Reimagining American education: Possible futures for equitable educational assessment

COVID-19 provides us an opportunity to “break with the past and imagine our world anew,” as Arundhati Roy (2020) writes. In the first year of the pandemic, we eased up on grades, put standardized testing on pause, and accommodated the variety of ways students needed to engage with schoolwork. It was often uncomfortable to do so, and many of us have been eager to return to things as they were. But many of us have been just as eager to let go of old educational practices, and we’ve asked ourselves whether it might be possible to move forward “lightly, with little luggage,” as Roy puts it, “ready to imagine another world.”

Which of the familiar kinds of school and classroom assessment should we take with us, and which should we leave behind? Looking forward, how can we ensure that our assessment practices are more valid, useful, and just? And what has the pandemic taught us that we should keep in mind as we build new assessment systems?

Assessment as creation

After World War II, the Italian Women’s Union opened and ran 60 self-managed preschools in the province of Reggio Emilia. Eight of these schools would become foundational for establishing Reggio Emilia as a model for early childhood education that cultivates what one of its founders, Loris Malaguzzi, called “100 Languages of Children,” meaning the many ways children think, speak, listen, sing, love, and come to understand the world around them.

A hallmark of assessment in a Reggio school is the effort to document children’s thinking, as revealed in the things they make and say. A Reggio school is filled with students’ creations, and if anybody has a question about what those students are learning, they can go look at the work posted on the wall, talk to a child, or peruse a notebook filled with images and snippets of conversation among children or between a child and their teacher.

Students’ creative work showcases their imagination, but it can also show what they know and can do and what they think is important to communicate to others.

Inspired by the Reggio approach, we can imagine a better and more equitable system of assessment that centers on students’ creations. Students’ creative work showcases their imagination, but it can also show what they know and can do and what they think is important to communicate to others. For example, students in a high school biology class studying antibiotic resistance — a topic of obvious relevance today — might be given the prompt: How can we communicate what we’ve learned to people to protect their own health and that of their families and communities? In response, they might decide to create a poster to educate their peers about how antibiotic resistance happens. Their goal is to share important information with other students. But at the same time, the poster also demonstrates what they’ve learned about this topic (InquiryHub Partnership & NextGen Science Storylines, 2018). The poster serves as the culminating assessment in the unit.

There are a few notable features about an assessment like this. For one, students have some degree of choice in what to create. For instance, some make posters, but others choose to make videos. Second, the prompts given to the students are carefully aligned with a district-level tool that helps teachers compile portfolios that document students’ progress toward various curricular goals (in this case, being able to engage in the science practice of “developing and using a model to explain phenomena”). Third, this assessment is not just a classroom exercise: Students are creating a real-world product that will be shared with others as part of the school’s health program.

Many schools today use performance assessments like these to gauge student learning. Capstone projects, extended research papers, and creative performances all provide opportunities for students to synthesize what they have learned and apply it in a way that appeals to them. Such assessments also have the potential to be both meaningful and consequential, if they are designed for students to share their learning with external audiences and not just the teacher (Lemke et al., 2015).

Beyond letters and numbers

It is hard to imagine a world without letter grades or without quizzes and tests scored out of 100 points. The letters and numbers persist in part because they make it easy for us to compare students to one another. But what if the main purpose of classroom assessment were to help students develop their thinking or imagine possible futures (e.g., Penuel & Shepard, 2016)?

In her book, Point-less: An English Teacher’s Guide to More Meaningful Grading, Sarah Zerwin (2020) describes practices she has been using for years to recenter grading on assessing progress toward the learning goals that matter most, while giving students more agency in determining how they will be assessed. Instead of putting in effort just to earn a grade, students engage in tasks that directly support learning goals. Students can redo work at any time and turn it in for credit. At the end of the term, students conference with their teachers about their grades, using a checklist of learning goals. Students use the checklist to choose a grade they think they have earned. Zerwin doesn’t do away with grades, which are required in her school, but her system keeps the focus on learning goals, rather than on letters or numbers that too often feel disconnected from learning. Throughout the term, Zerwin creates a culture where peers learn to give, receive, and use feedback, and she works with students to identify multiple ways their creations can show evidence of learning, instead of relying solely on tests.

