1. Preparing Your Assessment Plan
TEP II and Student Teaching
Guest Lecture to Methods students Spring 2014
Dr Finch

2. What and Why Do You Plan Assessment?
As part of the “Backwards Planning” principle (Wiggins) you must START your planning with standards and clear targets of what the student must know and be able to do to demonstrate standard mastery.
To demonstrate your mastery of teaching professional standard ASSESSMENT, you will submit your Assessment Plan for review to your instructor in the course and on Live Text.

3. Begin by thinking of a unit and standard you will teach…
Clear Targets-standards, practices, objectives, focus domains
What do you want the student to know, or do?
Apply the Planning Principle or Backward Design to ensure alignment of target, assessment, and instruction!

4. How Will You Assess This Target?
Pre-test to activate prior learning and establish a baseline for measuring learning gains.
Plan for a proper Balance of formative & summative assessments. (many more formative!)
Plan Multiple Means of assessment to engage all learners and triangulate your data.
Match your learning objectives with assessment types (authentic, performance, SR, CRA, informal).

5. For Manageability, Remember the Sampling Rule
Every assessment is only a SAMPLE of the domain of learning.
In other words, you don’t assess everything,
And it is perfectly valid and reliable to SELECT a representative sample of learning,
From which evidence you can infer how well/much students have learned.
Think of the political phone polls-from a representative, structured sample, pollsters infer the responses of the whole population.

6. So You Might…
Decide that three questions for each SPI will suffice to provide evidence of mastery.
Of course, validity declines for very small samples. But even your one question Exit Ticket has some validity from which you may infer the learning of the entire lesson.

7. Model & Structure Processes that:
Engage learners in understanding quality work and how they can improve (Frequent Descriptive Feedback is an indicator of Level 5 Teacher performance on the TEAM Rubric!)
Examine their own thinking & learning (metacognitive, reasoning, conceptual understanding & application).
Strive to lead students to Self-Assess (also a Level 5 indicator).

8. Plan for Data Collection & Analysis
May collaborate in Common Assessment & analysis.
Prepare Item Analysis to diagnose learning gaps & strengths and to refine the questions/assessment. Create a scale of estimates of learning gains and assign Value Added levels.
Devise Rubrics to guide students to self-assessment, provide clear targets and feedback, and ensure reliability. Build in rigor with clear descriptions of Advanced performance.
Reflect on the unit-”Should’ve, Could’ve…” (capture your own learning and refine the lessons). Collaborate & share.

9. Preparing your Assessment Plan for TEP II Live Text Portfolio (Assessment Standard)
1. Write a brief description of HOW you would assess a Unit. Specify the grade and standards. Be sure to include a "Balanced Approach" including "multiple means of assessment," such as formative, summative, frequent informal and formal, exit tickets, assignments, etc. Plan for the various Types of Assessment. What forms of questions would you use and why? Plan for a Pre-assessment.  Apply the Principles of assessment explicitly in a way that demonstrates your understanding.

10. Assessment Plan cont.
2. Explain how will you grade the summative and collect data from the Pre- and Post-assessments. ( For example, you could prepare a spreadsheet tracking student mastery of standards, or an item analysis). Plan to use rubrics to grade writing, projects or performances. 

11. Assessment Plan concluded
During student teaching you will actually create the entire assessments, rubrics and spreadsheets in your "Evidence of Student Learning Projects" for each placement. (You saw these at the Symposium.) For now, just a few descriptive paragraphs and sample questions will let me know how well you understand assessment.