
Short term effects of the Red River Rebellion1.2.3.
Long term effects of the Red River Rebellion1.2.3.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• By providing definitive requirements for the number of causes, and the number of effects required in the student’s answer, and by providing a graphic organizer to delineate the space provided for the response about effects, the teacher reduces the short term memory demands on the student, supports weaker readers, and gets a better opportunity to measure what the students know about the topic.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• In the group of authentic assessment tasks, performance tasks are the most inclusive of many types of projects and products that students could produce to demonstrate their learning. Review the Bloom’s Taxonomy Wheel provided in Chapter 9.
• This wheel identifies many types of performance tasks that could be required to demonstrate students' learning of both lower order and higher order thinking.
• The most vibrant performance tasks will require students to analyze, synthesize, create, and evaluate ideas to produce a single product. Performance tasks should engage students’ interest because they require students to use their knowledge in the production of an age appropriate realistic inquiry.
• Such a task should further the students’ understanding of the topic and allow the teacher to measure that learning. Performance tasks can be weighty because they have the potential to blend students’ competencies with content, process, and product.
• They are contextualized opportunities to integrate learning from many areas of the program to demonstrate understanding in Social Studies.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Performance tasks have many important characteristics (Borish, 2008) including: They ask learners to demonstrate understanding and skills learned through modeling and
after practice opportunities have been provided. They require learners to use what they have learned in realistic contexts so that they
demonstrate mastery of the learning. They involve higher order thinking when analysis, synthesis, creativity, and evaluation are
required. They “test” the learner’s internalization of the learning, going beyond factual recall. Standards for achievement are clear. They illustrate graphically what some end products of schooling are for the student’s
metacognitive awareness and for the parents’ interest. They value real application of understood ideas above book learning.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Using Portfolios for Assessment• A portfolio is one example of a performance task. • With a portfolio, students are asked to collect work over time to provide a purposeful
sample of evidence of their understanding of key ideas in a unit or course. • Portfolios can be flexible to assess a wide range of objectives and allow the teacher to
monitor and support growth over time. • Portfolios also allow students to engage in significant self-assessment as they select
and prepare artifacts for their portfolio. • This opportunity generates greater ownership of personal growth for each student
and can support conferencing between students and teachers to discuss and guide growth.
• By combining opportunities to determine criteria and standards for artifacts that are included in the portfolio, monitoring patterns of growth, highlighting students’ strengths, allowing for identification of specific and personal areas for growth, and, through conferencing, planning for that growth, portfolios can support authentic assessment opportunities in the Social Studies program.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Strong portfolios will represent one example of a performance based assessment and will:
• Provide criteria and standards for students so that they can determine which artifacts from their work should be included in their portfolio.
• Provide a portfolio checklist (which students can help to generate) which identifies specific artifacts or categories of artifacts that should be included in the portfolio.
Example: Evidence that you….• Provide a structure to guide students’ self-assessment of their portfolio.• Increase students’ accountability by ensuring that they examine their
work critically.• Structure the feedback that teachers provide as portfolios develop
(formative) and after completion (summative).See your textbook for an example of a portfolio tracking sheet.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Designing Culminating Tasks to Show Evidence of Learning
• Culminating tasks are opportunities to celebrate a body of learning that has taken place throughout a unit or a course of study.
• Culminating tasks are designed specifically to allow students opportunities to pull all of the big ideas from recent learning together into one task that demonstrates their learning.
• The format of that task should reflect students’ skills with the task required and their accumulated understanding and processing skills that can be applied to a new product.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
To develop ideas for culminating tasks, teachers need to identify the big ideas of the unit or course.
Sometimes provincial and territorial guidelines will do this in the layout of the units for a grade.
However, teachers may have to do considerable interpretation and extrapolation from some guideline sources to identify these ideas.
Examples of the big ideas of a unit that are separated for teacher use in a guideline include the following expectations for the culmination of a Grade 3 unit.
Students will identify and compare the distinguishing features of urban and rural communities. Students will use a variety of resources and tools to gather, process, and communicate geographic
information about urban and rural communities. Students will explain how communities interact with each other and the environment to meet human
needs.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Sample Culminating Task To culminate this unit, the teacher has asked students to form a Chamber of Commerce
for an imaginary region that is laid out geographically on a map. The map includes both urban and rural areas and the features of each are shown through satellite imagery. Students elect a caucus for the Chamber of Commerce then organize into committees to address improvement proposals for the area. Each committee will select an improvement project they would like to propose to the Chamber caucus. To do this, they study the area and develop a budget and a display booth to pitch their proposal. Display booths are presented to public viewing on the same day and the caucus invites the public to view their displays and hear their persuasive arguments. The views of the public are solicited on each proposal. Following the display day, the caucus meets with each committee to identify the public’s and the committee’s perception of their proposals. The caucus then decides which proposals will be funded and the extent of the funding. Students then revisit original proposals to determine any of the following: If they did get some funding but not all they asked for, how will they adjust their proposal to reflect this? If they received no funding, will they abandon, adjust, or postpone their proposal? What are the impacts on the community of each of these options? If they received full funding for their proposal, how will they move into implementation?