Promoting a more equitable system of assessment requires teachers to focus on how students’ work (and conversations about their work) change over time, rather than measuring students against a single standard. Teachers will also need to be prepared to value multiple forms of communication (Gutiérrez, 2014) and avoid relying on dominant assumptions about what “good work” looks like. As Asao Inoue (2015) argues, students’ academic work is often judged according to unexamined white racial norms and expectations, and creating an anti-racist ecology of assessment requires an environment in which many different cultural positions are recognized and honored.

Grounding assessment systems in cultural theories of learning

In most schools today, teachers begin with standards and use them to guide what they teach and what aspects of student learning they assess. They do not often stop to think about the theories of learning that underlie either the goals they set or how they might help students achieve them. A few years ago, my colleagues and I (Shepard, Penuel, & Davidson, 2017) reviewed a wide range of approaches to improving assessment, and we found that only those approaches that were grounded in robust theories of learning showed promise. Specifically, we argued that the most robust theories of learning began with the premise that learning is a cultural phenomenon. When we are learning, we are not just acquiring new ideas and skills, we are becoming different kinds of people as we observe and engage in activities in our families and communities (Lee et al., 2020; Rogoff, 2014). What we learn depends on the ways that we are allowed to participate in those activities, including the roles we can take on and opportunities we have for self-expression (Nasir & Hand, 2008).

If we begin with the premise that all learning is cultural, a focus on equity demands we consider whose cultures are represented and centered in the classroom, as Inoue (2015) does in his call for anti-racist writing assessments. In addition, it invites us to ask questions about how assessment supports and fits in with the kind of learning culture we want to create in classrooms. If we value students helping each other, how do our grading schemes focused on individual work need to change? If we want classrooms where students’ everyday language is valued, how do our rubrics need to shift to accommodate varied ways of expressing understandings? How can our culminating assessment tasks provide opportunities for students to apply knowledge and engage their civic imaginations?

One way we can promote equitable learning cultures is to elicit, value, and build on students’ insights, perspectives, and experiences in the classroom, particularly those of students from underserved communities (Bang et al., 2017). In a science classroom, that might mean eliciting students’ initial ideas about a phenomenon that the class is studying and learning to interpret them not as misconceptions to be destroyed as soon as possible, but as potential stepping stones to learning (Campbell, Schwarz, & Windschitl, 2016). It might also require the teacher to develop skill in listening carefully to the substance of students’ ideas with an attitude of curiosity, rather than evaluation (Warren & Rosbery, 2011).

Connecting families, communities, and schools

One of the strengths of the Reggio Emilia approach to assessment is that the documentation collected to show student learning serves as an avenue for communication among families, communities, and schools, all centered on students’ creations. In modern accountability systems, the possibility of using assessment for connection is largely secondary to the functions of monitoring, rewarding, and sanctioning students and schools for their performance. Yet it is possible to imagine such systems that make connection more of a focus.

One example is the Learning in Places Project, led by Megan Bang, Carrie Tzou, and Mary Margaret Welch (Seattle Public Schools) and Sharon Siehl (Tilth Alliance). The project uses “family walks” through the neighborhood or in a park to share their learning about ethical “should we” questions involving our relation to the places and lands where we live, like “Should we rake leaves in our yard?” and “Should we hang bird feeders in the trees where we notice birds?” Students engage in science investigations to answer questions about what they and the members of their community consider important. At the conclusion of the unit, the class comes up with a recommendation for shared action based on their investigations and deliberations. They then share their answers to the “should we” questions with family and community members and encourage them to make the changes they can to their everyday lives, based on their findings. For example, a family might decide to rake leaves and put them in a single area, guided by the values of keeping their streets from flooding, maintaining healthy soil, and offering resources to help organisms that live in the soil and use the leaves for food to thrive.

