An Approach to Assessment and Reporting

Dr. Kamala V. Mukunda, Teacher , Centre for Learning*

I teach in a small school, with seventy students and about twelve full time
teachers. The teachers run the school and create curricula as a cooperative
venture. One of the important decisions we have taken is that we will not
have any tests or examinations till the students appear for their recognized
certificate at the end of Class 10 or Class 12. No class tests, no surprise
quizzes, no midterm exams, no final exams, nothing! What exactly does this
mean? Our students do class work and homework assignments which are
corrected and for which feedback is given, and we do use tick marks and
crosses, and red pens like in any other school. But the important difference is
that no qualitative or quantitative ranking system is used. We do not give the
students any convenient handle with which to compare themselves with
each other.
This central aspect of our educational philosophy raises many questions, and
in this article I will try to address them to the best of my ability. However,
there is one valid question that I always find difficult to answer, and I will
mention it at the start. The reader could always say, well, yours is a small,
alternative school and what you do is not replicable in my classroom or in my
school. True enough. But the insights into learning that form the basis of our
decisions are also real and true. In fact, over the years, people have often
told us that understanding our reasons for doing things in a particular way
helps them clarify their own thinking about education. And who knows where
that may lead?

The dangers in comparative evaluation

From a very young age, adults try to use comparison as a tool to manipulate
behavior. Can you eat faster than her lets see who can finish first, why cant
you be like him and so on. It certainly seems to have immediate success, but
if you look closely and over a longer period of time, this approach is doing
more damage than you realize. In a school where comparative evaluation is
commonly used, children soon acquire a particular mindset when it comes to
learning, called performance orientation. Functioning from this mindset,
they come to any learning task thinking about how they will perform and
appear relative to others. This leaves no room for thoughts about whether
they have understood material and mastered it, or for what is called a
mastery orientation. Unfortunately, research is telling us that these two
orientations do not usually co-exist in the students mind; it is either one or
the other. But does the mindset matter? In other words, if my goal is to get
the student to learn something, does it really matter why he or she is
learning it?
The answer is it does matter. A students mindset determines his ideas about
what successful learning is. Success to one who has developed a
performance orientation involves doing better than the others, and this
success will come easily to the rare student who has superior abilities, and is
very confident about himself. But if he is not so fortunate, and he wants to
avoid failure, a few possible paths are open to him: He may avoid
challenging tasks, taking up only those where he can be sure that he will do
as well as or better than others.

He may slack off, not work hard, and make it obvious that he did not
work. Then when he does not perform well, it can always be explained
away as I never worked anyway. This interesting phenomenon is
called self-handicapping and it is surprisingly common among bright
students who dont want to appear to be losers. They fear that even if
they work hard, they may not come out on top. So the best strategy
to save face is to slack off.
He might even resort to cheating or copying answers.
These three outcomes are clearly undesirable. But at an even more basic
level, as we all know, tests create anxiety in students. Not only is anxiety
completely superfluous to the learning process, it can actually cause damage
to those parts of the brain which are concerned with memory and learning. In
most school systems in India, performance testing is almost a constant factor
of the school year. Psychological research has clearly shown that chronic
stress has permanent effects on our ability to learn new things. At CFL, we
looked at our educational intentions, and we realized that we wanted our
students to love learning and enjoy it because it is inherently rewarding. We
did not want them to develop a blinkered focus on performance and
outcomes, and we certainly did not want to make anxiety the dominant
emotion in their lives. So we made a conscious decision that we would not
subject them to comparative evaluationand several challenges
immediately arose. How would we evaluate students understanding, for the
purposes of feedback? How would we report a students grasp and level of
mastery of a subject, to the parents or to other teachers? How would we
motivate students to work hard, if not to aim for high marks or avoid low
marks.

