Dear all,
The death of Grant Wiggins early this week, coming on top of that of Paul Ginnis, makes one think how lucky we are to have enjoyed the influence of two great educational thinkers. There is no doubt that both these men have had a great impact on their sphere's of influence and upon us at ISHCMC.
There are a great number of tributes to Grant Wiggins on the internet that show his importance to the teaching profession. Although I regarded Paul as my educational mentor and more recently close friend, it was actually Grant Wiggins who ignited my desire to dig deep and to ask questions about education. I attended one of his weekend workshops on UbD at ISBangkok in the early 2000's and his insight, intelligence and practicality made me start to question how and why we do things in schools. Up to then, I'd just taught and managed by instinct on what felt right. The workshop on UbD changed all of that and I was inspired to learn more about children, how they learn and what we need to do to optimize that learning.That inspiration still persists today.
Here is an article I read years ago that made me think more about how and why we assess students. A topic that I am still grappling with today.
Have a good weekend,
Yours
Adrian
Grant Wiggins: Defining Assessment
Grant Wiggins is a nationally recognized assessment expert
who has been working in assessment reform for more than twenty-five years. He
is president of the educational consulting firm Authentic Education, and with Jay McTighe,
co-author of Understanding by Design, an award-winning framework
for curriculum design used around the world. In this interview, Wiggins shares
his thoughts on performance assessments, standardized tests, and more.
Wiggins has published several articles for Edutopia.org. In
2002, he wrote Toward Genuine Accountability: The Case for a New State
Assessment System. In 2006, he wrote Healthier Testing Made Easy: The Idea of Authentic
Assessment.
1. What
distinctions do you make between "testing" and
"assessment"?
Our line of argument is that testing is a small part of
assessment. It needs to be part of the picture. Many people who are
anti-testing end up sounding anti-evaluation and anti-measurement. A good test
has a role to play. The language that we like to use is, it's an audit. It's a
snapshot. You don't run your business for the audit. You want more than a
snapshot, you want a whole family album. But the audit and the snapshot have a
place in the larger picture.
What can the test do that more complex, performance-based,
project-based things can't do? Look for discrete knowledge and skill for the
individual student. Many projects, because they're so collaborative, end up
making you wonder, well, what about the individual student? What does the
individual student know?
For instance, in some state-based, performance-based
assessment, they always had a parallel paper-and-pencil test for the individual
student so that you had enough data on the individual. A different way to say
it -- and this is what scientists and researchers say -- is triangulate
the information. Match the quiz against the project, against the
PowerPoint® presentation. Now what's the whole picture say? So, what we would
say is "testing" is one piece of a portfolio.
2. What
is authentic assessment and why is it important?
Authentic assessment, to me, is not meant to be the charged
phrase, or jargony phrase that it has come to be for a lot of people. When we
first started using it fifteen years ago, we merely meant to signify authentic
work that big people actually do as opposed to fill-in-the-blanks,
paper-and-pencil, multiple-choice, short-answer quiz, school-based assessment.
So it's authentic in the sense [that] it's real. It's realistic. If you go into
the work place, they don't give you a multiple-choice test to see if you're
doing your job. They have some performance assessment, as they say in business.
Having said that, there is a misunderstanding. People say,
"Well, if it's not authentic, it can't possibly be a good
assessment." We never said that. We never implied it. There's a lot of
authentic work that doesn't make for good assessment because it's so messy and
squishy and it involves so many different people and so many variables that you
can't say with any certainty, "Well, what did that individual student know
about those particular objectives in this complex project that occurred over a
month?" So there's a place for unauthentic, non-real-world assessments.
We're just making the distinction that you shouldn't leave school not knowing
what big people actually do.
3. Why is
it important that teachers consider assessment before they begin planning
lessons or projects?
One of the challenges in teaching is designing, and to be a
good designer you have to think about what you're trying to accomplish and
craft a combination of the content and the instructional methods, but also the
assessment. And one of the things that we've done over the past years in
working with teachers is share with them how important it is to say, "What
are you going to assess? What's evidence of the goals that you have in
mind?" Otherwise your teaching can end up being hit-or-miss.
