Kirchenwitz’s Top 10 List: “Thinking Like an Assessor”

After reading chapter 7 of Understanding by Design. I made this top 10 list of important things to consider when thinking of how and what to assess.

Kirchenwitz’s Top 10 List:

“Thinking Like an Assessor”

1.  The evidence needs to align with our goals.

2.   What kinds of evidence do we need to find hallmarks of our goals, including that of understand?   (ex. comparing/contrasting or summarizing)

3.  What specific characteristics in student responses, products, or performances should we examine to determine the extent to which the desired results were achieved?  (ex. criteria and rubrics)

4.  Effective teacher-assessors gather lots of evidence along the way: informal checks for understanding, observation and dialogues, tests and quizzes, academic prompts, performance tasks.  A simple tool is the “one minute essay”: what was the big idea you learned and what are some unanswered questions you have.

5.  Assessment for understanding must be grounded in authentic performance-based tasks.  To be authentic it needs to:

• realistically contextualized:  the person’s knowledge and abilities are tested in real-world situations
• Requires judgment and innovation:  the students have to use knowledge and skills wisely and effectively to develop a plan for solving a problem that is unstructured.  
• The student has to DO the subject
• Students need to experience what it is like to perform tasks like those in the workplace and other real=life contexts, which tend to be complex and messy

6.  Performance tasks typically present students with a problem: a

real world goal, set within a realistic context of challenges and possibilities

7.  Can use the design tool GRASPS to aid in the creation of performance task: Goal, Role, Audience, Situation, Performance, Standards  (great example on page 158 of Understanding by Design)

8.  We need to know the learner’s explanation of Why they did what they did, their support for the approach/response, and their reflection on the result that we may gain fuller insight into their degree of understanding.  

9.  Assessment of understanding is enhanced when we make greater use of oral assessments, concept webs, portfolios, and constructed response items of all types to allow students to show their work and reveal their thinking.  

10.  The six facets of understanding signal the types of performances we need as valid measures of understanding:

• Explantation: tell the big idea in their own words, make connections, show their work, explain reasoning and induce a theory from the data
• Interpretation: make sense of stories, art works, data, situations and involves translating ideas/feelings in one medium to another
• Application:  use their knowledge and skill in a new situations
• Perspective:   see things from different points of view, see the big picture, recognize underlying assumptions and take a critical stance.
• Empathy:  develop their capacity to walk in someone elses shoes.
• Self-Knowledge:   self-assess their past as well as their present work.    A simple strategy is to make the first and last written assignments the same question.
• The tasks and performances should require reflection, explicit self-assessment, and self-adjustment, with reasoning or rationale made as evident as possible!