Reimagining student assessment

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/10/2023 (776 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A big thanks to Free Press reporter Maggie MacIntosh and educational consultant Myron Dueck for keeping the student assessment question alive, in “Not making the grade: rethinking student assessment,” Oct. 6.

Perhaps the most vehemently contested, and least understood, aspect of schooling is the contention over how best to judge a student’s achievement. The fact that virtually all attempts to do so are hotly disputed is an indication that there exists little agreement on what to do at the same time as it signals that, however enacted, the results are extremely significant for a child’s education and their future opportunities.

Most teachers, no matter how much they enjoy other aspects of their teaching, nevertheless dread having to give students a percentage grade, a letter grade or some other marker of their achievement. They know that they will also be judged by the marks they give — by students themselves, parents, and even other teachers.

They also know that those same judgments are not necessarily reliable indicators of future success.

Some students often have difficulty understanding the connection between their abilities and their efforts and the assessments they receive. For example, young adolescents often attribute low marks to the fact that the teacher doesn’t like them. One thing they do understand is that there are high reputational stakes attached to those judgments, at home, at school and in their community.

Many parents also have difficulties understanding and accepting their children’s evaluations when they don’t coincide with their perceptions of their children’s abilities, efforts or performances. But they also understand that poor ratings can result in reduced opportunities, particularly in postsecondary studies but, even in high school. Some blame the teachers for not doing their jobs when their children receive poor grades.

On top all this off, employers want some straightforward and easy method of determining whether young people can do their work and post-secondary institutions want a surefire indicator of whether students should be accepted and whether their chances of success are good.

Both have historically complained that standards are falling, and young people aren’t prepared for the real world — in other words, schools and teachers are failing and getting worse. Inevitably, many young people defy our predictions and many who don’t experience great success in school achieve amazing success in the adult worlds of business, colleges and universities.

One would think that these factors would make us a little more tentative about our conventional determinants of student achievement and we should look for more reliable and palatable alternatives.

On my read, the Prospect Schools movement, begun in Vermont in 1965 (not to be confused with the current Prospect Charter Schools), offered a different, more rationale approach to determining and reporting on student development and progress.

It engages children and young people, their parents or care givers, and teachers on a regular basis and throughout their school careers. It does so in the most respectful way with the educational aims of having shared responsibility for children’s progress and of helping them become self-governing, self-regulating adults and conscientious citizens.

I am most familiar with its early efforts which are archived in the North Dakota State University in Grand Forks, N.D.

In this project, from the time children begin school, some of their work, as determined by teachers, was collected in individual portfolios with the expectation that each piece would be signed off on by teachers, parents and the students themselves.

Furthermore, they would all have a say, reached by consensus, into what became part of the permanent school record for present and future reference. In that sense it was a way of not only tracking students’ achievements but also their progress over time. At the basic level, it assumes that everyone shares responsibilities for children’s achievement and success.

When a child is in the early years, parents and teachers have a greater say in what is placed in a permanent school record, although the students also have to agree to any entry. By extension, as children reach the middle years, they are expected to take a greater role in determining what is archived, but nothing goes into the record without parental and teacher approval.

In the senior years, students virtually have the final word, but all entries must still be acknowledged by parents and teachers. When they graduate or reach the age of 18 the file becomes the property of the student alone, although an archival record would be kept for possible later retrieval for legitimate reasons such as post-secondary admission and/or employment. And we now have the technology to keep ongoing digital records, something not available in earlier times.

Seen that way, such a system responds to several current concerns, namely student engagement, parental knowledge and involvement, teacher obligations and the real public purposes of education. The purposes of education and shared responsibility for education are reflected in this system of assessment — the hope is that students will take ever greater responsibility for those matters within their control as they reach maturity, and that they will accept the assistance and support offered by their parents and teachers along the way.

It would require a change in conventional views about authentic assessment and some considerable efforts around the involvement of parents, assistance for parents unfamiliar with the system and not in possession of the language of records, the responsibilities of schools, the use of secure technologies, and the attitudes of employers and post-secondary institutions. It also might mean the end of some unsatisfactory practices, such as parent-teacher nights and regular one-way reporting, which so often miss their intended targets and goals.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that some version of this assessment system would be a huge improvement over our current attempts or, at the very least, something worth talking about experimenting with. There’s nothing preventing using it alongside the current methods, thus enhancing their meaning.

Even a public discussion about the purposes of education and the best way to achieve them would be beneficial — with a change in government it would seem an opportune time to start such discussions!

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.