Differentiating Assessments

I’ve been working with a teacher at my school as he builds his summative assessment for his very low level ELL students. The teacher’s goal for the school year is to implement some alternative methods of assignment and to break away from the traditional pen and paper test. We’ve been working on his first unit of study and the students are studying nouns and adjectives.

When we began brainstorming, he had already begun writing a pen and paper test but we pressed forward and thought up an idea for a mini-project in which students create a “dictionary of me”. They choose five nouns and five adjectives that are meaningful to them and write a dictionary entry for each one. As we began to brainstorm, the teacher quickly realized that he wanted to offer both the mini project AND the test: his first foray into differentiated assessments. We broke from that meeting and agreed to meet the next week when he had time to write drafts of each assessment.

When we met again a week later, I told him I would be reviewing his ideas with the following guiding principles in mind.

Guiding Principles

1. Same Content: Both assessments should give the teacher the ability to determine student mastery of the same standards, skills or knowledge. When we first looked at the two assessments, the pen and paper asked a question about pronouns but the project did not. We agreed that either the test needed to drop the questions about pronouns or pronouns needed to be added to the project somehow.

2. Same cognitive demand: The tasks should be at the same level on Bloom’s Taxonomy. For example, in the first drafts of the assessments, the pen and paper tasks simply required students to “identify the noun” or “identify the adjective” from either a list of words or in a sentence. The dictionary task required students to think up their own and then write sentences that used the noun or adjective correctly. We rectified this by adding some open ended questions to the test that asked students to write a grammatically valid sentence using a given noun or verb.

3. Approximately same time commitment: Students need to feel like both assignments are equal in the amount of work they’ll need to put in. A pen and paper test is a “one and done” in the eyes of students whereas a project is daunting! We decided that providing the students a google slides template for their dictionaries would remove some of the anxiety and stress around creating something so that the students could focus on the content.

4. Make sure the formative assignments prepare students for both types of assessments. If all of your formative assignments are like the questions on the pen and paper test, students will be prepared for that but not for the project. Luckily, this teacher had incorporated some formative assignments that asked students to write their own sentences and generate their own lists of nouns and verbs so that they were prepared for the project task as well.

5. Provide equal support for both assessments. If students are allowed to collaborate or ask you, the teacher, for help during a project but not during a test that is an alternative to the project, there is certainly a lack of equity there. In the dictionary project, students would be able to bounce ideas off of each other while they wouldn’t be able to during the test version of the assessment. To rectify this, we decided that students would try the test first and then, if they did poorly, they could work with other students to discuss and correct their answers before answering a few new problems to reassess them.