Assessment Must Follow Curriculum and Instruction

Why balanced—or even good—assessments are impossible without the right grounding

We’ve been writing about balanced assessment systems for a long time, but something is really bugging me about it: We’re still not paying enough attention to the instructional core, a crucial piece of the puzzle that supports students’ learning and development.

I thought about this a lot during our recent annual conference, which focused on practical approaches for making assessment systems more balanced. We learned from district and state leaders who have been doing in-the-trenches work on this about their challenges and successes. We discussed over-testing, assessments used for the wrong purposes, and the overemphasis on state and interim assessments. We also talked about the need for a shared vision of how students develop increasing levels of sophistication in various subject areas, hopefully through a set of high-quality instructional materials.

The Instructional Core and Balanced Assessment Systems

Those who follow my writing know that I often quote Richard Elmore because he frames many issues we deal with so clearly, from school improvement to reciprocal accountability. In his Instructional Core, he makes the case that the only way to improve student learning at scale is to improve teaching quality, student engagement, and the meaningfulness of the content students are expected to learn. You can’t just focus on one of these dimensions and expect changes in student learning; you must address all three.

Similarly, Reimagining Balanced Assessment Systems, published last year by the National Academy of Education, argued that equitable classroom learning, instruction, and assessment environments must be the focus of balanced assessment systems. By focusing on classroom learning environments, the components and practices of assessment systems are more likely to support teaching and learning. For systems of assessments to be “balanced, they must support, directly or indirectly, teaching and learning that occurs in the classroom.” To support this vision, we can’t start with the assessments. We must start with a clear vision of what and how we want students to learn, which is hopefully represented in a high-quality curriculum.

Curriculum (meaningful content) and instruction (teaching quality) are two of the legs of Elmore’s instructional core. By putting high-quality curriculum and ambitious instruction in place, we hope students will engage in their learning and growth. District and school leaders have considerable control over curriculum decisions and implementation approaches.

Grounded in Curriculum

Many cite the importance of curriculum, but I’m still concerned that curriculum is not given the primacy it deserves when it comes to creating and sustaining balanced assessment systems. Trying to design balanced assessment systems without considering the curriculum context results in a significant amount of extra work and increases the risk of incoherence. In fact, one of our panelists made the wise observation that educators and leaders are weary of initiative creep. School and district personnel are tasked with solving so many of society’s problems; it is not surprising they are weary.

But, as the discussion continued, the panel acknowledged that implementing a rich curriculum and providing meaningful learning opportunities for students isn’t what’s making teachers tired; it’s the reason they signed up to be teachers. Therefore, if we tailor our assessment design to help them do what they signed up to do, it won’t be extra work; it will be the work.

Elmore described seven principles to frame the instructional core. All of the principles are vital, but the fourth principle, “the task predicts performance,” is especially relevant to the point I’m making here. Elmore noted that we “can’t assume students know and can do what the curriculum says they are supposed to do. It’s not even what the teacher thinks they are asking students to do. It’s what students are actually doing that tells us what they know and can do.” This means we must design rich and engaging instructional and assessment tasks to ensure they have opportunities to learn deeply and demonstrate that learning.

Grounding assessment systems in a high-quality curriculum helps organize the work of the instructional core. Further, assessment systems do not become balanced simply because they are tied together in some conceptual way. Yes, that’s important, but assessment systems are not balanced in some structural way. They are balanced because the results and the assessments themselves can be used effectively to foster student learning and identity development.

The curriculum provides a framework for interpretation and action, rather than requiring teachers to take extra steps to interpret the results and then translate those interpretations into their curriculum before taking action. We heard a presentation of the great work in Chicago Public Schools, where they used a research-based framework to produce a culturally relevant curriculum first. Once the curriculum was in place, they designed an assessment framework to elicit the information educators and leaders will need to further student learning and improve their practice.

Heroes Are Great, but We Need Structures

One of the things we noticed—and what Chris Domaleski brought up in his closing remarks—is that it seemed much of what we heard from our terrific district, state, and intermediate unit partners is that their successes were often based on the heroic efforts of small groups of educators and/or leaders. This is not sustainable or scalable.

Elmore’s framing is so simple and elegant that it makes school improvement sound easy, but it isn’t, and he never claimed it was. It takes intense organizational work and structures to support this work. Structural and cultural supports include common planning time for educators, high-quality induction and mentoring programs, high-quality instructional materials with embedded assessments, supportive instructional leadership, and many other elements. Grounding these structures and supports in the context of a high-quality curriculum maximizes the likelihood of creating coherent curriculum, learning, and assessment systems.

Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages