5 Ways To Assess Student’s Learning

What are two words likely to make a teacher’s head spin? Assessments and data. We hear these words frequently in education, and it’s often assumed that we must be experts at them. However, while teachers are experts in their content areas, we haven’t all been adequately taught about the different types of assessments and what to use our data for.

In this blog, we are going to discuss five ways you can assess your students’ learning. We will talk about data in this blog, but if you want a more in-depth look at how to use assessment data in your classroom, I recommend this blog post.

There are two main ways we can assess students’ learning: formative and summative. Formative assessments are “as we go” assessments. They are informal, and they give you a quick snapshot of your students’ learning. Summative assessments typically occur after a period of learning. These are more formal assessments that typically measure a broader range of skills.

Let’s look at five ways you can assess your students’ learning.

Assessment #1: Standards Based Assessment

Standards based assessments (SBA) are a way to evaluate students’ learning based on one single standard or indicator. Standards based assessments can be formative or summative assessments, but you will see them most commonly as formative assessments because they are measuring a student’s progress on specific skill overtime.

In a standards based assessment, students are taking control of their learning. Instead of earning the traditional grade letter or percentage score, students are graded on a scale. The scale measures how much of the skill a student has mastered or is proficient in. 

SBA gives a clear look at each student’s abilities. The data that is produced from an SBA can easily and quickly help teachers adjust their instruction. They know what skills need to be retaught and strengthened, and exactly which students need help. If you want to learn more about standards based assessments, check out this blog post.

Assessment #2: Rubrics

A rubric is a scoring guide used to evaluate a student’s work. Rubrics are typically used for larger projects and summative assessments. Like SBA, rubrics often measure a student’s skill or ability on a scale. However, unlike SBA, rubrics are looking at several skills at one time.

Rubrics are great to use when you want to measure several skills, but you don’t want to use a transitional multiple choice test or students aren’t expected to have a specific answer. They allow students to really flex their skills and teachers to assign a grade based on students’ performance in several areas. The downside, however, is that rubrics are difficult and time consuming to grade with. Because you are looking at multiple skills at one time, it can take quite some time to grade.

Assessment #3: Essays

If you teach an English class, then you are familiar with this type of summative assessment. Assessing students’ writing is a must in an English class, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. When grading a student’s entire essay, you are looking at and critiquing several different skills, from grammar to organization to the actual argument of the paper.

Because of this, essays can be difficult to grade and be very time consuming. Many teachers use rubrics to grade their essays, but as mentioned above, this makes the process only slightly easier. If you want to grade essays quicker and collect better data, I suggest looking for a few key skills to focus on. For example, you may focus on thesis statements and topic sentences. Instead of grading the entire essay, just grade these components.

Assessment #4: Exit Slips

A very common type of formative assessment is an exit ticket or exit slip. Exit slips are often given to students at the end of class to check for understanding. They can come in a variety of different styles. Students may write three new things they learned, a question they have about the lesson, or summarize a concept.

While exit tickets are a great way to check in with students after a lesson, they don’t always offer the most accurate data. Exit slips often don’t require students to apply knowledge they have learned (ie. asking for three things you learned is not applying knowledge). Exit tickets also follow just one lesson. If you just introduced a new concept, it’s likely students have not had enough time to absorb and practice the information.

Assessment #5: One Pager

One pagers are a one page response to information. These are often used as formative assessments. For example, if students learned about a historical figure from a reading, they could create a one pager that includes important information and facts about that historical figure. One pagers are an excellent way for students to synthesize and combine information they have learned into one place. It also allows students to express creativity because they can display this information in a myriad of ways.

Because students are expressing their knowledge in very unique ways, you don’t want to give students too many rules for what must be included or how it must be included on their one pager. This leads to the downside, however, that one pagers are extremely challenging to grade. Similarly to the exit slips, one pagers don’t necessarily reflect a student’s knowledge of a topic. Just because a student can write facts about a historical figure does not mean they have mastered any deep set of skills.

Before selecting an assessment for your students, I challenge you to really stop and think about what exactly you are wanting to assess. In order to get good, usable data on your students skills, you want to make sure your assessment is targeting the skill(s) you want to measure. In the next blog, we will talk about why you should track your students’ data. You can read that blog here.

Read my blog about standards based assessments here.) As we track our students’ data, we can even adapt and change our groups.

More Information About Standards Based Assessments

Want to know more about standards based assessments and how they can help you? Check out the rest of the posts in this series.

• What Are Standards Based Assessments?
• 5 Ways to Assess Students’ Learning
• Why You Should Track Data in Middle School ELA
• How to Use Standards Based Assessment Data