Education 421 Assessment and Motivation – Know-Wonder-Learn Chart

Education 421 Assessment and Motivation – Winter 2024
Know-Wonder-Learn Chart

Know – What do I know about assessment and motivation?

• Assessment is an integral part of teaching and learning process. The results of assessment can be viewed as the outcomes of the education system.
• Assessment can be performed in different forms including diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. Teachers use diagnostic assessment at the beginning of class to figure out what students know about the subjects. Formative assessments can be applied during lessons to gauge student’s understanding. Summative assessments take place at the end of courses or semesters through final papers, projects, etc. to evaluate students’ understanding and performance.
• Assessment can be applied individually and collectively.
• Assessment can guide teachers to identify the shortcomings of students; then they can improve teaching techniques and methods. Assessment can also provide feedback to update and change curricula to meet students’ needs.
• Assessments in BC focuses on core competencies and uses Four Point Provincial Proficiency Scale. The Ministry of Education and Child Care, school districts and schools are carrying out the Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) in Grade 4 and 7 to assessment of students’ literacy and numeracy skills.
• Personally, assessment makes me think about tests and exams, which are associated with stress and competitiveness.
• Motivation is a crucial part in learning process. It can be extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Students with intrinsic motivation study with a goal of self improvement and enjoy learning activities. Students with extrinsic motivation might study for external rewards like praise, awards, and prizes.
• It is not easy to maintain motivation during learning and teaching since they are two challenging processes.
• Teachers and their teaching styles can either motivate students’ learning or do the opposite to them. Assessment can have the same effect on students.

Wonder – What do I wonder about assessment and motivation?

• How can I employ assessment to find out the strengths and weaknesses of my students in their learning and to facilitate my teaching?
• Is it always true that grading/marking students’ assignments does harm to students’ development in learning? How to capture their learning levels correctly and make suggestions to improve their performance?
• How can I motivate students with learned helplessness?
• Which type of motivation benefit students the most, extrinsic, intrinsic motivation or the combination of both types of motivation? How to maintain students’ motivation throughout the school year?
• I would like to have a psychological understanding about motivation so that I can encourage my students to do their best but do not put pressure on them. Also, I would like to help them get over the fear of assessment and the frustration after assessment. I observed both feelings in my nine-year-old son before and after he took his assessment at school in Grade 4 last year.

Learn – What did I learn about assessment and motivation?

Assessment and its roles
• Assessment is a means to collect evidence about learning. The purpose of assessment is to support and measure learning. Every assessment should provide students and teachers with a clear and accurate understanding of where they are relative to where they are supposed to be (Erkens et al., 2017).
• Assessment acts as the bridge between standards and curriculum. Assessment results can indicate whether schools have their standards taught through their curricular resources (Erkens et al., 2017).
• Assessments can motivate learners if they are thoughtfully designed and sequenced to build competency over time, creating winning streaks that learners need to continue their learning. Building hope and efficacy in learners is one of the goals of assessment practices (Erkens et al., 2017).
• Assessments can help schools identify students who might need extra or special education services. This ensures equity in education and all students can access the support that they deserve to strive academically (Chrona, 2022).

