My professors in the English education program at Central Michigan University taught me to use Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) Understanding by Design and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) frameworks as starting points for designing assessment. Though these concepts seemed odd to me at first – What do you mean I should consider what my students should know before selecting a book? Is a poster really demonstrating the same knowledge as a multiple choice test? – I quickly added these frameworks to my instructional toolkit. In my first few years of professional practice, I sought to make creative and equitable forms of assessment. If you had asked me a few weeks ago if I had been successful in making creative assessments, I would have said yes. 

I likely would have backed up this answer by describing the RAFT writing for The Great Gatsby I created or the other creative outlets such as Flip(grid), Kahoot!, and Jeopardy I have used. After reading Kohn (2011) and Stommel (2018), I realized despite my best intentions, most of my summative assessments merely perpetuate the cycle of grading my students have been caught in for years. Since the 1940s, the United States’ public school system has perpetuated “absurd levels of grading, test taking, and standardized assessments” (Stommel, 2018, para 3). I add to this absurdity through my grading of my so-called, creative assessments. I am guilty of using grades “as a mechanism for controlling students rather than as a necessary or constructive way to report information about their performance” (Kohn, 2011, p. 8). Going into this week’s creative assessment project, I wanted to work with ideas of low-stakes assessment and ungrading in order to not only push my creativity, but reframe the purpose of assessment in my classroom. 

Though I was taught to start with Understanding by Design framework (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) that instructs teachers to first think of outcomes before content, the reality of my process more closely aligns with Flower’s (2021) Roundabout Design. My school requires me to teach certain texts, so with content in mind first, I then consider outcomes. In 11th grade, students read Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. In addition to following the Common Core State Standards I must teach to, I want students to be able to discuss how the sociological context of the play impacts the characters in it and be able to draw connections from the play to the world they know today. Before they can do that, my students must first be able to first understand and interpret a story. This aligns with Wiggins and McTighe’s (2005) second facet, interpretation, of their Six Facets of Understanding. 

After choosing content and desired outcomes, I considered what evidence of interpretation would be acceptable after reading Act 1 of A Raisin in the Sun. The Triangle, Square, Circle, method would serve well as a low stakes assessment for this purpose. Students are given a sheet with the three shapes on it. In the triangle they make connections, in the square they list points learned, and in the circle students ask questions. 

I added some directions to help guide students through the assessment, but not so many it would unduly constrain their responses.

Working with the idea of ungrading, instead of creating a rubric or listing the amount of points students will receive for completing this assessment, I tell students they will receive feedback from me as“feedback. . . [is] much more useful in the absence of letter or number ratings” (Kohn, 2011, p. 8). This way, I can affirm the interpretations students make, answer questions they have, and guide them to a meaning they should know going forward. This also gives me the opportunity to see where the students’ thoughts are, and serve as an important formative assessment to guide the rest of my teaching. 

To me, creative assessment not only considers multiple ways of demonstrating knowledge in order to be culturally responsive and create a classroom environment where students are interested in learning and not merely motivated by extrinsic grades, but moves away from the constant cycle of grading students are subjected to. After all, in the real world, people do not receive grades, their knowledge is assessed and evaluated in authentic ways such as a plumber identifying what is wrong with a toilet, or performing physical therapy exercises with the correct form. My assessments of my students should do the same.

References

Flower, D. (2021, January 11). Planning a great online class through roundabout design. Faculty Focus.

Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Alfie Kohn. https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/

Stommell, J. (2018, March, 11). How to ungrade. Jesse Stommel. https://www.jessestommel.com/how-to-ungrade

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design, (2nd Ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

I tend to favor assessments that fit within the mid-to-upper levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (University of Central Florida, n.d.). Most often this results in summative assessments that privilege creation of an artifact. This is due to my belief that “assessment, if not done with equity in mind, privileges and validates certain types of learning and evidence of learning over others, can hinder the validation of multiple means of demonstration, and can reinforce within students false notions that they do not belong in . . . education” (Montenegro and Jankowski, 2017, p. 5). However, this belief and its impact on my practice has made traditional data collection difficult for me. While I understand and can calculate the statistical concepts – such as mean, median, mode, range, and standard deviation – used in education for data collection and analysis, I have struggled to connect them to my actual practice.

After all, it is much easier to quantify results from a behaviorist-inspired test with true and false or multiple choice questions (Watson, 1905). Either the learner knew the answer or they got it wrong. In contrast, by privileging assessments that allow for multiple ways of knowing and demonstrating knowledge, I am incorporating culturally relevant pedagogy into my practice (Ladson-Billings, 1995). This shows my students I value them, but makes it difficult for me to quantify the subsequent data. How do I compare a student who wrote a poem compared to a student who wrote an article? When I call a student to my desk and ask them to explain their thinking for a written answer, should not that oral response count as a demonstration of knowledge? Therefore, my data usually ends up being a loose amalgamation of grades, informal conversations, and assignments students turn in that I view as individual progression rather than something scientific where I look at a class as a whole. 

Therefore, the idea of sorting through data based on a particular lens has been helpful to me. If I use a specific lens – age, gender, ethnicity, race, language, etc. – I can gather whole class information to guide my designs. 

In a recent assessment I intentionally considered gender in my design and as source of data. The assessment itself is evaluating two areas: the ability of students to apply Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning (CER) to writing in drama, and their ability to analyze a play from a dramaturge’s perspective. By examining student responses through the lens of gender – and applying a few mathematical concepts –  I can ask myself the following questions: 

• What gender of students more effectively fulfilled the requirements of the CER prompt?
• Do I notice similar  gender trends in writing in my Drama class as I do in my English classes? 
• When I leave feedback on their writing, does my feedback privilege one gender of students over another? 
• When students analyze the play, what themes are they picking up on, and is there a difference between gender?
  • What does this reveal about how students analyze plays? 
• Do students of certain genders favor one dramaturgical aspect over another?
  • Do boys favor tech and girls acting? 
• Did students across genders do well expressing themselves this way, or should I evaluate the structure and format of this assessment? 

These questions allow me to not only quantify information in a way I might previously have thought difficult in a humanities course, but allows me to evaluate my teaching. If one group of students is performing better on this assessment than another, I need to investigate how I am teaching as well as how I am evaluating my students. I may need to make changes so all of my students can learn to the best of their ability. Paying attention to the data and using it to inform my instruction is one way to do this. 

References 

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. 

American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491. https://doi.org/10.2307/1163320

Montenegro, E., & Jankowski, N. A. (2017). Equity and assessment: Moving towards culturally responsive assessment. (Occasional Paper No. 29). University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA).

University of Central Florida. (n.d.). Bloom’s Taxonomy. https://fctl.ucf.edu/teaching-resources/course-design/blooms-taxonomy

Watson, J. B. (1905). Contributions to the study of the behavior of lower organisms. Psychological Bulletin, 2(4), 144-145.