Seeking opportunities for meaningful feedback

Our greatest advantage is, of course, our small average class size. With
around six to ten students in a class, it is a simple matter to be closely in
contact with each individual students level of understanding or mastery. In
fact, we can literally see each childs notebook! Most perceptions of student
understanding are acted on almost at once, in an ongoing, continuous
fashion. If I ask my class a question in fractions and one student makes a
mistake, I try to identify the misunderstanding right away and clear it up. We
may fear that this kind of classroom feedback is wasting the time of the
students who have understood..
However, I have found that understanding deepens and strengthens over a
much longer period than one might think. Even after so many years as a
teacher, I feel I understand the concepts better or differently each time I
teach them! So the other students in class, even those who seem to have
understood it all, also benefit from the clarification, especially if the teacher
is making the effort to explain in different ways. This is also done when the
mistake appears in a homework assignment: the teacher can clear it up in
the next class, or write somewhat detailed feedback in the notebook, or find
time to sit with the student for a few minutes outside class. At the end of a
term or a year, however, it becomes necessary to stand back and generate
an overall assessment. The challenge is how to integrate all the myriad
nonverbal impressions and feelings that constitute our in-depth assessment
of each student. And how to articulate this gut feel in clear, simple
sentences so that the student can benefit from the feedback. One tool that
we are currently working on is the assessment rubric.. This is a matrix
whose rows are specified skills or knowledge areas, and whose columns are
specified levels of mastery. We begin by listing skill or knowledge areas in a
subject for a particular age group.
Then for each skill, we identify a few levels (three to five perhaps). Good
rubrics have levels that are more informative than, for example, poor,
average, good, excellent, than a number between 1 and 100, or than a letter
between A and F. A teacher can make his own rubric, and the exercise of
doing so will help clarify to himself his educational goals for his students.
Meanwhile, the student gets a clear idea of her strengths and weaknesses
from the completed rubric. There is an additional creative use of a rubric:
students can fill them in as self-assessment before receiving one from their
teacher. Also, when appropriate, students can fill them out for each other in
pairs (peer assessment), for instance if the rubric applies to a single piece of
writing. Once in our school year, we also write detailed descriptive reports for
each student. Nearly all teachers who have worked with the student will
write a short essay on their perceptions. This essay covers a wide range of
areas of growth: emotional, physical, social and academic. Some extracts are
shown here, with the names removed for confidentiality. has been
organized and bright in math classes he is very thorough and regular at
work. He has a good way of explaining steps out loud which really helps his
classmates. He also loves puzzles and I have seen that an unsolved one will
sit in his head for a long time before he gives up on it. There is a quietening
down in terms of the rude comments which I used to hear from him so often
nowadays he appears more mature both in class and outside. I hope my
observations reflect the reality is quick and somewhat hasty in math
class. He understands very fast and plunges into the work immediately after
I give the green signal, and does. Sometimes it does feel as though he is
rushing to catch a train even though there are no prizes offered for
finishing first! Since he is completely responsible about his homework, I can
focus my energy on making sure he has understood the material. Neatness
is an issue however, and that could be because of hasteIn class, he can be
extremely talkative and on a high it takes many reminders sometimes to
get him to settle down and stop the constant cross talk. Although he always
takes these reminders in good spirit, I wish he could learn to click into
appropriate classroom behaviour on his own as soon as he enters class...he
has always been an easy child to talk to he quickly accepts his patterns
when they are pointed out to him. I hope the next stage would be that he
can follow this by a change in his behaviour

