home
Align Instruction and
Assessment
How Have States Implemented AYP?
How Do Districts Support Schools to Meet AYP?
How Do Schools Meet AYP?


A major shift for teachers in a standards-based system is their loss of autonomy in teaching whatever they determined to be important. Teachers are now responsible for — and soon to be held accountable for — moving their students to proficiency on their state's content standards. Consequently, they must re-examine their instructional program to ensure that classroom tasks and assignment are aligned with the content standards they are expected to teach and that are assessed by the state.
 
If teachers mapped their current instructional assignments and class work to the content standards, they would likely see a number of tasks and assignments that were not aligned. If teachers walked through the classrooms in their school to examine the student work on bulletin boards, in journals or on student's desks, they would also see that many teachers have not yet weeded out those assignments and class work not related to state content standards. Because instructional time is at a premium, and the charge to take all students to proficiency is a challenging one, teachers must use their instructional time effectively.
 
There is an increasing awareness of the disparities among state content standards, the formal curriculum, the taught curriculum, and assessments in the day-to-day activities in classrooms. This lack of alignment inevitably results in poor test scores on state assessments. It stands to reason that if what is taught is not closely aligned with what is assessed students will miss the mark. A perfectly aligned instructional system would include a curriculum that addresses the state content standards, instruction that is based on the curriculum, and assessments that identify opportunities for students to demonstrate what they know and can do on the state content standards.
 
Not only do instructional tasks and assignments need to be aligned to the content standards, so do classroom assessments need to be aligned. In fact, it would make the most sense to design an opportunity for students to show what they understand and/or can do as part of every task and assignment. In an online article in the Phi Beta Kappan entitled, "In the Black Box", authors Black and Wiliam assert, "To begin at the beginning, the choice of tasks for classroom work and homework is important. Tasks have to be justified in terms of the learning aims that they serve, and they can work well only if opportunities for pupils to communicate their evolving understanding are built into the planning. Discussion, observation of activities, and marking of written work can all be used to provide those opportunities, but it is then important to look at or listen carefully to the talk, the writing, and the actions through which pupils develop and display the state of their understanding. Thus we maintain that opportunities for pupils to express their understanding should be designed into any piece of teaching, for this will initiate the interaction through which formative assessment aids learning."
 
This tight alignment has the added advantage of giving teachers a reason to weed out some current tasks and assignments and even more of a time saver, to stop grading student work that isn't related to indicators or doesn't give any useful diagnostic information. Activities graded for the sole purpose of sorting students according to level of achievement are simply not useful in understanding where students are and what help they need to improve.
 
In the same way that formative assessments provide the teacher some insight into what the student understands, comments that teachers write on student work should provide the student some information about their performance and some guidance about how to improve their work. Letter grades, smiley faces, or comments such as "good work" don't provide useful information. Comments need to be focused on what the task was meant to assess. For example, if a student was asked to read a story and draw an inference and support it with evidence from the text, then comments should focus on the student's demonstration or lack thereof to do that task in a proficient manner. It would not make sense to comment on the student's spelling errors when trying to help the student understand how to find evidence to support an inference. Teachers and students benefit the most from assignments when they have a common understanding of what is being asked and what constitutes proficient work.
 
Analyzing teacher assignments and assessments can reveal what cognitive level of thinking is being called for and the intellectual rigor expected for the type of content level as well as the degree to which it matches content standard indicators. A study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research of 1,400 pieces of student work in Chicago Public Schools found that 70% of the work "presented either no challenge or minimal challenge to the students. They also found that if students were given more challenging assignments, they did higher quality work." Furthermore, students who received assignments requiring more challenging intellectual work also achieved greater than average gains on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills in reading and mathematics, and demonstrated higher performance in reading, mathematics, and writing on the Illinois Goals Assessment Program.
 
Black and Wiliam describe what research has shown to be the most important difficulties with assessment which they define as effective learning, negative impact, and managerial role.




Effective Learning
  • "The tests used by teachers encourage rote and superficial learning even when teachers say they want to develop understanding; many teachers seem unaware of the inconsistency.
  • The questions and other methods teachers use are not shared with other teachers in the same school, and they are not critically reviewed in relation to what they actually assess.
  • For primary teachers particularly, there is a tendency to emphasize quantity and presentation of work and to neglect its quality in relation to learning.

Negative Impact
  • The giving of marks and the grading function are overemphasized, while the giving of useful advice and the learning function are underemphasized.
  • Approaches are used in which pupils are compared with one another, the prime purpose of which seems to them to be competition rather than personal improvement; in consequence, assessment feedback teaches low-achieving pupils that they lack "ability," causing them to come to believe that they are not able to learn.

Managerial Role
  • Teachers' feedback to pupils seems to serve social and managerial functions, often at the expense of the learning function.
  • Teachers are often able to predict pupils' results on external tests because their own tests imitate them, but at the same time teachers know too little about their pupils' learning needs.
  • The collection of marks to fill in records is given higher priority than the analysis of pupils' work to discern learning needs; furthermore, some teachers pay no attention to the assessment records of their pupils' previous teachers."
Understanding that "students can do no better than the assignments they are given," the Education Trust created a Standards in Practice (SIP) process for teachers to ensure that classroom assignments are rigorous and aligned with high standards. Their SIP model guides teams of teachers through six steps:
  1. "We all complete the assignment or task.
  2. We analyze the demands of the assignment or task.
  3. We identify the standards that apply to this assignment.
  4. We generate a rough rubric for this assignment from the standards and the assignment.
  5. We score the student work, using the rubric.
  6. We ask: Will this work meet the standards? If not, what are we going to do about it? We then plan action at the classroom level to ensure that all students meet the standards."

Resources for Aligning Instruction and Assessment with Content Standards
Online Technical Assistance
 
Examining Classroom Assignments and Assessments is a workshop on the School Improvement in Maryland Web site for school leaders to expand their understanding of how to align student work.
 
"Standards in Practice," on the Educational Trust Web site, describes a team-based professional development strategy for aligning assignments or programs with content standards.
 
Online Articles
 
"Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment" by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam in the Phi Delta Kappan argues there is firm evidence showing that formative assessment is an essential component of classroom work and that its development can raise standards of achievement.
 
"Authentic Intellectual Work and Standardized Tests: Conflict or Coexistence?" by Fred M. Newmann, Anthony S. Bryk, and Jenny K. Nagaoka describes findings from a study of the quality of student work in Chicago schools and the relationship of the work to student performance on standardized tests.
 
"Teachers Learn from Looking Together at Student Work" in Education World examines two approaches that teachers are using to look at student work.
 
Managing Alternative Assessment is a tool for teachers to reflect on their learning goals and align authentic assessment tasks to reach their goals.
 
 


Developed by hillcrest and main, inc. to support student achievement