Assessing All Things that Make a Student Teachable

Loretta Pardi
Harborside Community Center
East Boston, MA

Estelle Williams
North End Union
Boston, MA

During the Partnership Project, Loretta Pardi of Harborside
Community Center and Estelle Williams of the North End Union worked together to look at assessment that went beyond the content areas of the GED exam and look at how assessment fit into motivating students to take responsibility for their own learning.

We were originally interested in the Partnership Project because we expected it would help us as teachers. Teachers do not often get a chance to observe or work with other teachers, so we saw the Partnership Project as a good opportunity to work, talk and share around a common concern, in this case, assessment. Estelle was a first year GED teacher and Loretta has been teaching GED for three years and had been involved in alternative assessment for the same period.

During this project we hoped to share our experiences and concerns around teaching and assessment in a GED context. We also hoped we would have the opportunity to try new techniques or create whatever was needed to assess our students’ development and achievement. As a goal, we hoped to feel more confident handling the questions of assessment and student progress.

At our first meeting, we decided to address an issue that seemed most pressing for Estelle, namely finding an easy and accurate way to measure progress in math. At that meeting Loretta shared the assessment tools she had been using to assess student progress in math and the GED content areas. These tools were adapted from previous Adventures in Assessment volumes, as well as teacher-made tools from her program. Loretta and Estelle looked them over and chose one to try to adapt. During the discussion that day we also realized that, although we were from different sites and had different populations, we had many of the same classroom issues and experiences. Our students had a lot in common. The ways our students survived outside the classroom (e.g. lying, cheating, drugs, etc.) prevented them from participating in the group atmosphere of the classroom. They also had issues relating to peers and/or their teachers. Students were constantly challenging us as teachers and testing our ability to set limits and maintain control within the classroom.

When Spring was at its finest, our attendance was at its lowest. It was obvious through our conversations that our classroom situations were not improving. We realized the students lacked commitment to their achievement, class, peers and teachers. They also lacked belief in their ability to achieve goals and did not feel responsibility for their own progress or learning.

After careful thought we concluded that, perhaps we were concentrating too much of our effort on tracking the progress of students academically within the content areas of the GED. Students were not yet committed to their academic success and did not view social participation in the group setting of a class to be a realistic expectation. We regrouped and committed ourselves to a goal of assessing all things that make a student teachable.

We proceeded by asking ourselves the following questions. (We did not expect to answer all these questions at once.)

• How do we assess our effectiveness as teachers of GED with an individual?
• Do we need to assess our students’ ability to learn and achieve within normal boundaries?
• Should our students be held responsible for understanding and abiding by the same code of ethics as other school age students, e.g. K-12?
• Should we teach these (code of ethics) in Adult Education?
• Does the class schedule meet the needs of the students?
• Are we meeting the students’ needs by having a learning environment that is encouraging supportive and fair to all?

We wanted to develop a system that would encourage students’ commitment, beliefs and fairness to the group, as well as a tool to increase their self-esteem and encourage them to take responsibility for their learning. To do this in a timely fashion, we reviewed all the assessment tools we had from our own collections and the “Toolkit” revised a few, and put them together. We started with a daily journal that asked students to respond to several questions that would give students the opportunity to address an experience in the classroom.

This did not work. Students would talk about these topics in classes but were not willing to put anything in writing. It was also time consuming.
We had many discussions concerning how else we could encourage students to monitor their own progress in abilities not directly related to the content areas of the GED test itself. Many issues are vital not only to successful GED study but also to other areas in our students’ lives, such as the search for employment. Some issues we identified with our students through conferences and informally during class time were time organization, goals setting, and sustained commitment and actions towards short and long term goals.

We wanted to develop a tool to enable students to chart their own progress in these areas. After much thought we then came up with our Record of Participation (ROP) (see Figure 1). It would help students recognize what they have accomplished and what they need to do in order to attain goals.

Our Record of Participation asked the instructor to evaluate student progress and for the student to evaluate his/her own progress. Because the record is designed to be completed on a regular basis, the student will reflect on his/her activities in a timely fashion; s/he can recognize the quality of his/her participation for the past week, and then hopefully build on that success or address specific issues in the coming weeks. Plans for the future would be documented here and show long and short term goals.

This system (ROP) includes a student’s self evaluation/teacher evaluation and a discussion period for the student and teacher to talk about their assessments and possible next steps.

In the first weeks of using the record with my (Loretta) class, I found that most of the students tended to give themselves lower ratings than I gave them. This not entirely unexpected result gave rise to a useful class discussion about low self esteem. As the weeks progressed, however, and the class became accustomed to the weekly routine of reflection and assessment, I found that we usually concurred. Whenever noticeable discrepancies occurred between a student assessment and our own, we took the opportunity to talk with that student.

A student believed she deserved a ‘3’ in her math area. She believed that she accomplished obtaining and using information. I had rated her a ‘1.’ because she had not advanced according to her goal plan. Her success was a repeat of the preceding months and she had not advanced since then. A discussion of her achievement and an explanation followed. The student revealed she did not want to leave the comfort zone she was in and move into algebra. She was encouraged to address her fears, as it was on her goal plan. She was also assured of support and help with her move. A discussion about her learning style followed and a plan was put into place for her to approach the new work.

Another student assessed her attendance one month as a ‘3’ , when. in fact, she had missed half of the class time through absences and tardiness. She was dismayed to see that I had assessed her attendance at ‘1’ . We sat down and discussed the issue, both presenting our points of view. In subsequent weeks her punctuality improved but she still missed many classes. She maintained her self assessment at 3 while my assessment of her on this particular issue rose to 2.

The Record of Participation proved to be very useful as an ongoing assessment tool. It was very helpful in keeping students focussed on their goals and assuring accountability and progress, when used in conjunction with a learning contract completed at the beginning of cycle. We had a very short time to test out our tool; students would benefit from using the tool for a year. It will be exciting to spend the year using the tools and comparing previous attempts at assessment and refine our tool so that it better meets the needs of the students.

Conclusion
The process of mentoring gave us an opportunity to plan and experiment with tools and ideas that we would have not normally had the time or support to do. It also enabled us to come up with the most complete, accurate and efficient way to access the whole student as a person who is developing in a new environment and to look more closely at those factors that would affect his or her full participation in the class or towards attainment of a goal. The process also gave us an opportunity to work together as professionals, sharing ideas and issues and using our experiences and expertise to solve critical issues that face our students in the classroom.

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 7 (December 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.