Step 4. Use the Results to Improve Student Performance and/or Instruction.
Virtually all assessment methods can provide useful information about students' learning. The important point is how you take that information, analyze it, and use it to help your students learn and to impact your own teaching practice.
Using Results to Improve Student Performance
When you analyze the results of student assessments, you should be able to identify those areas of knowledge and skills that students mastered and those that need more work. If only a few students scored poorly on a given knowledge, skill, communication, application, or transfer area, you can group and reteach them and/or offer assignments to help them master those standards. You can also disaggregate (pull apart) your results to see whether, for example, boys performed better than girls, only students who had previous experience (e.g., computers in the home) did well, and so forth.If many students fail to demonstrate their mastery, you know that you need to re-examine the instructional delivery strategy to see what went wrong.
When you deliberately and systematically examine your practice and the effects it has on your students' abilities to learn, you are engaging in action research.
What is Action Research?
Action research is a process of systematic inquiry that helps teachers to assess learning from the perspective of what they do in the classroom. Teachers examine a situation or problem very carefully to find out "why" or "how" things happened the way they did. They analyze their own beliefs, values, and assumptions about teaching and learning, knowledge and curriculum, and how these impact the way they interact with students.
According to Bissex (1987) teachers who conduct action research are:
- Observers - looking and looking again at what happens in the classroom, not necessarily for new information, but thinking about the information they already have;
- Questioners - problems encountered in the classroom become questions and opportunities to investigate. Everything that occurs in a classroom can be seen as data to be understood;
- Learners - the focus changes from "what did you teach today?" to "what did you learn?" Teaching becomes a process to model learning; and
- More Complete Teachers - bringing together the concepts of knowing and doing.
Questions to Consider
- Did students understand their expectations? Did they meet high performance standards?
- Were students engaged in this assessment? Did they express an interest in follow-up exercises?
- Did some new learning goals for future or follow-up lessons emerge during instruction?
- Were you able to evaluate the products students created?
- Did the assessment provide authentic and meaningful feedback for improving student learning and instructional practice?
Congratulations!!
You've just learned a systematic process that can help you design an aligned assessment for your lesson.
To Step 5:
Online Resources for Assessment
Step 4.
Updated August 25, 2005
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