Types of assessments
• Formative assessment puts the focus on the underlying skills or knowledge (learning targets) that leads to the mastery of the standard (M. Baerg, personal communication, January 25, 2024).
• Summative assessment become effective when it sustains its validity and reliability. This means that assessments measures what they intend to measure (validity) with consistency (reliability) (Erkens et al., 2017, p. 35).
How can teachers use assessments to support student learning?
• Teachers need to unpack the standards and make them communicated clearly for students to allow students to be aware of the underlying skills or knowledge that they need to master to meet the learning standards. Unpacking the standards also makes assessment visible and achievable for teachers during their instruction and assessment processes (Erkens et al., 2017). In my practicum, I taught Grade 2 how to draw bar graphs. I broke out the key elements to build a bar graph like a title, a horizontal/vertical line, survey questions with different options/choices, and numbers. I explained how to get those elements and the steps to draw a bar graph. The students understood the process and tackled it successfully.
• While analyzing and understanding standards, teachers should describe the progressions of learning, identify appropriate levels of complexity (recall, extended thinking, involving creating and problem solving as in Norman Webb’s Depth of Knowledge model (Erkens et al., 2017, p. 86), select methods to meet the demands of the standards, and then develop a detailed pathway to obtain the desired results.
• Assessment methods depend on how teachers examine the demands of the learning targets. Selected-response assessments or pencil-and-paper tests are effective to gather information about students’ knowledge. Constructed-response assessments yield more quality evidence of students’ genuine understanding while performance assessments allow them to showcase their reasoning and skills and receive external and prompt feedback from teachers (Erkens et al., 2017, pp. 88-90).
• Measurement tools such as checklists, rubrics, and proficiency scales can assist teachers in seeing degrees of student work’s quality. Teachers and their colleagues as well as teachers and students need to develop an image of excellence that remains visible and steady (Erkens et al., 2017).
• To achieve quality assessment, teachers need to keep in mind that each learner has a unique perspective and different life experience, which can help or hinder his/her learning (Erkens et al., 2017; Weinstein et al., 2019). Hendrick and Stokke (2024) point out that “we understand new knowledge through what we already have within our brains” (39:02). Likewise, learners have preferred styles and methods for interactions that affect their motivation. Moreover, teachers should be aware of how students learn. Understanding the mechanism of memory and working memory, the significance of spaced practice, interleaving, elaboration, dual coding, concrete examples, and retrieval practice can maximize the results of learning in students. This eventually enhances quality assessment (Weinstein et al, 2019).
• Play-based learning activities is significant to student learning regardless of grades as it builds their understanding though the joy, excitement, and curiousness associated with games, open-ended questions, and experiments. Teachers can find evidence of student learning through listening to, looking at or discussing with students during play-based learning activities (The Ministry of Education and Child Care, 2023, p. 11). I taught addition and subtraction within 50 to Grade 2 through games. As they enjoyed playing, they also learnt how to do math problems. I found out who might need support (showing them how to do addition or subtraction again) through observing them playing.
• Teachers need to develop differentiated assessment so that students can have choices and multiple pathways to engage in learning and demonstrate their growth. This manifests the inclusiveness that educators need to promote in learning environment (The Ministry of Education and Child Care, 2023, p. 13). When I taught fairy tales to my Grade 2 class in Literacy lessons, I allowed them to choose to draw, write or talk about the characters and events of the stories. They could recall the stories through their preferable methods.
• When teachers build meaningful relationships with learners, they earn learners’ trust, propelling learners to taking challenges, and understanding learners’ interests, traits, concerns, strengths, and opportunities for growth. I was able to build connections with my students throughout my practicum. I used the questions related to their favourite treats or pets to teach them how to draw graphs. They enjoyed discussing about their favourite and sharing with their friends, building a sense of community in the classroom and keeping them more engaged in learning. I also realized that they were interested in collecting stickers. Thus, I used stickers to motivate them to participate and finish their work.
• Assessment results must be communicated to learners (and parents/guardians) to help learners increase their achievement and confidence. Reporting assessment results needs to be strength-based to cultivate confidence and encourage achievement. Furthermore, it also provides guidance for what’s next to learners and parents/guardians (The Ministry of Education and Child Care, 2023). I attended all the parent meetings with my coaching teacher and gained some techniques to approach parents to address my teacher’s concerns to better support my students.
• Grades or scores can give indication about student learning if they are used appropriately. Teachers can grade; however, grades should be used formatively to guide their instructions later.
