Taking ForI11ative
Douglas Fisher, Maria Grant, Nancy Frey,and Christine Johnson
When an urban high school embraced formative
assessments, teaching moved from weII
intentioned guessworh to a finely-tuned dance.
Inrecent years, educators have
experienced much outside pressureto raise student achievement. To
avoid falling into reactive andsometimes prescriptive teaching
with prepackaged lessons, teachers andschools must increase the precision of our
teaching (Fullan, Hill, &: Crevola, 2006).This is where formative assessmentcomes in. Formative assessment strate
gies-such as oral questioning, writingprompts, and tests (Fisher &: Frey,2007)-are essential if we are to develop
the detailed knowledge of students'
understandings and misunderstandingsnecessary to teach with precision.
Although educators have learned a lotabout good formative assessment inindividual classrooms, we wondered
what might happen if a school took the
process schoolwide. In 2001, through ajoint project between San Diego StateUniversity and the San Diego UnifiedSchool District, we set out to answer
this question. Hoover High School,an urban school of 2,300 students in
San Diego, California, with a highpercentage of low-income students andEnglish language learners, was our testsite.
The school arranged and paid for two
professors from San Diego State Univer-
sity (coauthors Douglas Fisher andNancy Frey) to teach part-time atHoover High for two years while collaborating with teachers to embed a formative assessment approach in the schoolculture. Teachers refined a process for
looking at student assessments collaboratively and using the information gathered to guide their instruction. Increating this process, we didn't wantteachers to simply give more assessments; we wanted them to see an imme
diate value in the process. We learned alot from the work of Georgea Langerand her colleagues (Langer, Colton, &:Goff, 2003). But rather than offeringcommon formative assessments as an
option, as Langer's group did, we madedeveloping and using common assessments an expectation schoohvide.
We offer here the four-step process
we created for powerful schoolwideassessments at Hoover High as a modelfor others considering this approach.
Step 1: Developing Pacing GuidesEssential to this schoolwide process is
the weekly meeting of teachers incourse-alike groups rather than departments (for example, all teachers
teaching Algebra I or world history). Asa beginning point, course-alike groups
develop common pacing guides. Pacingguides generally identify when theteacher will teach specific content standards, which instructional materials are
appropriate, and what types of instructional strategies teachers can deploy Inaddition to identifying these components, Hoover's pacing guides also indicate key vocabulary students will needto master in order to grasp coursecontent, which formative and summative assessments teachers will use to
determine student understanding, andwhat accommodations are recom
mended for students with disabilities,
English language learners, or studentsperforming above grade level.
64 EDUCATlONAL LEADERSHIP/DECEMBER 2007/jANUARY 2008
Assessment Schoolwide
Step 2: Designing CommonAssessments
In addition to choosing pacing guidesand corresponding summative assessments, teacher groups at Hoover
design, develop, or modify assessmentitems that every teacher will administerregularly throughout that course.Teachers develop these test items in
such a way as to provide informationthat will help them determine whatcontent students understand, where
students have gaps in comprehension,and who needs intervention. As groupsof teachers develop these assessmentitems, they learn more about theirstate's content standards and how those
standards might beassessed on state tests.
In addition, they plan
items that will signalwhen students are over
generalizing, oversimplifying, or exhibitingcommon misunder
standings. We learnedabout assessment designalong the way, learningfrom assessments wewrote that didn't work
and from professionaldevelopment seminarswe attended.
As part of designingcommon assessments to
use throughout the year,Hoover teachers generally create somecommon formative
assessment items thatmirror the state test
design because theyknow that test format
practice is essential. Students mustunderstand tests as a genre-how theywork and what to expect. However,teachers do not limit items to those that
mirror the state test format: They alsoinclude short -answer, constructed
response, and alternative-responseitems, as well as timed essays. We knowthat it's best to rely on a number of
strategies for determining students'understanding and that the key totaking formative assessments schoolwide is ensuring that teachers can determine "next steps" in instruction on thebasis of such assessments-which
requires more than practicing standardized questions.
Step 3: Conducting Item AnalysisTeachers in course-alike groups engagein the third step, analyzing the results,after all students in that course have
participated in a common formativeassessment. At Hoover, teachers useEdusoft, one of several commercial soft
ware programs that provide an itemanalysis for each assessment and indi
cate the percentage of students whoselected each of the answers. Other
powerful programs include Datawiseand Instructional Data ManagementSystem.
To avoid fallinginto prescriptive
teaching, teachersand schools must
increase the precision
of their teaching.
The item analysis is key to instructional conversations and the interventions that flow from them because itenables teachers to look across the
student body for trends-content orconcepts they need to reteach, assess
ment items they need to change, orpacing guides they need to revise.