We call it backward design. Instead of jumping
to the activities -- '"Oh, I could have kids do this, oh, that'd be
cool" -- you say, "Well, wait a minute." Before you decide
exactly what you're going to do with them, if you achieve your objective, what
does it look like? What's the evidence that they got it? What's the evidence
that they can now do it, whatever the "it" is? So you have to think
about how it's going to end up, what it's going to look like. And then that
ripples back into your design, what activities will get you there. What
teaching moves will get you there?
4. How do
you assess project-based learning?
It all starts with, well, what are our goals? And how does
this project support those goals and how are we assessing in light of those goals?
So, you would expect to see for any project a scoring guideline, a rubric, in
which there are clear links to the project, to some criteria and standards that
we value that relate to some overarching objective -- quite explicitly, that
we're aiming for as teachers.
Sometimes we run into the problem that the project is so
much a creature of the student's interest that there's no question that lovely
learning occurs, but we sort of lose sight of the fact that now it's completely
out of our control. We don't even know what it's really accomplishing in terms
of our goals other than the kid is learning a lot and doing some critical and
creative work.
What we have to do is realize that even if we give this kid
free reign to do really cool projects, it's still got to fit within the context
of some objectives, standards, and criteria that we bring to it, and frame the
project in so that we can say by the end, "I have evidence. I can make the
case that you learned something substantial and significant that relates to
school objectives."
5. How
can technology support and enhance assessment?
Once we get beyond the idea that assessment is more than
just quizzes and tests -- and that it's the documentation of whereby you make
this case that the student has done something significant -- this body of
evidence, if we want to stick with that judicial metaphor, proves the student
actually learned something.
Technology is an obvious partner because whether it's on a
CD-ROM, floppies, or an old-fashioned technology like video cameras or even
overheads, the student is bringing together visual, three-dimensional, and
paper-and-pencil work. We want to be able to document and have a trace of what the
student has accomplished and how the student got there.
Having said that, I think sometimes technology is overused
and we don't think carefully enough about the evidence we need to give the
grade, put something on the transcript, and track that information over time.
Many well-intentioned people say, "Let's have student portfolios of the
student's work K-12." Well, that's fine for the student, but there's
hardly another human being other than the kid's family that wants to wade
through all that.
And that's actually another role of technology: It's a good
database system -- information management, storage, and retrieval whereby we
say, "I don't want to look through the whole portfolio. I want to just see
some samples, some rubrics to get a sense of the student's current level of
performance." Tracking information over time through technology is
actually an important part of it as well.
6. How do
you respond to the argument that teachers don't have enough time to design and
conduct authentic or performance-based assessments?
One of the criticisms often leveled at alternative forms of
assessment -- whether we call them performance, portfolio, authentic,
real-world, or project-based, -- is they're too time intensive, they're too
expensive. It's too big of a hassle. What's the payoff? What's the cost
benefit?
I can understand that argument at the state level. The state
is in the audit business. And one of the things I think we've learned over the
years is that given their need to save money, to not be too intrusive, to make
it reliable as an assessment, then they may have to not do some of this. But
many of those arguments that the critics make don't hold up at the district
level at all. On the contrary, it's not very expensive. You've got all your own
local people who are in the business of assessing. It's not inappropriate or a
waste of time because you can't meet the standards without doing performance-based
assessment.
7.
Standardized tests, such as the SAT, are used by schools as a predictor of a
student's future success. Is this a valid use of these tests?
Standardized testing has
a role to play as an audit, but one of the things that many policymakers and
parents forget, or don't know, is that these tests have a very narrow focus and
purpose as audits. They're just trying to find out if you really learned the
stuff you learned in school.
Whether these tests
predict future performance or success -- they do not. Even with the SAT, ETS
and the College Board are quite clear about what it does and does not predict.
It just predicts freshman grade point average in the first semester. That's
all. And there's plenty of studies to show that grades in college don't
correlate with later success.
So, one of the things
that people get in trouble with is assessment. It's like a bad game of
telephone. Remember the game you played as a kid? What starts out as a
perfectly intelligible sentence ends up being some wild distorted thing by the
end.
Ten or fifteen years
ago, the Secretary of Education was having wall charts about each state's SAT
performances -- as if that was a measure of school and school-system success.
But the SAT was invented as an aptitude test, not an achievement test linked to
curricula. It was just about general intelligence. Let's be very careful about
what we're making claims about, what these assessment results do and don't
mean. Most state and national tests are predicting very, very narrow results
about certain types of school performance. That's all.
