Quick Feedback for Teacher Assessments

Working with teachers on assessment is one of the best ways to improve curriculum and instruction practices. Teacher assessment provides a reflective space where there are no political or philosophical arguments - just student data that results from a teacher's design and decision making. This provides a great space to talk to teachers about how they understand what the curriculum is, their approaches to teaching, and the results that they get as a direct result of the relationship between curriculum and instruction. Furthermore, if a teacher has really been paying attention to his or her own assessment practices, it makes data analysis of external assessments more personal and valuable as a source of information.

Reviewing assessments can assist you as the principal with really understanding curriculum and instruction implementation in your school. Of course, you don't want to spend enormous amounts of time going through each individual question, but there are some quick points that can be valuable to both you and the teacher.

1. Is the time assigned to the test/task reasonable? Many teachers make the mistake of trying to test fluency (how automatic a skill is) before they test mastery. This happens when you try to test a large amount of items in a short time or require a complex task to be completed in a short amount of time.

I tell teachers to use the time and a half rule. If it would take you as an expert an hour to do this test/task, then expect for it to take students at least 1 1/2 times amount of time. For instance, a teacher has a 45 minute class period, but they have 30 questions attached to two reading passages and 2 short answer questions. If a student were to finish this test, this would mean that either the questions are very low level or the students are very fast, expert readers who have already mastered the skills in the exam. Neither situation is ideal for assessment and demonstrates that the assessment probably is not going to be worth the class time being used.

I encourage teachers to use less items that are higher quality and have different levels of complexity. They get better information about student performance this way. The purpose of assessment is not to fill up the class period; it is to find out if students have mastered the skills and content taught.

TIP: Make this the first thing that you look at. The size of the task v. the time given will probably help you to develop some very pointed questions that will help you to zero in on feedback for the specific teacher.

2. Does the question/prompt reflect the standards? I encourage teachers to explicitly write the standard/objectives on their assessment. This serves three purposes: one, it helps the teacher to focus on making sure that (s)he is aligning the assessment item to the standard; two, it helps the student know what is being evaluated during the assessment (really important in complex tasks like projects or essays); and, three, it serves as valuable information in data analysis later on. As the administrator, you can also use it to understand how standards are being implemented in your school.

If the standard says to explain but the assessment has the student selecting an answer or giving an opinion, this is not aligned. The result will be that the assessment item isn't that valuable for understanding the effectiveness of instruction or if students are learning.

TIP: Review the teacher's unit/lesson plan before you look at the assessment to make sure you know the standards/objectives and then check to see if the items match

3. Is the assessment organized by standard/objective and then by difficulty level? Assessments that are measuring student performance should be organized first by the standard/objective; within that, the assessment should be organized from the easiest skill/task to the most difficult.

This allows the student to progress through levels of mastery, keeping their attention focused on a specific objective rather than having to sporadically change gears throughout the test (which adds a cognitive skill outside of what is being tested). It also allows the teacher to see the depth of mastery very quickly (hmm, most students score low at the 3rd level of this objective....).

If the teacher is using multiple anchors (reading passages, graphs, etc.) and testing multiple objectives, they should have almost like a protocol for each assessment item, going from easiest to most difficult testing the same skills.

TIP: This is something that you can see fairly quickly and if you use something like Bloom's or Costa's, then you can easily give feedback on the organization and difficulty levels.

Of course, this isn't everything to look for in an assessment, but it is a good start, and will be a strong conversation starter with your teachers. Some have never thought about these issues and others don't know where to start. But, in my experience, the more teachers understand about the assessments they create, the better they get at data analysis and responding to student data. Furthermore, the data begins to have an intrinsic value to the teachers rather than the stench of compliance.