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Rethinking Assessments during COVID-19 and Beyond

12/30/2020

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The pandemic has caused us to make many changes in our everyday life, causing businesses to re-think their business strategies to remain relevant and open during these challenging times. It’s no different for education. For centuries, “school” has remained consistent and almost unchanged overall. With people all over the world making and implementing new plans and new ways of doing things, we wanted to focus on the topic of assessment for this blog post.  

There are some hard questions that have been raised by educators about assessment:
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  • Is formative and summative assessment necessary during the pandemic?
  • Do tests need to be proctored and/or timed?
  • Can it really be considered an assessment if students are allowed to use notes and resources to craft their answers?
  • Is it possible to move beyond assessing what students know to what students can do with their knowledge (apply, create, iterate, solve)?
  • Are we measuring what we value?
  • How can we use technology to assist in the creation of authentic and interactive assessments?

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Matt Enlow’s tweet on December 2 started a thread that gave insight into changes that teachers were making and although there is no one size fits all assessment solution, there are ways in which we can grow and assess better. ​
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Below are five ways we found that assessments and final exams might be given and adapted during COVID-19 and beyond.
  1. Student Choice
Design tasks that allow students to spiral back through the most important standards you have covered during the semester.  Let students earn points for the challenges that they take on. Here’s a challenge board that teachers can customize.  Another way to approach this type of assessment is to list the standard and then it’s the student’s job to submit evidence that they understand or have mastered it. The length of time across the bottom of the board could be adjusted to grading periods or to the complexity of the challenge. An example of a product that might be submitted was created by high school student, Shirley Zhu, “Combinatorics: Sticks and Stones”  

     2. 
Evidence of Mastery using Flipgrid. Example from Mike Mohammad  (A secondary science teacher) 
Create a Slide Deck and have each slide with a standard or learning target that students can submit a flipgrid response to. Check out the Bingo Card he created for students and the Slide Deck with Instructions.   Students are presenting evidence and it’s in short snippets. If they are recording something in Flipgrid, it’s specific and not drawn out. They hit their target and move on to show evidence on the next standard in another Flipgrid submission.  Everything is linked in a slide deck which makes it organized and easy for the teacher to assess. To make assessing the Flipgrid responses quick and efficient, organize students as individual topics (now called groups) in flipgrid.  Greg Kulowiec explains this hack here. 

      3. ​ Final Exams or Epic Finales by Anthony Crider 
Could exam week become the best week of the year?  Anthony Crider took the traditional exam and flipped it upside down to create a culminating experience at the end of the semester.  After seeing a colleague tackle a final by asking one really good question, he set out to do the same thing. 
“It took me longer to come up with that one good question than it did to pick 100 questions for my introductory astronomy class. I also trimmed the question down to be as short as possible, requiring students to “unpack” it even before answering it. As one student wrote to me afterward, “I think I spent as much time figuring out what the question was asking as I did answering the question.” 
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  “The unspoken truth of education is that we don’t want students just to learn the material; we want them to want to learn the material. The final exam closes the book on a semester of learning. An epic finale primes the students to discuss the topic for weeks (or years) to come and to leave the classroom amid a bit more awesomeness than when they arrived.”
      4.  A Google-Proof Assessment  
Developing an assessment that allows students to use their notes and the resources that are available to them on a daily basis.  It is a question that can not be directly answered via Google because it requires analysis, interpretation, and application. The web will be a very helpful resource for students in collecting information related to these questions, but search engines will not lead to easy answers. Use Blooms Digital Taxonomy, adapted by Andrew Churches, to help craft questions that cause the learner to create, evaluate and analyze. Creating these questions will take time and practice. Get with your team and divide the learning targets that you’ll be accessing and use this template to help develop your questions. 
      5.  ePortfolio - Collecting Evidence of Learning   
A portfolio allows the assessment to shift and have the learner own the assessment process.  John Spencer has a great collection of resources to help establish a portfolio process to collect evidence of learning and has included steps to take while curating a portfolio during distance learning. 
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What sets people apart from others in the 21st century is knowing what to do with the information that is available to them, not simply having the information. Developing the skills of curation, evaluation, synthesis, and application should be goals within any assessment.   

How might the next assessment you develop look different? How would you lead teachers to re-think and change their assessments?
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1 Comment

3 Ready to Go Retrieval Practice Resources - Help Learning Stick

12/9/2020

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Retrieval Practice is a powerful strategy that improves learning by pulling information out of students' heads.  Allowing students to quickly connect learning in both a flexible  and low stakes way has been shown to have a huge impact on long-term achievement. Learning is not about what you put into the brain but what you can retrieve and take out. Integrating retrieval practice into instruction offers student's the opportunity to transfer knowledge and apply it to what they already know.  

Two quick strategies to integrate Retrieval Practice into your virtual, hybrid or in person teaching environment are Brain Dumps and Two Things. 


1.  Brain Dumps
At any point during a learning session, pause and ask students to write down everything they can remember about the topic you are learning about.  Students are given a short period of time to write and just "dump" their thoughts.   Click here to make a copy of my Brain Dump Form.  It has a timer built into it, so the students can begin the activity on their own. 
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2.  Two Things
At any point in a learning session, ask students to write down two things in response to a specific prompt. Possible prompts include: What are two things you have learned so far today? What are two things you learned yesterday (or last week) that connect to today's learning? What are two takeaways from this unit thus far? What are two things that you might want to explore further? What are two things from your own life that relate to today's lesson?  Click here to make a copy of my 2 Things form. You can edit your copy or use it as is.

Consider integrating either of these strategies while also using  "Think, Pair, Share", having the Brain Dump or 2 Things strategy be the "Think" stage in the process. ​
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3. Retrieval Grid Challengs

The Retrieval Practice Challenge Grid that Kate Jones created can be used at the start of a lesson with a range questions that require students to retrieve and recall information from last lesson, last week and even further back.
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An example of the Retrieval Practice Challenge Grid being used in math is shown by @MsJonesEdu.
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Templates to create your own Retrieval Challenge Grid were made available by Mark Anderson and can be accessed here. 

Leveraging the research of cognitive scientists like @PoojaAgarwal will boost the learning in any classroom.  (Additional strategies can be found in Retrievalpractice.org guide "How to Use Retrieval Practices to Improve Learning") I have not read her book yet, Powerful Teaching, but it's on my list for winter break. 

If you have additional strategies that you have found to be effective, please share them below. 
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