Edusoft also enables teachers to analyzethe results of clusters of students, such
as exploring how English languagelearners as a group performed on aspecific item.
L
ASSOCIATION I'OR SUPERVISION AND CURRICLILLIM DEVEl.OPMENT 65
We didn't want teachers to simply givemore assessments; we wanted them to
see an immediate value in the process.
both parents (bb); a combination ofBb or
BBwould yield brown eyes.
Mr. Simms began the discussion:
MR. SIMMS:The greatest percentage ofstudents did choose the correct answer.
Question 3. In a(n) , all citizens at
mass meetings make decisions for the government.
Question 10. Use the map below to answer the following
question: Sparta is located of Athens.
FIGURE 1. Sample History Questionsand Student Answers
eyes (b). For this species, eye color doesnot depend on the sex of the organism.When a team of scientists crossed a male
and a female that both had brown eyes,they found that 31 offspring had browneyes and 9 had blue eyes. What are themost likely genotypes of the parentinsects?
Ms. GRANT:Maybe if we sharedthese results with students, it
would facilitate their thinkingabout the content. What if weshowed all students this item
analysis and asked them to workin small groups to determine whyspecific answers were wrong?
Ms. JACKSON:I also think we need
to work on test-taking skills. Ourstudents should have been able to
eliminate answers A and Brightaway because each shows aparent with blue eyes, and thequestion states that both parentshave brown eyes.
MR. SI~[MS:Twenty-six percent ofstudents chose answer D. Maybethey thought that since three outof four alleles are B, there's acorrelation to the 31 out of 40
total offspring with brown eyesdescribed in the question. I thinkI need to review how to use
Punnet's squares.
MR. SIMMS:Even though I covered themain concepts of Mendelian genetics, itseems that students didn't really understand how expressed traits are passedfrom parent to offspring.
Ms. JACKSON:Yes, but 54 percent didn'tchoose the right answer: 17 percent choseanswer A. This might mean that studentsdon't understand how a recessive trait is
passed on.
MRS.RODRIGUEZ:Yes, and II percentchose answer B. The students that chose
this answer don't understand the conceptof a dominant allele. Maybe I need tofocus more on vocabulary instruction forthis group of students. We covered thekey terms, but they don't seem to knowhow to use them. I think we should find
out the specific students who missed thisand get to them during small group time.
B.2%
D.30%
B. oligarchy
D. representative
democracy
B. northeast
D. southeast
B.3%
D.29%
A. BB and bbB. bb and bbC. Bb and BbD. BB andBb
Each answer shows the two alleles for
eye color of the male and female insect.The correct answer, which 46 percent ofthe students chose, is C because most of
the offspring have brown eyes but a few
have blue eyes. For an offspring to haveblue eyes, it must receive a b allele from
A. monarchyC. direct democracy
What students chose:
A. 7%
C. 61 % (correct answer)
A. northwest
C. southwest
What students chose:A.lO%
C. 58% (correct answer)In a certain species of insect,the allele for brown eyes (B) isdominant to the allele for blue
Uncovering Gaps inGenetics KnowledgeHoover science teacher Maria
Grant regularly facilitatesconversations about student
work. She and her colleaguesteaching 10th grade biologyrecently had the followingconversation about students'
understandings of geneticsconcepts while examiningstudents' responses to thisquestion on a common formative assessment:
Step 4: Engaging inInstructional Conversation
The fourth step, instructional conversa
tion, is why Hoover High teachers do allthis work. Talking with colleagues whoteach the same content and see the same
data results is foundational to instituting
improvements and helps teachers determine which instructional strategies are
working, which materials are effective,and which students still need help tomaster the standards. Each course group
has a leader who receives professional
development in facilitation skills. Suchconversations enable teachers to returnto their individual classrooms and
engage in the real work of formativeassessments-to reteach and intervene
where students aren't doing well.Let's consider two fruitful
instructional conversations
observed recently at a regular
weekly meeting at Hoover.
66 EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP/DECEMBER 2007/jANUARY 2008
How Students Scored in History
How Students Scored in Biology
2003 2005
Ms. Vasquez confessed, "I don't reallyknow how to teach this. I've shown mystudents the map and the directions. Idon't know what to do differently" Mrs.Johnson suggested to her, "I'll coveryour class so that you can go watch Mr.Applegate teach this concept. Is that
OK?" She then asked, "Does anyone elseneed help with teaching cardinalpoints?" Because many teachers wantedhelp, Mrs. Johnson recommended that
the group consider revising the course'spacing guide to allow more time toteach map skills.
