After a series of fits and starts over the past 15 years, through-year assessment finally is having its day in the sun.
The warmth of the sun inevitably and appropriately, however, becomes the glare of the spotlight, and halfway through the year of through-year it’s not yet clear how well through-year assessment will withstand the heat.
It is beyond the scope of this post to address all of the potential through-year models and all of the possible concerns (real, imagined, and manufactured) associated with them. What I would like to do in this post is to consider one popular through-year model that has come under a lot of fire, the interim assessment model, and like the NPR program Throughline, “go back in time to understand the present.”
There is an obvious connection between the traditional interim assessments in which every test is constructed from the same test blueprint and end-of-year summative tests. That connection is so strong and the leap between the two is so small (e.g., mind the gap) that it makes the question of whether interim assessments can supplant traditional end-of-year tests one that is focused solely on logistics and unintended consequences rather than on any valid technical concerns.
Less obvious, perhaps, is the through line that runs from the classroom through interim assessments to the state test administered at the end of the year. The common element that connects all three is the expectation for what a student will know and be able to do at the end of a year’s worth of learning.
The Importance of Knowing Where You are Going
It’s understandable that after spending the past two decades steeped in state tests aligned with state standards that we associate the concept of the expectation for what students should know and be able to do at the end of a school year with large-scale summative testing and a top-down, centralized approach to PK-12 education. The reality, however, is that the importance of a clearly stated expectation, goal, or target that is understood by teachers and students was identified as a critical component of effective classroom instruction long before No Child Left Behind and even predates the shift to custom and criterion-referenced state testing which began to take hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Both classroom-based progress monitoring and the intermittent testing that we now call interim assessment are based on having that expectation, and the seeds for both of those were sown in the 1970s and early 1980s in adjacent buildings along the east bank of the Mississippi River at the University of Minnesota.
Going further back into the history of US public education, one might go back more than a century and cite Horace Mann’s 1840 comparison of an effective teacher to a skillful riverboat pilot who “sees the haven for which they are to steer” as early recognition of the importance of knowing where you are going.
There are some, however, who argue that education is best viewed as an open-ended journey without any artificially set mileposts and destinations established by the school, district (i.e., community), or state. I might agree that the ultimate destination of a student’s PK-12 journey is individual and unknown at the outset.
Nevertheless, there is a common core (lowercase) of knowledge and skills that are critical tools for reaching any destination and I believe that there is sufficient evidence that they should be acquired by certain points in time to provide students with the opportunity to reach their desired destinations. As I have written previously, instruction in that common body of knowledge and skills can and should be completed by the end of eighth or ninth grade in most cases.
I am open to the argument that the end-of-year expectation might not be the same for every student in the 3rdgrade, 4th grade, 5th grade, etc., especially if we continue to make grade-level assignments based on factors other than a student’s readiness for instruction in the curriculum associated with that grade level.
I am even more open to arguments that we need to revisit what should be included in that common core, who should be involved in deciding what should be included in the common core, and in discussions of the many various ways in which that body of knowledge and skills can be demonstrated by an individual student.
I am definitely open to the notion that there are multiple pathways and approaches that students and teachers may take to arrive at the desired destination.
But you still need to know where you are going.
And Knowing Whether You are Making Progress Toward Your Destination
Wherever we land on what is the expectation, whether for individual students or for all of the grade 6 students in a state, we need to assess and monitor progress toward that expectation throughout the year at the classroom level, at the school and district level. And at the end of the year, we need to determine whether students have reached their destination.
That statement, in a nutshell, describes the primary purpose of classroom-based progress monitoring, school- and district-based interim assessment, and end-of-year summative state testing.
The reason for wanting to know whether teachers and students are making progress toward their destination throughout the year, of course, is to determine whether that progress is adequate or whether changes to the instructional approach are needed.
We can quibble over details like the optimal design of the assessment instrument, the frequency of assessment, the information that should be reported, and how it should be reported to be most useful. We can debate the meaning of “making adequate progress” or whether the determination of adequate progress should be based in theory, derived empirically, or be norm-referenced. We can argue over whether the tests can be used for other purposes or to provide additional information. Like Alice, we can willingly jump into rabbit holes, never one considering how we will get out again.
What we cannot continue to do, however, is to allow those quibbles, debates, and arguments to detract our attention from the primary purpose and use of this type of assessment: collecting information throughout the year to determine student progress toward meeting the end-of-year expectation.
We need classroom-based progress monitoring to inform instructional decisions for teachers and individual students.
We need interim assessment (in some form) to monitor progress across classroom at the school level or schools at the district level.
With that those pieces in place, it should not be difficult to envision a through-year assessment program that ultimately produces a determination of whether a student has met the expectation for the year.
And if we can envision it, then we can build it.
Header image adapted from image by Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay
Embrace the Absurd 