Developing Quality Classroom Assessments

 

TLC Educational Solutions Strategy-Based Professional Development on-site workshops are specifically designed to provide the skills needed for educators to teach and interact with today’s students, "to stay on the cutting edge of their profession". Educators are challenged to keep current with effective ways to meets the student’s needs in the areas of instruction and assessment. With the support of our TLC Educational Solutions Training Resource Manuals, which each workshop participant receives, step by step strategies are provided and can be incorporated into lessons the very next day. At our Developing Quality Classroom Assessments on-site workshop, we provide teachers and administrators with guidelines and strategies designed to develop meaningful assessments that correspond to their specific goals.

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Quality assessments are based on state, district, or school standards with the capacity to provide valuable feedback to teachers and students while serving as a vehicle to raise the cognitive demand of instruction and learning.  The focus on assessment design includes selected response, constructed response, performance assessments, and rubric development. The critical components of universal design, bias, and sensitive issues included in this training all affect how accurately an assessment measures what students know, understand, and are able to do.

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Workshop Sessions

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Selecting Assessment Types to Accurately Measure Skills and Understandings 

The assessment types available for determining what a student knows, understands, and is able to do have expanded greatly over the past few years. The question is, “Which type of assessment do I use to accurately gain information to support my goals and objectives? The overview of the Quality Criteria of Assessment and Assessment Types moves the teacher and administrator on the road to developing and/or selecting reliable measures to meet intended goals.

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Assuring Universal Design and Removing Bias & Sensitive Issues in Assessment

Whether assessments measure what is intended and whether assessments are fair is impacted by the design features and absence of bias and unintentionally built-in sensitive issues. Consideration for diverse student needs, from vision to culture, and life experiences, affects the measures of student learning and performance. This session provides guidance for creating a fair assessment experience for every student.

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Developing Selected Response and Constructed Response Items

All assessments involve some sort of selected response or constructed response process. Specific criterion exists for both of these assessment types and assures that they are accurate measures of student knowledge and skill. Understanding how to design or select assessment items that result in high-quality assessments allows teachers to have accurate information to monitor and adjust instruction and provides a basis for fair grading practices.

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Supporting Performance Assessments with Student-Friendly Rubrics

and Scoring Rubrics

Recognizing the value of Performance Assessments is the first step toward developing authentic experiences that measure the ability of students to apply their learning. The reliability and fairness of these assessments lie in the selection of rubric design and the development of rubrics. Both scoring rubrics and student-friendly rubrics for self and peer assessment have specific places in the learning process. Rubrics are not designed to directly translate into grades, however, research-based processes to convert rubric scores into grades are included in this session.

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Motivating Students with Formative Feedback

Perceiving feedback as an on-going exchange between teacher and student is essential. Successfully implemented feedback informs teachers in making real-time adjustments in learning opportunities for their students. Likewise, it informs students allowing them to be actively involved in their own learning. Feedback strategies that can be used throughout the learning process are the focus of this session.

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Raising Cognitive Demand and Rigor

In education, we recognize that instructional and assessment strategies are key for raising the cognitive demand and rigor of student learning. Gaining skill in designing assessment items to raise cognitive demand while retaining appropriate difficulty level allows all students to gain more from their assessment experiences. Embedding components that gather information about each student’s level of confidence in their responses contributes to assessments becoming more powerful tools for guiding student learning.

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