As they continued to analyze theresults, the teachers also identified a
small group of students who had missedall the test items related to governmentstructures. They believed these learnerswould benefit from instruction to build
their background knowledge of suchstructures. Mr. Applegate offered tomeet with these students during theschool's after-school tutoring time.
Teachers also examined the students'self-assessments and determined a
correlation between accuracy and aresponse of "I knew it." Students whochecked the "I figured it out" indicatorwere also often accurate. The teachers
were pleased to see students using testtaking strategies of elimination andusing context clues.
Here we go again. Our students still don'thave a sense of the cardinal points. Wekeep asking questions that require themto use map skills, but they keep gettingthem wrong. Look here, just over 50percent correct. We have to focus oninterpreting maps every day It's not justabout using this for history and geography This is a life skill.
1%
18%
51%22%
8%
1%
1%
28%42%27%
20032005Advanced
0%3%Proficient
3%13%Basic
27%26%Below basic
24%27%Far below basic
46%31%
(n = 553)
AdvancedProficientBasicBelow basicFar below basic
(n = 333)
By the end of this conversation, theteachers decided to reteach some basic
concepts and show the students the
item analysis to focus them on thereasons for the correct and incorrectanswers.
Wouldn't that help them get test-formatpractice and also reinforce the biology?
Parsing MastcJY of a History Unit
Hoover's history teachers also analyzecommon formative assessments and
change their teaching strategies on thebasis of what they find. The departmentrecently piloted a metacognitive task incombination with a content assessment.
For each question students answered,they also indicated one of the followingfour descriptions of how they answered:
1 knew it, I figured it out, I guessed at it,or I don't care. During a discussion ofthis assessment, for the 9th grade courseFoundations of Democracy, teachersexamined a question that confused anumber of students (see fig. 1). Mr.Jacobs summarized the knowledge gapsthis question showed:
Let's start with Question 3. Only 61percent of the students got it right, andonly 38 percent of those who answeredcorrectly self-reported that they knew it.An additional 36 percent said they figuredit out, and 24 percent guessed at it. It'sinteresting that only 3 kids (of 241) didn'tcare about this question. 1 know that Itaught this. Most of the wrong answerswere still based on [students' under
standing of] democracy, but not the righttype of democracy I think this could be aquick fix. We need to make sure thatstudents really have a sense of the difference between direct and representativedemocracy I have an idea for a simulationthat could solidify this for students.
Mr. Jacobs described his idea for a
simulation, and the teachers agreed toreteach this concept. Mrs. Johnson thenturned their attention to Question 10:
Data reflect 10th grade scores onthe California Standards Test before
and after Hoover High implementedschoolwide formative assessment.
The Fruits of Precision Teaching
Although the joint action project withSan Diego State has ended, Hooverteachers continue to engage in somestep of this four-step process every
Asso CIATl 0 N FO R SUPE RVIS 10 N AN D CUR R I C UL U M DEVELOP MEN T 67
week, on the day students are releasedearly Hoover has experienced impres
sive gains in student achievement sinceadopting formative assessment schoolwide. As data shown in Figure 2 indicate, average student performance onthe California Standards Test in both
biology and history improved appreciably over the first two years thatHoover High has been involved in thisformative assessment process. In 2005,for example, 51 percent of Hoover's
10th graders scored at the basic level onthe California Standards Test in biology,compared with only 28 percent
achieving at the basic level in 2003 .Similarly, in 2005, 18 percent scored atthe proficient level on this test,compared with only 1 percent scoring atthe proficient level in 2003.
These changes came about because allHoover's teachers became more precisein their teaching. Collaborative itemanalyses and rich instructional conversations based on these analyses, character
ized by collegiality and respect, drovethese changes. The key to powerfulformative assessment, whether school
wide or class-specific, is for teachers totake action as soon as they have information about what students do and
don't understand. With this key, we canall teach with precision. IS!
ReferencesFisher, D., &: Frey, N. (2007). Checkingfor
understanding: Formative assessment tech
niques for your classroom. Alexandria, VA:Association for Supervision andCurriculum Development.
Fullan, M., Hill, P, &: Crevola, C. (2006).
Breakthrough. Thousand Oaks, CA:Corwin.
Langer, G. M., Colton, A. E., &: Goff, L. S.(2003). Collaborative analysis of student
work: Improving teaching and learning.
Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Douglas Fisher ([email protected])is Professor of Literacy and Nancy Frey([email protected]) is AssociateProfessor of Literacy at San Diego StateUniversity in California. Maria Grant([email protected]) is currently Assistant Professor of Secondary Education atCalifornia State University in Fullerton;Christine Johnson ([email protected]) is an educational consultant. Fisher
and Grant are authors of Better LearningThrough Structured Teaching: A Framework for Gradual Release of Resposibility(ASCD, in press).
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