I chose the words for this post’s title carefully. I truly believe that 1) widespread conventional secondary assessment is not a product of intentional design; 2) cobbled-together reactions to grading policies, exam-based courses, and graduation requirements do not resemble anything functional; and 3) the processes, practices and loops experienced by teachers and students do not, and never have, comprised a real system.
It has been quite invigorating to turn the tables on each of these elements and design a functional assessment system from scratch.
The collection of structures and practices that most high school and university students experience as ‘assessment’ convey some pretty terrible messages about academic performance.
Masked as desirable attributes, the following terms flow freely from educators’ lips. Rarely are the lived messages articulated, so I define them below:
- Accountability is the relationship between the student and a very narrow set of task types and formats, grading policies, and subjective interpretation of the teacher, which may change with each new unit as the content changes. Students are accountable to the exam publisher or teacher, and their achievement is wholly dependent on these entities. In this way, the most accountable students are often the least autonomous learners.
- Achievement is a status, rank or grade, often earned on high-stakes exams, which may take the form of end-of-unit tests. Students have one opportunity per a given set of content or chapters to determine their level of achievement, which fixes the status, rank or grade. (Re-takes, test corrections, and other similar policies do not alter this definition—in fact they reinforce the message that the demonstration of content understanding takes place within a set timeframe).
- Studying is memorizing, and is done just before the need to regurgitate information bytes, parrot a published author’s or the teacher’s own reasoning/analysis, or compare definitions.
- A good student is one who studies well, achieves status, and exhibits strong accountability (dependence).
It was obvious that this collection of anxiety-provoking messages needed careful recrafting.
Any system behaves in a way that reflects what its designers value. The system itself is the messenger, not the stakeholders within it.
If students cannot establish accountability as defined above, if they fail time and again, or if they are unable to study well, teachers cannot console them with contradictory messages.
Students know better.
The lived experience of the stakeholders represents the values of the system.
For me, the most important part of our assessment system design was the identification of these foundational values.
I am proud that the central tenets of our assessment system silence messages of ‘performance by pain’ and replace them with more encouraging, equitable messages.