Assessment is Learning

Kathy Dyer wrote in 2017 about assessment as a tool for learning, feedback beyond letter grades and the three feedback questions of John Hattie and Helen Timperley. A section after the article adds what the research behind those ideas shows, and what its limits are.

How Educators and Students Can Measure Success Along the Way

In her book Standards-Based Assessment of Student Learning: A Comprehensive Approach, Leslie Lambert offers a beautiful explanation of the deep interconnectedness between assessment and learning in the classroom. She notes that “anyone observing the class should not be able to tell where instruction ends and assessment begins,” invoking the powerful idea that, in its best sense, assessment is learning.

This happens to be my favorite kind of assessment, in that assessment becomes a tool for advancing learning rather than just for measuring learning. The teacher feedback that assessment generates, when effectively directed to learners in this way, helps them access whatever the task and learning objectives are — and illuminates the learning path to enable students to plot their own way. By empowering learners in this manner, formative assessment also contributes to building a culture of learning in the classroom, one in which students are engaged and motivated to learn.

In this context, a strong culture of learning is based on a sense of collaboration between you and students. As journalist Katrina Schwartz describes on KQED’s education blog MindShift, when assessment and learning merge in a mutually reinforcing manner, it “makes it easier for teachers and students to become partners in learning, giving students ownership over their success and asking them to show responsibility for improvement.” This idea resonates with me and my interest in the connections between formative instructional practices and the ways that students can transform themselves into self-regulated learners.

Engaging Every Student in Formative Assessment

Done well, formative assessment can be the backbone of a vibrant partnership between you and learners, but too often formative assessment is not structured as it should be. Many classroom discussions consist of lower-order questions that only a few motivated students answer. These questions aren’t rich enough to provide detailed information about student learning because participation is frequently composed of voluntary responses rather than systematically collecting responses from all students in the class. Without eliciting feedback from every student in the classroom, you cannot effectively determine that all students are, indeed, learning; instead, you run the risk of leaving some students behind, which defeats the purpose of effective formative instructional practices. When all students are engaged, though, and formative assessment practices are robust, you can better determine who understands the material and who needs a little extra help, and learners are inspired to self-regulate and own their success.

Feedback Beyond Letter Grades

As I noted earlier, teacher feedback is a critical component of assessment and is profoundly valuable and empowering for students. However, providing constructive feedback is not always easy, especially when grades are involved. Students can get caught up in the grades they receive and may not focus on the comments or suggestions you make. And while we understand that grades serve as the benchmarks that parents, and ultimately students, need, you can use strategies along the way to help students receive the valuable feedback needed to move their learning forward. These strategies may include comment-only marking and symbol marking — which uses plus, minus, and equals signs (or up and down arrows) to indicate how students’ performance compares with previous assignments. These types of strategies can be effective alternatives to letter grades.

Regardless of the strategy you use, make sure your feedback is specific to the quality of a student’s work, is designed to promote thinking and provides clear guidance on what to do next. Perhaps even more important than delivering the feedback itself, you have to establish routines and offer time in class for students to use the feedback and to ensure that they are partnering with you in their learning.

Three Questions to Frame Feedback

The feedback model advanced by John Hattie and Helen Timperley is simple and effective. Use these three questions to frame the feedback you give learners:

• Where is the learner going? Make sure that the learning targets are clear and specific so that you can focus feedback on them.
• How is the learner going? Frame the feedback as if it were criterion-referenced, focused on what success would look like for a specific task.
• Where to next? Help learners develop deeper understanding, more self-regulation, and more clarity about what they know and don’t know.

If you are practicing responsive instruction, then you will plan the time to use the feedback as part of the lesson time. Facilitating the use of the feedback received provides learners that “practice time” to improve. If you need to, think of it as homework (which is a whole other topic) that students do in class. What good is the feedback to students, if they a) don’t understand it and b) can’t use it? By planning time in class to use feedback, you are allowing learners to access peers as resources as well as you. It makes the learners’ use of the feedback more effective.

Effective formative assessment is, in my mind, fundamental to achieving this ideal of assessment as learning. The strategies, techniques, and tools that constitute formative assessment make it possible for both you and learners to continually gather evidence of learning in the classroom and use that evidence to adapt instruction and learning moment-to-moment and day-by-day. More specifically, formative instructional practice enables you and students to partner in collecting critical information about learning progress, uncovering opportunities for review, providing feedback, and suggesting adjustments to both instruction and student learning.

