Philosophy of Assessment

Assessment is a way to measure what students have learned, however I dont believe that
assessment always needs to be done by the teacher. There are many ways to assess student
learning. Two main types of assessment are summative and formative assessment; I believe there
are times in which to use both of these tools in your assessment practices. Rubrics are a great
tool to use in both formative and summative assessment for both the teacher and the student.
These rubrics can be created by the teacher or co-created by the students and the teacher for use
in assessment. Including students in the assessment process can be incredibly valuable and one
way to do this is through peer and self-assessment. In this document, I will further address these
assessment practices and strategies.
Marzano (2006) defines formative assessment as occurring during the learning process
and summative assessment as something that happens at the end of a unit to assess what students
have learned. Summative assessment should only be done once students have been given the
time to practice with the material and become familiar with it. Summative assessments should
not be sprung upon students and given halfway through the learning process, it is an unfair
assessment of student learning. Formative assessment is what should be used when students are
learning the material and trying to understand it. Marzano explains that formative assessment can
highly improve students understanding of the material and can help guide the teachers
instruction on the material by showing where students are strong and where they still require
further clarification. Formative assessment also encapsulates many different forms of
assessment; it can be more formal and written or it can be oral, like a discussion with students
about where they are with a certain topic (Marzano 2006). Formative assessment is essential to
assessing student learning, however it should never be given a grade.
Formative assessment is a place to give feedback to students so they can gauge how they
are doing and so that teachers can also use that information to guide their instruction. When
teaching a unit on predicting in a Grade 7 English Language Arts class I gave students an article
with only headlines and text features on it, all the text of the article had been whited out.
Students had to use their predicting strategies to predict what the article may be about based on
the information left of the sheet. I collected these to check for understanding of predicting and to
make sure their comprehension was high enough to move to the next exercise in the unit. I made
sure to chat with some students who did fine on the assignment but in the written comprehension
question at the end seems to lack confidence in their abilities, to assure them they were doing
fine and clarify why they felt they werent predicting properly.
For either form of assessment, summative or formative, solid assessment criteria needs to
established, so that students can identify what they need to do to improve and also so teachers
can grade each product with a strong level of consistency; one method for this is the use of
rubrics. Rubrics provide both the teacher and the student with outcomes and expectations for the
products being created to assess student learning. Rubrics should be used when grading students
and also should be given to students to use while they are completing their work. This allows
them to clearly see what is expected of them and what they need to do to obtain a certain grade

or level of achievement. While some may see this as making projects and assignments too easy
for students, I dont feel that the goal of assessment is to make things hard for students and there
is really no reason to not let them know and have the criteria for assignments beforehand. These
rubrics may be seen as being more suitable to summative assessment, however they can be used
in formative assessment as well. Rubrics are guidelines for students that help clarify the learning
goals and outcomes. In a Grade 8 English Language Arts class I gave my students the rubric I
would be using to mark and then broke the rubric down and went through an exemplar of strong
writing with them and highlighted examples of each of the points within the rubric. This gave
students an understanding of what a strong piece of narrative writing looked like and also
provided a strategy, highlighting each different requirement with a different coloured highlighter
or pencil that they could use to check their own writing against the rubric.
One video called Making the Learning Transparent to Students talks about creating
learning goals or success criteria for students so they can know what they are working towards in
class and with their assignments. This video also states that sometime the learning goals do not
always have to be explicit from the very start, however they need to be discussed so that the
teacher can see that students understand what the purpose of the activity was and that they have
gotten the information and instruction out of it that was needed. This ties into rubrics quite well
because it gives students the information they need for success. If students can identify and
understand what is expected and required of them they can work towards meeting these
expectations and can take ownership of their work. Rubrics are great for teachers because they
give a list of expectations that can be assessed and can be used to determine where a student is
formatively and what their grade is for summative assessment. It is important of course to make
sure that the rubrics are written in way that students can understand and use. I co-created a rubric
for newspaper articles with a grade 7 English Language Arts class, they were given the rubric to
reference when they were creating their articles and I used it for my summative assessment
rubric as well for the completed articles. Rubrics are great for teachers to check in on student
progress and also to mark student work, however they can also be great for students when it
comes to peer-assessment and self-assessment.
Peer and self-assessment are incredibly valuable tools that can be used within the
classroom. This bring the students into the process of assessment with you and also helps them to
become more critical and able to analyze their work more closely. A video called Peer
Assessment: Reflections from Students and Teachers (2013) mentions having a clear idea about
the way you are going structure peer assessment; one way suggested the Ladder of Feedback,
created by David Perkins of Harvard University, where students are taught how to give their
peer-assessment that is kind, thoughtful and reflective. While it is clear that teaching students
how to be peer-reflectors can take some time, its benefits are clear; one teacher in the video on
Peer Assessment (2013) states that her students marks have actually gotten higher even though
her marking practices have not changed. Students never place a letter or number grade on their
peers work they provide feedback based on the criteria for the assignment. Self-assessment is
similar in that students do not give themselves a grade and they go through their work closely
with ideas of what is expected in mind and figure out what they have and what they are perhaps
missing. This creates students with a critical eye for their own work. Peer and self-assessment are

great tools in the classroom, they improve student understanding and independent learning. It
also creates a community within the classroom because everyone is ready and willing to help
each other with assessment and improvement.
While there are many other aspects to assessment these are the topics I feel very strongly
about and I believe are useful in the classroom. Summative and formative assessment are both
important in their own right; summative to assess their learning at the end of a unit and formative
to check in on their understanding throughout the learning process. One tool of assessment that
can help really help student and teachers are rubrics, they provide clarification and a standard for
grading which all students are given and graded against. Then finally, self and peer-assessment
are great formative tools that create a community in the community and provide students with a
better understanding of assessment. If used together and used well these tools can become a great
foundation and way to assess students to help them learn and to see what they have learned.

References
Planning Assessment with Instruction. Making the Learning Transparent to Students. Retrived
from: Measurement &Evaluation Moodle Page.
Jobs for the Future. (22 Aug 2013). Peer Assessment: Reflections from Students and Teachers.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqWCJZH8ziQ
Marzano, R. J. (2006). The Case for Classroom Assessment. Classroom Assessment & Grading
that Work. (n.p.). Retrieved from: https://moodle.stu.ca/mod/folder/view.php?id=27868