This chapter discusses how teachers must think like assessors to determine if students have understood the material. It emphasizes using multiple forms of assessment over time, including performance tasks, to gather evidence of understanding. The chapter also covers developing valid rubrics to evaluate student work, with criteria focused on facets of understanding rather than just correctness. Rubrics should be refined based on analyzing student work to ensure they accurately measure understanding.

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Thinking Like an Assessor
EDPC605
Chapter 7

2. +
Overview
 Chapter seven requires the teacher to think like an assessor
and reflect on what he/she does to check for student
understanding.
 How do we know that the student “got it”?
 Consider the following judicial analogy:
“Students are innocent (of understanding, skill, and so on) until
proven guilty by a preponderance of evidence that is much
more than circumstantial” (p. 148)

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Stage 2
Assessor’s Questions
 What evidence can show that students have achieved the
desired results?
 What assessment tasks and other evidence will anchor our
curricular units and thus guide our instruction?
 What should we look for, to determine the extent of student
understanding?

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Two Approaches to Thinking
About Assessment

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A Continuum of Assessments
 “Effective assessment is more like a
scrapbook of mementos and pictures than a
single snapshot” (p. 152)
 “Effective teacher-assessors gather lots of
evidence along the way, using a variety of
methods and formats” (p. 152)
 “Understanding develops as a result of
ongoing inquiry and rethinking” (p. 152)

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An assessment, problem, or
project is authentic if it:
 Is realistically contextualized (abilities can be tested in real-
world situations)
 Requires judgment and innovation (student has to develop a
plan or procedure for solving the problem)
 Asks the student to “do” the subject
 Replicates key situations in which adults are truly “tested” in
the workplace, civic life, and in personal life
 Assesses the student’s ability to efficiently and effectively use a
repertoire of knowledge and multistage task
 Allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practice, consult
resources and get feedback on and refine performances and
products

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Problems not just exercises
 Authentic problem solving requires deciding when to use
which approach and which facts
 Real performance always involves transfer
 The performers must figure out which knowledge and skill is
needed on their own, without simplifying teacher prompts or
cues, to solve the real problems of performance.

8. +
GRASPS
 It
is a design tool used to assist in the creation of
performance tasks.
Goal (the goal is to…)
Role (your job is…)
Audience (you need to convince…)
Situation (the challenge involves dealing with…)
Performance (you will create a …)
Standards (your work will be judged by…)

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Using the 6 facets as assessment
blueprints
Students who really understand …
Facet 1. Can explain
Facet 2. Can Interpret
Facet 3. Can Apply
Facet 4. Can see in perspective
Facet 5. Demonstrate empathy
Facet 6. Reveal self-knowledge

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“Answers without reasons and support are
typically insufficient to “convict” the learner of
understanding” (p. 161)

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Chapter 8:
Criteria and Validity

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The need for criteria
 When assessing, criteria is needed “because the kinds of
open-ended prompts and performance tasks needed to
assess for understanding do not have a single, correct
answer or solution process.” (Wiggins & McTighe, 172)
 “Criteria highlight the most revealing and important aspects
of the work.” (173)
 “We must clarify a set of independent variables in the
performance that affect our judgment of quality.” (173)
 Criteria needs to be “central to the performance and its
purpose.” (173)

13. +
From criteria to rubric
 Rubrics are criterion-based
 Rubrics answer the following questions:
 How performance should be judged or
discriminated.
 Where we should look and what we should look
for.
 How the levels of quality, proficiency, or
understanding be described and distinguished
from one another.
(Wiggins & McTighe, 173)

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Types of rubrics
 Holistic
 Provides an overall impression of the
student’s work.
 You give one grade.
 Analytic
 Divides product of performance into
traits and each one is judged separately.

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Rubrics to assess understanding
 Understanding is assessed as a degree on
a continuum.
A rubric that assesses understanding
“must provide concrete answers to our key
assessment questions.”
 Othertraits, such as mechanics,
craftsmanship, and organization should be
judged separately.

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Backward design from criteria and
rubrics
 Use the standards as a guide to what
criteria should be judged.
 Develop a rubric from these criteria.

17. The facets and criteria
 Understanding is revealed through the following six
facets.
 This table gives a partial list of criteria for each
facet that can be used to create a rubric. (For
sample rubric see Figure 8.3 on p. 178-179)
Facet 1 Facet 2 Facet 3 Facet 4 Facet 5 Facet 6
Explanation Interpretation Application Perspective Empathy Self-knowledge
accurate meaningful effective credible sensitive self-aware
coherent insightful efficient revealing open metacognitive
justified significant fluent insightful receptive self-adjusting
systematic illustrative adaptive plausible perceptive reflective
predictive illuminating graceful unusual tactful wise

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Designing and refining rubrics
based on student work
A rubric is built and revised through the
analysis of student work.
 Arterand McTighe (2001, pp. 37-44)
propose a six-step process for analyzing
student work…

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 Step 1: Gather student samples that show
the desired level or understanding
 Step 2: Sort the work and reasons for
that specific sort.
 Step 3: Cluster the reasons into traits
 Step 4: Write a definition of each trait
 Step 5: Select anchor papers for each
score point on each trait.
 Step 6: Continuously refine.

20. +
The challenge of validity
 “We typically pay too much attention to
correctness and too little attention to the degree
of understanding.”
 “Understanding usually falls through the cracks
of typical testing and grading.”
 When developing tasks for students (Stage 2), a
teacher faces the challenge of validity. This
means that we need to ask our students to
produce appropriate evidence for the desired
results framed in Stage 1.

21. +
Backward design to the rescue
 Usingbackward design can help ensure that
assessments are valid. There is an extra step
added to Stage 2. Go through the following steps
and complete the sentences:
 Stage 1:
 If the desired result is for learners to…
 Stage 2:
 Then you need to evidence of the student’s ability to…
 So the assessments need to include some things like…
 There is a Self-Test of Assessment Ideas (Figure
8.5) that teachers can use to evaluate the validity
of a task.
(Wiggins & McTighe, 186-187)

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Rubric validity
 Rubrics also need to be assessed for
validity.
 Ask yourself the following questions:
 Could the criteria be met without the performer
demonstrating deep understanding?
 Could the criteria not be met while the
performer shows understanding?
 Ifyou can answer yes to either one of
these questions, then your rubric and
criteria are not going to produce valid
information.

23. +
Reliability: Our confidence in the
pattern
 We cannot use a “snapshot” to judge a
student’s degree of undestanding.
 We need to use many and various methods
in order to assess students so that we can
conclude whether or not they are
demonstrating understanding.

24. +
A caveat before closing
 Thischapter focuses on formal and
summative tests; however, ongoing
assessments and teacher observations also
play a major role in providing us with a
“scrapbook of evidence” for understanding.