Reconsidering large-scale testing

Considering learning as a cultural phenomenon requires big shifts in the ways we design and use classroom assessments. It is hard to support big shifts in practice without models to learn from and curriculum materials like those from the Learning in Places project that embody a new vision. Large-scale testing systems are intended to be curriculum-neutral, leaving it up to local educators and schools to decide how to meet standards. But decades of research have shown that it’s hard to create systemic change that works toward equity without changing curricula and offering sustained high-quality professional learning opportunities for teachers (Kirp, 2013; Short & Hirsh, 2020).

At the same time, there is little evidence that simply implementing high-stakes testing can compel improvements to learning and reduce achievement gaps (National Research Council, 2011). When we focus on achievement gaps as the problem to be solved, which is what tends to happen when we make testing the primary lever for improvement, we are less likely to hold systems accountable for equity or to search for systemic solutions to the gaps uncovered through testing.

In our InquiryHub partnership, we are exploring what it might mean on a small scale to create a system of assessment that puts curriculum and equitable teaching, instead of testing, at the center. The multicomponent system — currently being implemented on a small scale in a secondary science program in a large school district — includes curriculum materials, embedded assessments and “transfer” assessments, like the poster described above, and sustained professional learning opportunities for teachers (Penuel & Watkins, 2019; Shepard et al., 2018). We seek to avoid many of the harms caused by large-scale testing, but also to realize the benefits of assessment grounded in cultural perspectives on learning and supported by curriculum. Instead of relying on large-scale testing, we’ve adopted a systemic approach that is supported by extensive and ongoing professional learning.

This new system would not compare, rank, and sort students, as many expect large-scale assessments to do. But such an approach is grounded in the false idea that children’s brilliance and excellence is and should remain uncommon and that educational opportunities should be distributed to the few who display such brilliance as they grow older. For this new vision of assessment to become a reality, as parents and as educators, we would need to commit to a more expansive view of our students and their capacities for growth and to developing an educational system that reflects that view.

Remembering to imagine our world anew

During the pandemic, we have remembered many things. We remembered that our relationships with students are what make learning possible. When we lost touch with them, and when we reconnected, we remembered that all learning is social. It does not take place in a box or a Zoom room. What students learn online or in person depends on how we engage with one another, as people, and how we support one another’s growth.

We have also remembered that we can be resourceful and creative when faced with crisis. And that we are subject to the same prejudices and systems that have produced the inequalities we must address to create a more equitable assessment system. The crisis, after all, has not hit us all equally.

Our assessment systems are built on our imaginings of how the world ought to be, but, once built, they create their own energy that propels education in specific directions, subject to biases and false perceptions that we built into the system. If we want this pandemic to be a portal to a new world, we will need to both remember and imagine how assessment can help us connect with students, their families, and communities and enable them to thrive in the most difficult of circumstances.

Note: This series is supported, in part, by the Spencer Foundation.

References

Bang, M., Brown, B.A., Calabrese Barton, A., Rosebery, A., & Warren, B. (2017). Toward more equitable learning in science: Expanding relationships among students, teachers, and science practices. In C. Schwarz, C. Passmore, & B.J. Reiser (Eds.), Helping students make sense of the world using next generation science and engineering practices (pp. 33-58). NSTA.

Campbell, T., Schwarz, C.V., & Windschitl, M. (2016). What we call misconceptions may be necessary stepping-stones toward making sense of the world. Science and Children, 53 (7), 69-74.

Gutiérrez, K.D. (2014). Syncretic approaches to literacy learning: Leveraging horizontal knowledge and expertise. In P.J. Dunston, L.B. Gambrell, K. Headley, S.K. Fullerton, & M.M. Stecker (Eds.), Literacy Research Association Yearbook (pp. 48-60). Literacy Research Association.

Inoue, A.B. (2015). Antiracist writing ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just culture. Parlor Press.