Obtaining the data on which to base a report

Rubrics and descriptive reports of this kind can be filled out only when a
teacher is closely in touch with the students learning. Agreed, this is more
difficult when there are many students in a class. Yet I feel that this kind of
awareness is a fundamental aspect of teaching, and if we sacrifice it, we
seriously diminish our work as teachers. So, when there are many students in
a class, you have to come up with creative ways to assess them. Well-
designed worksheets, challenging open-book assignments with plenty of
time to complete (as homework for example), individual or group projects
where the quality of work reveals the effort and achievement of the student
these are all exciting possibilities. If you look at traditional tests or exams,
they are the opposite of all this. Poorly designed, emphasizing memory over
understanding and application, closed-book, testing performance with severe
time restrictionsExaminations conducted by external boards have to be all
these things (except poorly designed!) due to the constraints of large
systems, but classroom tests made by the teacher or the school can be free
of these limitations. Another simple way of getting to know your students
better is to allow for discussion and dialogue in class, even a short time each
day. The discussion can be an offshoot of what is being covered in the class
that week. (It is not meant as an oral test; if it turns into that it will become a
source of stress for students!) Keep it as an open-ended discussion around
the main topic, allowing for every student to have a valid response, even if
all do not get the opportunity to express it. Over the year, make an effort to
encourage silent ones, throw specific questions to one or another. Soon, you
will develop a sense of where each child is, and this will add to a rich
descriptive report. The point is, there are several abilities and aspects to
your students other than just getting the answers right, and you as a teacher
have to find ways of discovering these. Examples can be seen in the quoted
excerpts above: enjoyment of a subject, self perception of ability, oral
expression, ability to explain to others, perseverance with hard problems,
neatness, classroom behaviourreporting on these adds so much richness to
the picture of the student. As you can see, in our rubrics or descriptive
reports there is no need to make comparative evaluations; however, there is
always a standard in mind when you are assessing something. This is the
difference between so-called norm referenced and criterion referenced
tests. Can we develop a criterion against which to evaluate our students, so
that we do not have to say, She is better than 54% of her class at
mathematics, since that is not a very useful statement? Certainly we can.
Several bodies in the world have published National Standards in different
subjects, for different ages. A great deal of thought and care has gone into
these documents, and many are freely available on the web. Nowadays with
the increasing access to the internet, a teacher could read through and
research some of these documents. In fact, an experienced teacher will have
developed a sense for what a student of a given age, from a given
background, can be expected to accomplish. Added to this, there is the
individual student whom you have got to know over the year(s). How hard he
works, how much he is capable of when he really applies himself, and
whether a given piece of work was casual and hurried, or carefully and
meticulously done. These observations are an important part of assessment.
Personal communication as feedback
Along with rubrics and written reports, at CFL we also spend a lot of time
meeting with students and parents to give evaluative feedback. This
happens both informally (outside class) as well as once a year in a formal
report meeting with the parents. At this meeting, all the teachers who have
interacted with the student that year sit together with the parents and we
have a focused discussion on several aspects of the students learning, both
academic and non-academic. The benefit of this dialogue is immense, as
a joint picture of the student emerges, and suggestions and decisions can be
made jointly In the senior school, the student can also be a part of such a
meeting (much to his or her discomfortimagine being surrounded by your
parents and teachers in a room all discussing only you!). It is important to
note that the tone of such meetings is friendly, constructive and frank, rather
than a one-way communication of judgments or observations leaving no
room for questions. At such meetings, the partnership between parents and
teachers in raising a child is reinforced and strengthened.
The question of motivation
When the school system stops using tests and exams as a motivator, some
students will inevitably lose interest in working or learning. To the extent that
their only source of motivation was the need to outperform others, removing
the competitive context reduces their edge.. The solution to this is not to
reintroduce tests! At CFL we would like to invite students to understand their
own motivations for learning and working. Some of the most important
things in life have to be done for their own sake, fueled by a strong inner
motivation. By using the crutches of comparison and competition in school,
we are robbing our students of the power of this inner motivation. So if tests
are removed, what is left? Students at CFL produce a lot of work which
teachers look over and give feedback on. When appropriate, we appreciate
our students efforts and the quality of their work. Where we see areas
needing improvement, we communicate this also. We demand a high level of
engagement with learning and work. If a student has been sloppy, casual or
hasty, the teacher points this out clearly. All this helps to build an
understanding of what constitutes an excellent piece of work. After all, one of
the strong motivators in life is the satisfaction of having accomplished
something and done it well. In general, a sound principle of assessment is
that we actually want to measure competence, not performance. The only
way to get better measures of competence is to sample performance of
different skills, over time, in different contexts. No single testing episode
should assume supreme importance. While this translates to a lot of work for
the teacher and the educational system as a whole, if we see that there is no
alternative, then we will not grudge our young people the extra effort.
*Kamala V. Mukunda is a PhD in Educational Psychology. Since 1995 she has
been associated with Centre for Learning, a teacher-run school outside
Bangalore. An avid reader she authored a book titled "What Did You Ask at
School Today?" which was brought out by HarperCollins, India in 2009.