The Big Picture (Week 9)

One part of this summary chapter that stood out to me was Zadina's notes on assessment practices.  This has been on my mind a lot lately because our students just took i/Leap in grades 3-8 and our K-2 students will take their end-of-year assessment, the MAP test, at the end of April.


Zadina says that students should see questions in a similar testing format before they take the final test.  This is not teaching to the test, but instead teachers are ensuring that the test format is familiar for students.  I agree with this point, but also feel like it's a hard balance for teachers and schools to find.  How often should students practice test formatted questions?  When should teachers assess in a manner that provides different information, for example through performance based items or project-based rubrics?


Based on Zadina's recommendations for assessment format practice, I created a plan to support our students over the month of April.  The MAP assessment has shorter, skills-aligned, online checklists that are different from the end-of-year tests.  Like the culminating assessment, the skills checklists are taken on a computer and contain technology-enhanced items.  For example, students need to listen on headphones, use features such as drag and drop, and click on the blue "next" button to go on to the next question.  For the month of April, we planned to have students log in to the MAP testing platform once per week and take one skills checklist, which lasts about 15 minutes.  The classroom teachers chose checklists aligned to content they were covering, but the act of taking the assessment has allowed students to become familiar with features of the test.


So far I think it's been a good balance, as it requires less than a half hour over the course of the week.  I will definitely continue with this model, but perhaps next year we will space these out, maybe once per month, instead of completing the checklists weekly in April.