Hints for Creating Unit Assessments

The goal of Core Knowledge lessons: to create balance of assessments.

Why assess? The purpose of assessment is to find out what students are able to do with knowledge, in an appropriate context.

There are three main reasons to assess students:

1. Initial Assessment: to diagnose students' content knowledge and skills before the units
   • Does the student have the necessary prerequisite knowledge and skills?
   • Does the student already know some of the material to be taught?
2. Monitor Progress: to inform and guide instruction
   • Is the student moving towards the goal during the unit?
3. Summative Evaluation: to collect data on student performance at the end of the unit (i.e., documentation)
   • Has the student mastered the goal?

We are looking for all three types of assessment within units.

Effective assessments should:

• Relate directly to curriculum and instruction
• Be specific and explicit
• Be accurate and objective
• Be systematic, regular, repeated, and ongoing
• Be used to guide instruction

Rubrics are one way to ensure that subjective assessments are effective.  Why use rubrics?

• To make learning more relevant to students
• To give students more opportunities to assess their thinking (self-assessment)
• To give students opportunities to make adjustments and revise their work
• To provide deeper meaning behind the concepts, content, and skills that students are expected to learn
• To support development of sophisticated, higher order thinking skills
• To provide a concise explanation of learning expectations to students and parents
• To provide informed feedback so that students know their strengths and weaknesses

Final thoughts on assessment:

Reliability and Validity:
• In order to be valid, the assessment must clearly connect with the content to be taught.  (For example, putting a stamp into a Kindergarten child's passport is not an assessment of what he/she learned about a continent.  Asking the child to describe 3 facts he/she learned about the continent is an assessment.
• In order to ensure that your grading is reliable, re-grade a couple of papers from the top of the pile after you have graded the whole stack. In other words, if the results are the same, your grading is reliable. All teachers using the assessment tool should arrive at the same result.
• Assessments help us to focus on content and not on time-consuming projects that are simply "cute."
• Remember, use a variety of assessments to achieve a balance!

As you create your unit, be sure that all lesson and unit assessments:

• Connect Core Knowledge with your state standards and/or test objectives.
• Can be used by students during the lesson to measure their progress.
• Can give students a picture of the desired outcome.
• Can provide assessment data for the teacher to determine the student's level of understanding.

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Last updated: Mon, June 23 2008