Lesson 1: What is Transformative Assessment

Imagine you are trying to teach your kindergartener how to dress themselves in the morning. There are a few things they need to learn and be able to do before they can come downstairs fully dressed and ready for school. They need to know all the different pieces of clothes they will need: underwear, a shirt, pants, socks and shoes. They need to know where these different pieces of clothes are in their drawers and closet. They need to pick out each piece and, hopefully, they need to pick pieces that match, especially their socks and shoes. They need to be able to take off their pajamas and put on their newly selected clothes. If there are buttons and zippers, they need to be able to successfully negotiate these complicated fasteners with their little fingers. Lastly, the child needs to be able to put on their sneakers and tie the laces. This is probably the most difficult one. Once the young student has completed all these activities successfully and you see their bright, shiny faces ready for school,you can feel confident that you have achieved your goal or, in assessment terms, the learning outcome.

There are a lot of steps and time involved in getting to that final learning outcome though. As you are teaching your child what they need to do, you are mentally assessing their progress along the way. Which elements have they learned and which elements are they still struggling with? For example, it might be easy to teach them what clothes they need and where to find them. But, zippers, buttons and laces may take more time. As you discover the areas where your child is struggling, you think about new ways to teach them and revise what you are doing. It is an ongoing cycle of teaching, evaluating what is working, revising your approach and then teaching again using your revised approach.

What you have just engaged in is assessment. Assessment is a critical process in teaching and learning whereby you determine what you want your students to learn and then determine if they learned it. If they have not learned what you want them to, you do more evaluation into the stages of the learning experience to understand what is and isn’t working and then make curriculum revisions and improvements that will get you to the learning outcome.

Good assessment is an ongoing process that is never over. As teachers you should be constantly trying to improve what you are doing in the classroom. Assessing student performance, determining issues and making changes to address those issues so that students learn better is the foundation of transformative assessment.

Transformative Assessment Guiding Principles

File:Assessment Guiding Principles.pdf

Elements Needed for Transformative Assessment

For assessment to be effective and transformative there are key elements needed. The first is clear, student-centered learning outcomes. Learning outcomes are the relevant and meaningful things the student will be able to know and do at the completion of the learning experiences. Second, you need to identify meaningful pieces of student work that you will evaluate to determine if learning has occurred and the specific criteria you will use to evaluate those works. With our kindergartener, we may look at the clothes they selected and evaluate their performance based on whether they selected the correct types of clothes, whether the clothes they selected match, and whether they have successfully buttoned the buttons, zipped the zippers and tied their shoes. You also need to determine benchmarks for success. This means that you need some bar to decide whether the student accomplished the outcome or whether more teaching and learning needs to happen. Once you have the student work and assessment criteria (which usually take the form of rubrics) you need to assess each student work using the rubric, compile the data and analyze it against the benchmarks. Finally, you need to develop recommendations for improving the learning experience based on the results for the assessment.