Assessment: Progression of Learning

A day in the life of my assessment practice!

Within the program we are constantly assessing students to see how they are adjusting to many of the hidden curriculum objectives. Can they follow a routine? Can they go to their lockers independently? Can they sit in class? Do they need first then charts? It's a constant focus of observations to determine how the students are progressing in their goals to become independent citizens. Or as independent as possible. 

I think we've moved from bench marking with Fountas and Pinnell and Mipi's to developing our own pre and post assessment to determine students functional levels. When we developed our own curriculum to focus our teaching we also developed an assessment tool to determine where the students were starting. It made more sense to start there and then to use our sliding scale (fully supported- partially supported-independent) to determine the students success. 

Let's explain the scale because I know I will often say things that I think makes perfect sense but then I see facial expressions that make me wonder if I was just trying to explain rocket science.

Because we are a life skills program (and let me throw this out there, we've been doing financial literacy since I started) and our goal is to get students to be as independent as possible we gauge all of their learning on their independence level. So let's look at our scale and some examples

Fully supported means they need an adult with them to do each step of the project or to move onto each next step. 

Let's take Student S, she is a lovely girl, loves the Blue Jays and can tell you all about the game. She is someone who for most things is fully supported. She knows our routines but when she started she required physical prompts all the time, now we have her down to verbal prompts but without those prompts my lovely little Blue Jays fan will not proceed to the next task. She will wait and ask questions consistently. 

Partially Supported is an indicator that they may need some verbal prompts but they can likely follow through on completing tasks in chunked sections.

Student L is a prime example of a partially supported student. L knows what needs to be done with his verbal instructions but struggles with some learned helplessness and will get stuck when things get tricky, so he requires an adult to pop in with him regularly during the class to help him get passed his road blocks. It is very minimal in supports and usually he doesn't get stuck to long. We've begun using a Red Yellow Green indicator with him so he can tell us he is stuck without drawing big attention to himself with his peers (he doesn't want them to think he's dumb) and it puts the responsibility on him. 

Independent is the indicator we use when a student can do things on their own and we sometimes forget they are even in the class, no I am kidding we always know when people are missing.

Student A is an excellent example for one of my more independent learners. The caveat is that he requires things to be routine and a visual schedule would be super helpful. So with our independent students, it doesn't mean they don't have supports, it just means they have supports they need to be successful without adult intervention.

Now we use these scales for our options class, this is what gets sent to our options teachers. We usually set their social emotional, personal living and community living goals based on their Individual Support Plan (ISP) that is set with the parents, if they do not have a goal in that domain it is blank. The options teachers then assess the students in their unique environment to determine if the student is not yet (full support) at the goal, they can manage the goal supported (partially supported) or they are Independent. What this does for us is allows us to see if the skills we are working on are transferring to other areas. This is so important for us and is something that we rely on our colleagues to provide for us. 

So there is the history of my Assessment practices, there is always informal assessment happening. We use the informal assessment to help us with our formative assessment in determining the appropriate supports or to determine if the supports we are using are beneficial or not. Our summative assessments generally fall in the form of our ISP goals. Here is a look at a tracking sheet we have used in the past to help us determine what we need to accomplish for the ISP goals. This one is not the completed one but we continue to work on this document all year and for those students returning it isn't surprising to see similar goals on the sheet.

I think one of my favourite things that I had recently used in my classroom was a student self assessment with our curriculum. We have written our curriculum in "I know" statements (the big ideas) followed by "I can" statements (the demonstrable proof) of the big idea. For example, I know basic number sense. The student can demonstrate this by counting to ten, identifying groups of objects, counting higher, or skip counting. Kind of depends on where they are at academically for each of our bigger items. But then we know where they need to move to next. 

If I am honest, and I try to be, assessment is something I have to focus on in the short term future to ensure I have effective practices. I don't know of the names of the people that guide my practice for assessment, it's not something I have spent a lot of time considering. I focus my assessment on assessment for learning, what can I do to ensure I can see that the student is learning, but I suppose on reflection it can be assessment of learning. I do not recall the use of assessment as learning so I do have some work ahead of me to ensure I am creating a wide array of assessments to ensure my students in the future can show their learning. 

I have plans to reach out to Vanessa and Joel for help in the assessment area since they are spending a lot of time researching and I am sure they can impart some amazing resources my way!! Thanks for reading everyone!

References

Drake, S., Reid, J., & Kolohon, W. (2014) Interweaving curriculum and classroom assessment. Oxford University Press.