• Feedback can motivate student learning. Formative feedback needs to be appropriate to each learner’s level, yield productive responses, and cause thinking. Similarly, summative feedback can provide next-step instructions and proficiency confirmation, leading to productive responses and building hope and efficacy (Erkens et al., 2017).
• Four levels of feedback include personal level, task-level feedback, process feedback, and self-regulation feedback. Feedback becomes effective when it’s delivered to the learner who needs the feedback (motive), in the right way (means), at the right time (opportunity) so that the learner can act on the feedback (Erkens et al., 2017, p. 47).
• Assessment results must be interpretated accurately between teachers and students. This means that they would render similar inferences from assessment results (Erkens et al., 2017, p. 59). Teachers and students strive for quality interpretations with accuracy, accessibility, and reliability.
• Teachers can improve interpretations by sharing their assessment designs and collaboratively reviewing the results of assessment information with colleagues, reducing bias and guarantee similar expectations to students. Also, teachers and students can review assessment results to obtain the same assessment criteria and produce accurate and valid interpretations. Moreover, teachers need to ensure the alignment between instruction and assessment to create positive impacts on student attitudes, motivation, and learning environment (K. Scott, personal communication, March 2024).
• A student with an IEP or student learning plan should not be labelled as Emerging or Developing or given a lower letter grade and percentage. Teachers should assign a scale indicator or letter grade and percentage that reflects their learning based on student learning performance (The Ministry of Education and Child Care, 2023, p. 16). The support that students receive during their learning does not impact their reports.
• Instructional agility happens when teachers can create flexible instructional strategies deliberately with purposes and accuracy to motivate learning. Teachers can develop instructional agility in assessment processes through listening and self-reflecting on their effectiveness (Erkens et al., 2017).
• Asking quality questions with sufficient wait time for responses, engaging in class dialogue, analyzing responses, and generating sufficient sample sizes of quality evidence permit teachers to understand learners’ learning, engage learners, and co-construct meaning with them (Erkens et al., 2017). Throughout my practicum, I practiced employing quality questions during my instruction with the intention to improve the quality of answers and build a culture of risk taking. I provided my students with sufficient think time and selected respondents randomly. I allowed everyone to have a chance showing their knowledge before giving my judgment on the right answers. I used wrong answers, analyzed them to support my students to correct their mistakes themselves. My students seemed to be more engaged and sustain the concepts better and longer after that.
The relationship of student investment, self-assessment, and motivation
• Student investment mean that students invest in their own learning by devoting resources, persisting through challenging problems, and gaining interest and confidence in their learning. Students invest when they believe that they can do it and they know what to do next. Also, the work needs to be meaningful, relevant, and worth their time to induce students to invest. I did a Writing/Art project with Grade 2 in my practicum. They listed all the things that they wanted to be/have/see/go before they turned 100 years old, explained why they wanted them, and decorated with cotton balls. I told them that they could show it to their parents at the conference meeting. The students were excited to share about their wish lists. They felt motivated to showcase their ideas and decoration to their parents.
• Self-assessment, a component of self-regulation, can help students figure out where they are in their progress relative to where they need to be (Erkens et al., 2017). During my practicum, I observed students doing their self-reflection on how they performed at school. Given the explanation from the teacher, most of the students could understand what the next steps for them to engage more in class. However, I realized that some students might have mistaken seeing their performance level due to their lack of self-regulation. That explained to me why some students had problem finding their ways to improve their learning in the classroom. It also reminded me to change my strategies to support their learning.

References
Chrona, J. (2022). Wayi Wah! Indigenous Pedagogies: An Act for Reconciliation and Anti-Racist Education. Portage & Main
Press.
Erkens, C., Schimmer, T., & Dimich, N. (2017). Essential Assessment: Six Tenets for Bringing Hope, Efficacy, and
achievement to the Classroom–Deepen Teachers’ Understanding of Assessment to Meet Standards and Generate a Culture of Learning. Solution Tree.
Hendrick, C., & Stokke, A. (Hosts). (2024, Jan 12). Ep 22. Mindsets and educational misconceptions with Carl Hendrick
[Audio podcast episode]. In Chalk & Talk. Podbean. https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-22-mindsets-and-misconceptions-with-carl-hendrick
The Ministry of Education and Child Care. (2023) K-12 Student Reporting Policy.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/education/administration/kindergarten-to-grade-12/k-12-student-reporting-policy-communicating-student-learning-guidelines.pdf
Weinstein, Y., Sumeracki, M., & Caviglioli, O. (2019). Understanding how we learn: a visual guide. Routledge.