1. The Learning Counsel – Ditching the Report Card
2. Ed Week – The Science of Learning and the Value of Educators
3. Stanford Social Innovation Review – Education is Changing—It’s Time Assessment Caught Up

Assessment is for learning: what the research on feedback says and how teachers use it

The idea that assessment is for learning, and not only a record of it, rests on a body of research that is older than most classroom apps and still shapes how schools talk about feedback. As Kathy Dyer explains above, assessment works best when it helps students see where they are headed and what to do next. This section looks at what the evidence behind assessment is for learning actually shows, where the Hattie and Timperley feedback questions that Dyer describes come from, and what limits teachers and leaders should keep in mind when they use the research to change grading and feedback routines.

Where the evidence comes from

Much of the case for classroom feedback traces to a 1998 paper by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam of King’s College London, Inside the Black Box. The authors searched more than 160 journals over nine years, found about 580 articles and chapters, and used material from 250 of them in a longer review published in the journal Assessment in Education. They reported that formative assessment experiments produced typical effect sizes of between 0.4 and 0.7, which they described as larger than most found for educational interventions. An effect size compares an average improvement with the spread of scores in a typical group, so a larger number means a bigger gain relative to ordinary differences between students.

These figures are 1990s results from a review of mixed studies, and readers should treat 0.4 to 0.7 as a historical estimate, not a promise for any one classroom. Black and Wiliam themselves wrote that improving formative assessment is not a quick fix and requires sustained professional development, and that the work involves far more than adding a few observations and tests to an existing program.

Why grades alone do not carry feedback

Dyer writes that students may focus on the grade and overlook the comments. The Black and Wiliam paper makes the same point from the research: it says that if pupils are given only marks or grades, they do not benefit from the feedback on their work, and that feedback has been shown to improve learning when it gives specific guidance on strengths and weaknesses, preferably without overall marks. The paper also states that formative assessment gives particularly good results with low achievers when it concentrates on specific problems and gives a clear understanding of what is wrong and achievable targets for putting it right, provided the message is not clouded by overtones about ability and comparison with others.

For teachers, the practical reading is that comment-only marking, which Dyer lists, and the plus, minus and equals symbols that Dyer describes are ways to separate the feedback from the grade. Whether a given school should do this on every assignment is a local decision, because grades serve purposes such as reporting to families, as Dyer notes. One option some teachers use is to hold the grade until students have used the comments on a draft; the sources opened for this section do not test that option.

The Hattie and Timperley questions in context

Dyer cites the three questions from John Hattie and Helen Timperley: where is the learner going, how is the learner going, and where to next. These come from their 2007 work on feedback. A summary from the nonprofit Evidence for Learning in Australia reports that the Hattie and Timperley model has been adopted by many Australian education departments, teacher registration bodies and AITSL as a definitive model of feedback for the classroom. The same summary adds a caution that teachers can use: there remains very little evidence about how the model works in Australian schools, and many studies adapting it were done in higher education, business or computer science, so they are not directly relevant to school classrooms.

The summary also describes a study by Parr and Timperley in 2010, involving six primary schools, that found a strong correlation between teachers’ written feedback and gains in student writing. The summary presents this as correlational evidence, which shows the two moving together and does not prove that better feedback caused the gains. It also reports that peer and self-assessed feedback tends to focus on the task and the process, and that feedback aimed at self-regulation was missing from peer assessment and rare in self-assessment. If a school wants students to judge their own work, this finding suggests teaching them to ask the third question, where to next, and not only the first two.

What leaders and teachers can decide

1. Choose one routine and keep it. Planned time in class for students to use feedback, as Dyer recommends, is easier to sustain than a new marking policy in every subject.
2. Make targets visible. Black and Wiliam found that students can assess their work only when they have a clear picture of the target, and that many do not. Share what success looks like before the task.
3. Collect responses from every student. Dyer points out that voluntary answers leave some students unheard. Whole-class response routines give a teacher evidence from the quiet students as well.
4. Check the claims. When a vendor or workshop cites an effect size, ask which studies, in which grades, and whether the results come from classrooms like yours.

The edCircuit assessment guide collects related reading on formative and summative assessment, and the same research supports the point Dyer makes in the title: the strongest assessments are the ones students can use to learn.

Related reading

• Connecting SEL and Formative Instruction

More on Assessment and Testing