Meaningful Assessment (Annual Report Part 2)

This year the first prompts for our annual reports were written by department heads and specific to the work that departments are doing with respect to our curricular review. The European Language Department chose to invite teachers to look at assessment.  

As we continue our curricular review process next year, we will be focusing on assessment. We’ll use your responses as a starting point for our discussion at the beginning of the school year.  Please respond to one of the questions below:
1. Describe a specific assessment you use that you think successfully differentiates between those students who deeply understand from those who do not.
2. Describe one formative and one summative assessment you use and explain how you use them to guide student learning in your classes.

I am going to respond to number one.  Last fall students in Spanish 5 were responsible for keeping up on the news in a particular region of the Spanish speaking world.  Every day class began with one or two students giving presentations about a few recent news stories from their region.  The learning objectives of the on-going project were both for students to have a better understanding of world events and global diversity, and also for them to work to make meaning out of real Spanish communications (reading and/or listening skills).  We had an agreement that they would use sources in Spanish.  But I am sure that a number of students found and read news in English and then translated their presentations-- it was simple to tell who those students were because of vocabulary issues.

The students who were developing deep understanding of the realities in these countries were able to communicate the stories in their own voices (typical Spanish 5 linguistic complexity) but stretched themselves and the classes just enough with new terms.  They were telling the story in their own voices, meaningfully. This was a result, I think, of their efforts to make meaning out of the sometimes challenging newspaper Spanish.  This task challenged and expanded their sense of the world (learning objective one) and their linguistic capabilities (learning objective 2)

As in all things, there was a spectrum of performance, and at the opposite end were the students who likely read the news in English. Their struggle to make meaning was to turn their understanding, in English, into Spanish words.  That is a totally different challenge than making meaning out of Spanish text.  And the fact that they had not enjoyed the meaning-making in Spanish was evident in their presentations.  They tended to use vocabulary and diction that was not as accessible to the group, both because of an over-reliance on translators and a lack of confidence in their own Spanish: "Just because I don't get what I am saying doesn't mean that my more able classmates and teachers don't."

The second part of this assessment each day was the questions that followed.  (I went through a number of permutations about how to encourage questions--prizes for the best each day, tallying them over the course of a week, etc. . . that challenge is another issue entirely.) In this element of the presentations, the rest of the students in the class gave me a sense of how well they understood the material which further reflected the presenter's understanding.  No questions often meant that it was over everyone's head, and the presenter had not had a good enough grasp of the topic to make it accessible to their peers. Whereas lots of questions usually meant that the presenter had engaged more deeply, thus engaging their peers.  I was interested to see the "cool factor" of the individual students fade away in this element of the class.  Students were not easy on the "cool" kids when they did a poor job on these presentations and a culture began to emerge where doing excellent work became the new cool.

I think this particular assessment worked well in my class because of three structural elements:

1. It was ongoing:  students presented every couple of weeks and had the opportunity for to redeem themselves in case of unsatisfactory work.  Also, if they couldn't go on a given day (due to sports, life conflicts or work-load in other classes), they could trade with other students. 
2. Students were accountable to their classmates, not just me.
3. Students chose the content of the presentations:  Some students often presented about sports or celebrities in their countries, and others delved into more complex political realities.