Fair and Justice-Oriented Assessment

Senior Associate Caroline Wylie and Margaret Heritage, an independent consultant known for her work in formative assessment, have published a new book, Fair and Justice-Oriented Assessment, with Harvard Education Press. They discussed the book with the Center’s editorial director, Catherine Gewertz.

I’m excited to talk about your new book. I noticed, though, that the title of Chapter 1 is “Fair and Justice-oriented Assessment Practices.” Could you talk about why we need to think and talk more about assessment practices, not just assessments?

Heritage:

Yes, absolutely. So when we think about the fundamental purpose of assessment, it’s to improve student learning. Who are the people most engaged in improving student learning? That’s teachers. They’re the ones who see kids day in, day out, and they want to move learning forward, so every child is getting what he or she needs.

But the word “assessment” it sounds like a thing, like an event. We want to help people understand that it’s really about use. Yes, you need high-quality assessments. Yes, you need strong evidence if you’re going to engage in formative assessment during the lesson. But the key is the practices you engage in. What do we mean by that?

First, teachers have to be clear about what they want students to learn. Then they have to be able to draw inferences from either summative assessment results or from formative assessment in the classroom. Then they have to make decisions.

Without effective use, these assessments are just nothing. You may as well not bother.

So that’s the teacher side.

On the student side, we also want students to engage in assessment practices. Often, teachers and students both feel that assessment is something done to them, rather than something they can use to advance their own [teaching or] learning.

But there are many ways students can get involved in assessment practices. We want kids to be able to monitor their own learning and to know when they’re stuck, when they need help, what strategies they need to employ. So it’s important that both participants have agency in the assessment use.

Similarly, this book focuses on classroom assessment practices, when practically everything we hear about testing focuses on statewide assessments. Why did you choose to focus on this topic at this time?

Wylie:

So, two parts to that: why classroom assessment? And why now?

Classroom assessment is what’s happening every day in the classroom—or it should be. It’s the part of the assessment process that has most direct relevance to teachers and to students. There’s also a really deep literature base that supports the positive impact that formative assessment practices have on student learning.

We also wanted to acknowledge that teachers have to grapple with classroom summative practices. And we wanted to talk about the degrees of freedom that teachers have to engage in classroom summative assessment in ways that are different from state and interim assessment. When teachers avail themselves of that freedom and have rich classroom summative assessment, that information both sums up where students are at that point in time, and can inform future instruction. The information can help teachers reflect on what they might do differently when they teach that unit again, and what learning opportunities they may still need to provide for students moving into future units.

In terms of why now: there has been, and continues to be, an emphasis on state assessment. And as Scott [Marion] highlighted in his blog, changing those assessments is not going to move the needle in any noticeable way if classroom teaching and assessment are not supporting learning.

So there are still things to be said about this. We thought that we had a way of framing it that would be accessible. One of the hallmarks of the writing that Margaret and I do together is that we draw on real and concrete examples of practice. This book was an opportunity to put all of those things together.

Teachers need a fair amount of assessment literacy, which you define as being able to engage in a chain of reasoning from evidence. Few, if any, teachers get pre- or post-service training on this stuff. Right? Why have we overlooked this, and what’s been the cost?

Heritage:

Caroline and I would both agree on that. And certainly people that we talk to—for example, people in state departments of education, say that those coming into the profession just aren’t equipped. They don’t understand what they need to understand about summative assessment, and they don’t really know much about formative assessment.

A lot of the teacher education programs are focused on methods, and that would be the obvious place to put assessment. But frankly, there’s very little. There are only one or two notable exceptions around the country.

I honestly don’t know why we’ve so completely overlooked it. One of the answers may be that for so long, assessment has been seen as separate from teaching and learning; it’s a thing that we do to kids and that we do to teachers. But really, in an effective classroom, those three dimensions are integrated: teaching, learning and assessment. And if you don’t see it holistically like that, then you think assessment is for somebody else, not for me.

What’s been the cost? That’s pretty simple. Neither teachers nor students can take advantage of the affordances of assessment to help them know where they are in their learning, whether it’s the end of a unit, halfway through a class period, or the end of the year. They need feedback on how that learning is going, and, importantly, how that teaching is going.

In the book, you walk us through different purposes of assessments, and the types that teachers have available to them. How do you connect that to fair and justice-oriented assessment? Where does that fit into the purpose-and-use conversation?

Wylie:

We started by thinking about assessment in terms of what’s changing in education: demographic changes, what students are going to be facing in the world of college and career. We also recognize that there are disparities in the U.S. educational system: if you are Black, brown, poor, disabled, don’t speak English as your home language, you have, on average, a different educational experience.

To close those opportunity gaps, we need to have teaching and learning practices that honor and support all students, rather than intentionally or unintentionally privileging some. That’s our grounding, and the compelling reason to have fair and justice-oriented assessment. We thought a lot about what that means for teachers, the sociocultural consciousness they need, and the recognition that their world view may not match the worldview and experiences of their students.

In the book, we talk about three components of assessment: clear learning goals, eliciting evidence, interpreting and using that evidence. Those three components hold true across all of the assessments that we talk about. Whether it’s a teacher planning a lesson and thinking about formative opportunities, or working collaboratively with colleagues to develop a common end-of-semester assessment, there are fair and justice-oriented actions that teachers can take considering each of those three components, regardless of purpose and use of the assessment.

So in some ways, the fair and justice orientation is independent of purpose and use. Both are important—teachers need to be thinking: what are the actions I should be taking as I’m thinking about learning goals? Are they accessible to all students? Are they setting expectations that all students can learn?

Teachers also need to be thinking: Am I using this assessment for the right purpose? So it’s two almost orthogonal ways of thinking about the assessment process in its entirety.

Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages