Teachers can find it hard to write a high-quality assessment, much less a high-quality, rigorous, and relevant assessment. Too often, an assessment—which seeks to assess what teachers taught—misses the importance of the learning’s larger context. For example, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS; National Governors Association Center for Best Practices [NGA] & Council of Chief State School Officers [CCSSO], 2010a) require students to understand text features. But after teaching text features, how should teachers assess students’ understanding of text features? Should teachers just assess that students can point to features, identify them with appropriate labels, and explain how those features make a text easier to comprehend? Many summative assessments stop at the level of knowledge and skill instead of getting to strategic or extended thinking. While it is necessary to ensure such basics are in place, a check on the basics can take place in formative stages. Ultimately, however, such assessments at the summative level miss the mark of having students create meaning within a complex text because of their ready access to and interpretation of the document’s text features. When teacher teams collaborate to write assessments, they question the relevance of the learning and the rigor of the potential tasks or items. They challenge their assumptions, materials, and practices as they explore rigor and relevance while writing the assessment.
Effective Data Use
While assessment literacy requires that teams design assessments accurately, it is equally imperative that teams use the data effectively. For example, an adult could take a child’s temperature over and over with a thermometer and generate an accurate reading of 103 degrees. But the data generated won’t suffice to effectively address the findings. The adult would need to administer an aspirin in response to the data that the child has a fever. Teachers need to understand how to effectively address their classroom assessment findings. To do this, teams must agree on the best ways to respond to their assessment results; possible responses include identified error analysis, targeted instructional responses, effective feedback, dynamic student involvement, systemic reflection, and positive cultural change.
Identified Error Analysis
Teachers could easily look at assessment data by the resulting percentages and then sort learners based on their percentage scores into groupings for re-engagement and extension opportunities. Percentage-based scores, however, never suffice. They should serve only as an indicator requiring deeper exploration, not as an exact conclusion requiring on-the-spot decision making. When teachers deeply own the results of their team-created assessments, they look at percentages as indicator data, which drives them more deeply into the actual student work so they can gain insights into what went wrong. Did students make reading errors? Concept errors? Reasoning errors? Collaborative teams use data to launch deeper investigations through error analysis.
Targeted Instructional Responses
A deeper exploration into data points and student work can offer significant insights into the appropriate instructional responses. For example, a student might have scored 65 percent on the learning target of “drawing conclusions,” but what went wrong? Teams using the collaborative common assessment process engage in error analysis to find critical answers to questions like, Did the student identify explicit evidence but neglect to identify implicit evidence before drawing a conclusion? Did the student have insufficient evidence before drawing a conclusion? Did the student have sufficient implicit and explicit evidence but employ faulty reasoning when drawing the conclusion? Clearly, it would be a mistake to reteach all of this learning target to a student who scored 65 percent. Teams would find it far better to analyze the type of error the learner has made and then identify a targeted instructional response. With such information in their hands, teacher teams can close learning gaps in short order because they directly match their interventions to the type of error the learner made.
Effective Feedback
When collaborative teams share unified commitments to consistent learning targets, employ uniform criteria for evaluating quality, and collectively explore the specific types of errors students make in the learning process, they can better provide the necessary feedback that supports learners in reducing the discrepancy between where they currently are and where they need to be. In the absence of such work, individual teachers provide feedback of varying degrees of quality. John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) argue that feedback “is most powerful when it addresses faulty interpretations, not a total lack of understanding” (p. 82). In order to identify the right feedback to offer, teachers should work together to find and analyze learners’ faulty interpretations of concepts. According to Hattie (2009), feedback is one of the most powerful instructional strategies a teacher can employ. Yet assessment experts continue to cite research that indicates teachers often misunderstand this strategy and seldom employ it with a high degree of effectiveness (Chappuis, 2009; Hattie, 2009; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Ruiz-Primo & Li, 2011, 2013; Wiliam, 2013).
Feedback is a two-way street—teacher to students and students to teacher. Both directions require tremendous clarity and energy. Hattie (2009) reminds teachers that:
Feedback to students involves providing information and understanding about the tasks that make the difference in light of what the student already understands, misunderstands, and constructs. Feedback from students to teachers involves information and understanding about the tasks that make the difference in light of what the teacher already understands, misunderstands, and constructs about the learning of his or her students. It matters when teachers see learning through the lens of the student grappling to construct beliefs and knowledge about whatever is the goal of the lesson. This is never linear, not always easy, requires learning and over learning, needs dollops of feedback, involves much deliberative practice, leads to lots of errors and mis-directions, requires both accommodating and assimilating prior knowledge and conceptions, and demands a sense of excitement and mission to know, understand, and make a difference. (p. 238)
A deep analysis of common assessment data leads collaborative teams to better understand the errors their learners are making so they can help their learners autocorrect. Likewise, the process enables teams to stand behind their proffered feedback with focused instruction and ongoing monitoring.
Dynamic Student Involvement
Assessment should never be something that teachers do to learners; rather, they must do it with and for learners. This requires that they utilize even common assessments with the ultimate end user—the learner—in mind. Jan Chappuis (2009) asserts:
Formative assessment is a powerful tool in the hands of both teachers and students and the closer to everyday instruction, the stronger it is. Classroom assessment, sensitive to what teachers and students are doing daily, is most capable of providing the basis for understandable and accurate feedback about the learning, while there is still time to act on it. And it has the greatest capacity to develop students’ ability to monitor and adjust their own learning. (p. 9)
Teams that develop assessment literacy through common understandings and practice embrace the conversation of engaging learners in analyzing and responding to their own results. In this way, an instructional re-engagement strategy exponentially increases in power as teachers target their responses to specific gaps in understanding while students rally their attention and energy around mastering their own gaps.
Systemic Reflection
The work of collaborative common assessments is ultimately about professional inquiry and learning. In teams, teachers gather the necessary data to explore their instructional impact, identify and deliver strategic responses, and reflect on their practices and beliefs. Timperley (2009) observes:
When teachers … interpret assessment data in order to become more responsive to their students’ learning needs, the impact is substantive. Teachers, however, cannot do this alone…. Creating the kinds of conditions in schools in which teachers systematically use data to inform their practice … requires that they teach in contexts in which such practice becomes part of the organisational routines. (p. 24)
The entire system engages in reflective practice; the findings of a few inform the work of many. Collaborative common assessment engages