Education Week - October 22, 2014 - S20

S20 |
EDUCATION WEEK OCTOBER 22, 2014
n
Taking Stock of Personalized Learning > www.edweek.org/go/personalized
Formative-Assessment Tools
Shape Personalized Lessons
W
Educators are
evaluating an
array of
testing and
curricular
products and
services to
see what
works
hen he was
teaching
kindergarten,
Shawn
C. Rubin
used a
clipboard
and green,
yellow, and red crayons to track students'
progress on paper. Adjusting
his teaching for each student's ability
level had the greatest possibility for
advancing learning, he said, but it was
also the most difficult assessment approach
to do.
learning-a mix of face-to-face and
online education-in all Rhode Island
school districts and charter schools, he
sees the magnitude of the formativeassessment
challenge multiplied
exponentially. Elementary
teachers need to evaluate
"30 students a day in six
subject areas with two competencies
in each subject,
and high school teachers
might be tracking 200 students
in one subject," said
Mr. Rubin, the director of blended
learning for the nonprofit Highlander
Institute, a Providence, R.I.-based community
of educators and professionals,
and the ceo and co-founder of Metryx,
a Providence-based company that has
designed an ed-tech tool that allows
teachers to track and analyze student
mastery without crayons.
Metryx is just one of dozens of edtech
products on the market today
competing to help teachers and students
with some aspect of the formative-assessment
process, in which educators
gauge learners' understanding
to pinpoint precisely what each has
mastered, and adjusts teaching
accordingly. The competition
is heating up, in
large part because formative
assessments'
on-the-spot feedback
about student mastery
lies at the heart of scaling
personalized learning.
But truly effective formative
assessments
need to go beyond
simply evaluating
students' knowledge
against standards
and creating
bar charts and
graphs to show
degrees of mastery,
say some observers.
The most important
question is: "How does
this support the learning
process?" said Margaret
Heritage, the assistant director
for professional development
for the National Center for Research
on Evaluation, Standards, & Student
Testing, or cresst, at the University of
California, Los Angeles. She describes
formative assessment as an embedded
process in which teachers are collecting
evidence while students are learning.
In evaluating the growing collection
of formative-assessment products on
the market, Ms. Heritage said educators
should be asking whether those
products give them the items or tools
that are linked to their immediate
lesson goals and that provide actionable
information. "Most things I see
out there don't do that," she said.
Now working to advance blended Market Demand Rising
By
Michele
Molnar
Analyzing growth trends in the testing-
and assessment-market segments,
"we found a lot of excitement-and
therefore, demand-around
formative, adaptive assessments
that support
personalized learning,"
said John Richards, the
president of Consulting
Services for Education
and the author of "Behind
the Data: PreK-12 Testing
and Assessment Market,"
"
a report that the Washington-based
Software & Information Industry Association
was finalizing at press time.
Formative-assessment products are
now capturing some of the most sophisticated
and nuanced learning measurements,
including assessing skills
such as collaboration, problem-solving,
and conceptual understanding, according
to Mr. Richards.
Educational technology products
that help conduct formative assessments
are being packaged in three
distinct ways, said Julia F. Freeland, a
research fellow for the Clayton Christensen
Institute, a San Mateo, Calif.based
think tank that studies
trends in personalized learning.
It is embedded in online curricula,
such
as ST
As
content
becomes more
widespread and
commoditized, it's going to be
all about online assessments
to verify what students
know."
THE MARKET
FOR FORMATIVETESTING
TOOLS
Educators who want immediate feedback about their student comprehension
have a growing list of ed-tech products to choose from to help them evaluate
student mastery more quickly, and adjust their teaching accordingly. Some of
the products that have made their way into schools include:
Acuity
Formative assessments used by more
than 1,000 districts.
ForAllRubrics
A portable tool where assessments
can be uploaded, created, or
borrowed via mobile devices.
InfuseLearning
A student-response assessment
tool for "bring your own device"
environments.
MasteryConnect
A cloud-based software platform
for educators to share and find
assessments and resources, track
mastery of standards, and use
built-in grading tools.
Metryx
A tool to import standards, track
mastery, and analyze results to
differentiate teaching via mobile
devices.
Naiku
Standards-based mobile formativeassessment
tool.
Math, Lexia Learning, and DreamBox
Learning; it is offered as a stand-alone
assessment tool like MasteryConnect
and its recent acquisition Socrative;
and it is provided as part of adaptivelearning
platforms such as Knewton,
(See related story, Page S6) that aggregate
data from numerous assessments
and use those results to generate recommendations
for individualized
learning pathways.
For products that embed quesJULIA
F. FREELAND
tions in online curricula, Ms.
Freeland observes varying levels
of trust among educators about
the quality of those assessments.
In response to that concern,
some ed-tech providers-such as
MasteryConnect and Renaissance
Learning with its STAR Custom-
rely in whole or in part on teachersubmitted
assessments that
can give educators the morecustomized
feedback they
want.
Research Fellow, Clayton
Christensen Institute for
Disruptive Innovation
Increasingly, ed-tech
Taskstream
Portfolio- and data-management
system that aims to support
outcomes-based assessment.
SOURCES: Excerpted from "Assessing Deeper
Learning: A Survey of Performance Assessment
and Mastery-Tracking Tools" a report produced
by Getting Smart; Education Week
Nutmeg Education
Assessment-building based on a
question bank submitted by teachers,
or teachers can create their own, via
mobile devices.
Schoolnet
Pearson's instructional management
system, which includes formativeassessment
tools.
Socrative
A tool to track student performance,
aggregate results, and provide
visuals to show students' strengths
and areas in need of improvement.
SparkWorks
Competency- and cloud-based
software for online and mobile
adaptive learning.
companies are matching their content
and questions to specific standards,
including the Common Core State
Standards, which can be problematic.
"A single question could be tagged
against one or multiple standards,"
she said. If a student answers a multiple-standard
question incorrectly, it
can cause confusion for teachers. "How
are they expected to unbundle that,"
she asked.
Common Core Fuels Interest
The expected rollout this school
year of the more complex commoncore
tests from the Partnership for
Assessment of Readiness for College
and Careers, or parcc, and the
Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium
brings with it an increasing
interest in formative testing that goes
beyond multiple choice and true/false
responses. Some questions will require
test takers to demonstrate the
PAGE S23 >
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Education Week - October 22, 2014

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