Assessment is a key part of being a teacher. Our teaching programs all revolve around it; we always need to know what our students need to be able to do before we think about teaching them how to do it. 

Assessment often gets a bad rap for being strict and berating a student’s self-esteem. There are also huge problems in certain schools and contexts with competition between students around assessment and grades. 

Assessment is a critical part of teaching, and it is critical for teachers to get it right. Here are a few common assessment strategies that you can adapt to your classroom to get the best evidence of learning out of your students.

Quizzes

Quizzes can be a great way to determine how much your students know as you work through a unit. 

The real skill of quizzes is how you use them. Sure, you can use a quiz to get students to demonstrate what they’ve learnt after finishing a particular topic. The power of quizzes is when you don’t count them towards a student’s grade. 

Quizzes can be done before you’ve taught anything. Your students always come to your classroom with something already in their heads, and a quiz can be a good way for you
(and them) to identify what that is. 

Also, don’t just mark your quizzes and hand them back to the students. There is real power in getting them to mark themselves, mark one of their peers’ work, and reflect on how they scored against certain success criteria. 

Quizzes can be a quick and easy activity in lessons, but they can also be incredibly powerful for learning if you do a little more with them afterwards!

Brainstorming

Some students hate brainstorming, and I get it. They often seem like an additional complicated layer over an already difficult mental process. 

The idea of brainstorming, which is throwing out ideas and trying to organise them, can demonstrate what a student knows and give them leads for where they might want to go next. Getting students to organise and categorise their ideas and thoughts also helps them learn how to prioritise and evaluate their ideas, which is relatively high on Bloom’s Taxonomy. 

You could do this in the form of a mind map. A Venn Diagram is also a great way to get students to think about comparing different ideas. Lotus diagrams are also a great way for students to brainstorm as it encourages them to come up with a certain number of ideas, which may mean that they either need to cut some out or stretch themselves to come up with more. 

Brainstorming can be a great thing to do collaboratively before starting a new topic or project, but make sure that students get used to brainstorming independently. Brainstorming is a valuable life skill, and going through the entire process of generating, ordering and evaluating by yourself becomes second nature with some practice.

Investigations

You’ve probably heard the word investigation commonly used when referring to a summative task. You may only have heard it describe a final project or assessment task.  Doing an investigation earlier on in a unit of work can be a powerful tool for exploration and learning.

Investigations can be a great way for students to explore. Without the pressure of getting a final grade that will go towards their report, investigations can be a way to play around with an idea and figure things out. 

Many students don’t really know how to do an investigation. One of the strategies that I’ve found works best is to start the task in a lesson and give them absolutely no access to technology. No Google, no YouTube, nothing.

They’ll need to think for themselves first. 

This will really help them deconstruct the problem and use their own prior knowledge to create leads that they might want to explore. Once they’ve got to this point, setting them off with tech will have a much different, more creative effect than giving it to them right away. Remember, the purpose of an investigation is to explore. There should be twists, turns, and dead-ends along the way. 

Hypotheticals

This is another great way that you can get some creativity out of your students. 

Give them a situation or historical event. Next, just ask them.. What if? What if this had happened instead? What if we didn’t know about this? What would happen then?

This is a great way for students to form conclusions when there isn’t a “correct” answer. Many students get hung up on being right as opposed to learning a skill or how to apply the concepts that they know. 

No matter what conclusion a student draws, they’re going to have to back it up. They’re going to have to do this themselves too, as it’s very unlikely that someone on the internet has gone down the exact path that you’re asking them too. 

Formative assessment strategies can really help students build their skills and capacity. Without the grade looming over them, students have the agency to explore and play around with concepts and ideas. 

Include some of these formative assessment strategies in your lessons and get your students learning freely.