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Using Rubrics to Ensure Success: Rubrics as Growth Schemes
Rubrics can be used to:• Assess students’ work
• Guide students to achieve at a higher level
• Support self-assessment
• Target new learning goals for individuals or the class
To develop effective rubrics: Identify the expectation(s) that are to be assessed by the rubric Develop a blank template for the rubric that separates descriptors for each of the possible levels of
achievement. Generate criteria for the assessment; criteria can be sub-divided by content, process, and product. Identify social skills that should also be evaluated in conjunction with the criteria from guidelines.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
To develop effective rubrics (cont’d): Set the number of levels of performance that may be observed to reflect common
assessment levels proposed in provincial/territorial guidelines. For each criterion, develop a full descriptor that identifies the expected level of
performance and place it on the template under the level that best describes the provincial/ territorial guideline directions.
Generate full descriptors for each of the other levels. Examine all descriptors to ensure that there is sufficient separation among the descriptors
to cause clear differences in learning to be observable. Insert an “Overall Comments” box at the bottom of the rubric to provide specific direction
for student growth after using the rubric. Refine the draft based on clarity and clear delineation across descriptors for each criterion. Determine a weight to be assigned to each criterion on the rubric based on the relative
importance of content, process, or product for the specific evaluation. Determine how the rubric based assessment will be evaluated to assign a mark or grade. Use the rubric to assess a sample and adjust any descriptors to reflect the best possible
discrimination among levels of achievement if necessary. Provide to revised rubric to students when assigning a task to be evaluated using it.
Using ExemplarsTo help students examine exemplars productively, teachers can provide individual or small group observation record sheets to guide observations. ExampleSTRUCTURED OBSERVATION OF AN EXEMPLAR
• This exemplar was used to show that the students understood…
• This exemplar addresses these criteria:
• This exemplar addresses these standards:
• This exemplar is good because it:
• This exemplar could be improved by:
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• Assessment is the collection of data about a student’s achievement. • Evaluation is the professional judgment of the teacher applied to that data to assign a
mark that relates the quality of the student’s work to the criteria and standards sought for the work.
• Data should be collected from the widest possible range of traditional and authentic sources given time and resources allowed.
• Teachers need many ways to examine the data that attests to students’ achievement and devices for recording their observation so that accumulated data can be assessed.
• This can be done using several recording devices that will help the teacher examine a summary of all sources of information when it is time to create a summative mark or comment that evaluates the student’s work.
• Different types of recording devices can support the transition from assessment to evaluation. These include: anecdotal records, checklists, rubrics, rating scales, and learning logs.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Testing and Rich Performance Tasks: Choosing the Right Medium
• The way that we assess what students do in our Social Studies program will reflect what we value in the program.
• If disproportionate value is placed on tests, the learning that cannot be measured through testing is undervalued. Tests do some things very well.
• Their main strength is in providing opportunities to demonstrate students’ lower level learning through well structured questions that measure factual knowledge, comprehension, or the simple application of ideas.
• Test questions that are well designed can also measure analysis, synthesis (including creativity), and evaluation of knowledge but there are many other more effective strategies for evaluating those outcomes.
• Effective assessment is about making the best choices of how to assess students’ learning using the best methods available.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• As students investigate topics of personal interest, they can start to produce products that attest to their individual learning about a chosen sub-topic.
• Each of these products can become an artifact in the student’s expanding portfolio of evidence of their learning.
• To determine what should become part of the student’s portfolio, the teacher must ask, “What will I accept as evidence that students know or can do this?”
• As students develop increasing capabilities with self-assessment and become competent portfolio managers for themselves, students need to keep an evaluative question in mind as they select artifacts for their portfolio.
• The question, “Is this good evidence that I have learned something?” will guide a student’s portfolio development.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• Authentic assessment aligns the goals of learning and the approach used to assess those goals.
• Authentic assessment is non-intrusive, inclusive, and designed to measure deep understanding.
• Authentic assessment considers the question, “What will I accept as evidence that students know or are able to do this?”
• Authentic assessment is assessment used for and as learning rather than just providing data related to the assessment of learning.
• Authentic assessment focuses on what really matters, provides valid indications of student competence, encourages and guides further learning, is rich in feedback, and is efficient.
• Authentic assessment includes feedback focused on improvement.• The relationship between the teacher and the student shifts toward a more
cooperative one as authentic approaches are used.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
• Teachers must understand the assessment criteria, assessment standards, and exemplar characteristics when they plan for assessment that will be effective.
• Assessment criteria used in authentic assessment should be relevant, comprehensive, and clearly articulated.
• Standards support the use of assessment data to formulate evaluations.
• A test planning framework will help teachers plan tests effectively and know exactly what each question is measuring.
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
Social Studies: Innovative Approaches for Teachers
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• Rubrics can be used as growth schemes to help students envision the actions needed to achieve the next level of performance.
• Culminating tasks provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning by pulling together big ideas from the unit into one final task.
• Culminating tasks should be planned in detail before a unit begins so that teachers can determine what skills need to be taught throughout the unit to ensure success with the culminating task.
• Systematic development of rubrics strengthens their use in assessment contexts.
• Exemplars provide targets for student aspirations for achievement.
![Culminating Project.Pointer.Fisher[1]](https://static.documents.pub/doc/80x56/554fde1ab4c905264d8b4c75/culminating-projectpointerfisher1.jpg)
