"If you do not know where you are going, any path will get you there."

-Alice in Wonderland- 

When we continue around the circle of an “integrated professional development system” we find ourselves confronted with the assessment questions. What is assessment, how does it inform our professional practice, what is the difference between formative and summative assessment, why do I need to know any of this stuff anyway, can’t I just continue to teach and test as needed? What do those NECAP results have to do with me anyway? Is there a professional development connection to this assessment concept?

Before we begin to grapple with today’s topic, Summative Assessment, I want to remind you where we left off in this blog series.  In the last two blogs, I talked about Valued Learning Targets and the Vermont Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities. I assert that we must begin our instructional deliberations by planning, as Steven Covey would say, "with the end in mind"; we must come to agreement on the valued learning targets we will pursue with due vigilance. If we do not articulate and solidify our agreed upon destination, we will inadvertently follow the path of Alice in Wonderland: "If you do not know where you are going, any path will get you there."

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:

Alice: Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate! However, the Multiplication Table doesn't signify: let's try Geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome - no, that's all wrong, I'm certain! I must have been changed for Mabel!

How do we move from the land of fairy tale to school improvement you ask? Are they really two sides of the same coin? I paraphrase Rick Dufour, who confronts us with four thought provoking questions, to mirror the discussion that I am trying to frame in this blog series:

• What do we want all students to know and be able to do? (AKA: "Valued Learning Targets" - Stiggins and "Agreed Upon Standards - The Guaranteed & Viable Curriculum" – Marzano
• How will we know if students have learned what we intended them to learn? (AKA: "Formative and Summative Assessment" - Ainsworth)
• What will we do by design to facilitate student learning? (AKA: "Instructional delivery system; Schooling by Design" – Wiggins & McTighe)
• What will we do when all students do not achieve the valued learning targets we have established? (AKA: How do RTI, DI and the Pyramid of Intervention fit into this puzzle?)   

Let’s begin with some assessment terminology so we can have a common language to work with.

"Summative assessments are assessments of learning that measure many things infrequently. Formative assessments are assessments for learning that measure a few things frequently."

State and provincial assessments are summative assessments: Attempts to determine if students have met intended standards by a specified deadline. They can provide helpful information regarding the strengths and weakness of curricula and programs in a district, school or department and they often serve as a means of promoting accountability. The infrequency of these "end of process measurements" however, limits their effectiveness in providing timely feedback that guides teacher practice and student learning. (Dufour, Dufour, Eaker and Many.) 

By definition, the NECAP, our state wide assessment is a summative assessment. This does not mean that it is bad or useless, it simply means that it has a specific purpose; it serves as the primary means for us to determine externally if our students are making progress towards the attainment of our state standards (i.e. learning targets). Watch out for the curve ball; a good summative assessment can be used in a formative manner. I will have more to say about that in the next blog on formative assessment.  In a thoughtfully designed comprehensive assessment system, a local school district would create additional summative assessments that are vertically and horizontally aligned with their valued learning targets (i.e. standards). They would also develop formative assessments that provided them with frequent and robust feedback on student learning inside the instructional process. These assessments are designed as part of the ongoing collection of evidence as assessment for learning.

Wiggins and McTighe (1998) provide a nice conceptual framework to help capture the big ideas in this assessment conversation.

• "By assessment we mean the act of determining the extent to which the curricular goals (learning targets) are being and have been attained. Assessment is an umbrella term that we use to mean the deliberate use of many methods to gather evidence to indicate that students are meeting the standards."
• The holy grail according to Wiggins and McTighe is the "pursuit of understanding". In fact, a central tenet of their premise is "that understanding can only be developed and evoked through multiple measures of assessment".

Larry Ainsworth (2006) offers this useful construct to help us understand what summative assessment looks like at the classroom level.

• "Classroom summative assessments, given by individual teachers or common summative assessments given by grade level teams or departments can occur at the end of a unit, quarter, term or semester. Since these assessments take place after all instruction and student learning have ended, they are summative in both design and intent. They report the final results of student learning to the teachers, their students, to parents and to administrators.  They are typically used to support the assignment of a letter grade or the determination of levels of proficiency."

Given what we now know about the design and purpose of summative assessment, how should we use this information and the results of summative assessment to improve our instructional delivery system?  If summative assessments are designed to be evidence of assessment of learning, what burden or demand does that place on formative assessment to round out the picture or to complete the puzzle?

What are the implications of this evolving body of knowledge on assessment literacy for teacher and administrator professional development? How should this information be contextualized so that Math, English, Music, Science, Social Studies, Foreign Language teachers etc, understand that this assessment information needs to be fully embraced and understood by all? 

What are you going to do with this information to improve your schools?

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over. 

Bob Stanton