InquiryHub Partnership, & NextGen Science Storylines. (2018). Why don’t antibiotics work like they used to? www.nextgenstorylines.org/why-dont-antibiotics-work-like-they-used-to

Kirp, D.L. (2013). Improbable scholars: The rebirth of a great American school system and a strategy for America’s schools. Oxford University Press.

Lee, C.D., Nasir, N.S., Pea, R.D., & McKinney de Royston, M. (2020). Reconceptualizing learning: A critical task for knowledge-building and teaching. In N.S. Nasir, C.D. Lee, R.D. Pea, & M. McKinney de Royston (Eds.), Handbook of the cultural foundations of learning (pp. xvi-xxxv). Routledge.

Lemke, J.L., Lecusay, R., Cole, M., & Michalchik, V. (2015). Documenting and assessing learning in informal and media-rich environments: A report to the MacArthur Foundation. MIT Press.

Nasir, N.S. & Hand, V. (2008). From the court to the classroom: Opportunities for engagement, learning, and identity in basketball and classroom mathematics. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17 (2), 143-179.

National Research Council. (2011). Incentives and test-based accountability. National Academies Press.

Penuel, W.R. & Shepard, L.A. (2016). Assessment and teaching. In D.H. Gitomer & C.A. Bell (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 787-851). American Educational Research Association.

Penuel, W.R. & Watkins, D.A. (2019). Assessment to promote equity and epistemic justice: A use-case of a research-practice partnership in science education. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 683, 201-216.

Rogoff, B. (2014). Learning by observing and pitching in to family and community endeavors: An orientation. Human Development, 57 (1), 69-81.

Roy, A. (2020). Azadi: Freedom. fascism. fiction. Haymarket Press.

Shepard, L.A., Penuel, W.R., & Davidson, K.L. (2017). Design principles for new systems of assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 98 (6), 47-52.

Shepard, L.A., Penuel, W.R., & Pellegrino, J.W. (2018). Classroom assessment principles to support learning and avoid the harms of testing. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 37 (1), 52-57.

Short, J. & Hirsh, S. (2020). The elements: Transforming teaching through curriculum-based professional learning. Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Warren, B. & Rosbery, A. (2011). Navigating interculturality: African American male students and the science classroom. Journal of African American Males in Education, 2 (1), 98-115.

Zerwin, S.M. (2020). Point-less: An English teacher’s guide to more meaningful grading. Heinemann.

This article appears in the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 4, pp. 54-57.

Read responses to this article:

“Consider the real-world constraints” by Mark Dynarski
“Different measures for different purposes” by Sonja Santelises
“New visions don’t fit in old structures: A response to Dynarski and Santelises” by William Penuel and Lorie Shepard

Watch the video

The Spencer Foundation teamed up with Phi Delta Kappan to publish a series of thought pieces about the kinds of schools and learning opportunities it may be possible to create in the coming decades. Grantmakers for Education organized a series of conversations for its members around the themes being explored. Join funders, researchers, educators, students, and advocates in exploring what may be possible and how it could shape your work.

For too long, we have accepted many aspects of educational assessment as givens: Letter grades. Tests scored on a scale from 0 to 100. Using a single test on a day each spring to judge whether schools are serving our children. So many of these practices serve as gatekeepers — sorting and selecting students for supposedly scarce opportunities. It’s hard to imagine any other way of thinking about assessments. Looking forward, how can we ensure that our assessment practices are more valid, useful and just? And what has the pandemic taught us that we should keep in mind as we build new assessment systems?

Speakers include Gabriela López, Director Research to Practice Measures, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative; Dr. William Penuel, Professor, Institute of Cognitive Science and School of Education, University of Colorado; Dr. Ivory A. Toldson; Professor, Editor-In-Chief, and Director of Education Innovation and Research; Howard University, The Journal of Negro Education and NAACP. Moderated by Dr. Joshua Starr, Chief Executive Officer of Phi Delta Kappa International.