Newsmaker

Q&A With Nancy Staub
Finding Function in Formative Assessment

Nancy Staub loves data. Even before NCLB pushed data-driven Decision-making strategies to the fore, Staub had been a crusader for formative assessment. Whereas summative assessment looks at student achievement at the end of a year or semester, formative assessment provides educators with analysis along the way.

Staub, assistant superintendent of Pinckney School District, located outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, advocates for this method as the means to enable teachers—and students—to make informed, on-the-spot decisions that improve learning. She addresses school leaders across the country, encouraging the integration of technology to make this assessment possible. Scholastic Administr@tor spoke with her about how to promote this paradigm shift among teachers, school leaders, and students themselves.

How responsible is NCLB for bringing assessment to the forefront?
NCLB is fraught with problems that make me crazy, but the whole concept of making sure kids are learning makes sense. We had this vision in place before NCLB. We were already plugging away, trying to find ways to put useful student data into teachers’ hands. NCLB stepped up the pace of our work. It validated the vision for assessment and the work districts like ours were doing around the use of data in the classroom.

How do you use assessment to influence curriculum development and instruction?
The work we do flows among curriculum, instruction, and assessment. In our district, curriculum is not finite. We look at it and evolve it. The more teachers delve into curriculum, the better understanding they have of the concepts. When the concepts become clearer, the essential skills of the concepts become more defined. The same is true of assessment. Our teachers developed criterion-referenced assessments based on the curriculum. When the assessments were given and the data reviewed, teachers realized that a particular assessment item may not have been a good match for the concept they were trying to test. The curriculum would then be fine-tuned and a new assessment item developed to more closely reflect the content.

Results from our criterion-referenced assessments, along with the standardized norm-referenced assessments we use, provide a picture of how students are doing along the way. We are able to identify areas of need for individual students. So we began to ask the question about how to customize instruction for individual students. The question led us to looking at differentiated instruction and the need to provide teachers with the understanding and the tools required to develop and implement differentiated instructional lessons.

So professional development also plays a part?
To provide teachers with these tools, we developed a two-year program that provided school teams with training, follow up, and mentor support throughout the year. The cohort consisted of diverse school teams, including the principal, teachers, a student/family specialist, parents, and a school psychologist or speech and language therapist. In the first year teams worked together to develop a cultural awareness regarding diversity—opening the door to differentiated instruction and a layered curriculum model.

In the second year these teams delved into assessment: What is data? How can data help me in the classroom? What is summative versus formative data? How do I know which type of data I need and when to use it? Teams become aware of assessment standards and how to use the standards to create assessments for students.

How are you training teachers to manage the classroom-assessment process?
First, it is important to make assessment and data part of the school and district culture. Talking about data, requiring data to make decisions, training principals in the use of data are all critical.

For the first time this year teachers had immediate access to student results in the science and social studies checkpoint assessments. The quick turnaround of results allowed teachers to see where they can make adjustments in their teaching. To make this data more meaningful, we created a pacing guide for one of the content areas. The purpose of the guide was to help teachers get a sense of how they should be progressing in relation to year-end outcomes and also to provide a blueprint for formative assessments that we can give students at specified intervals. As teachers become more familiar with this process, they will provide immediate and specific intervention to students.

What do you need from principals to get assessment into each classroom?
I realized along the way that leaders need to be involved. Principals must have a strong understanding of the purposes of data. Principals must become users of data, modeling how data are used.

Conversations about data must become daily practice in schools, with principals asking questions about the evidence teachers have supporting student performance: How do you know a student is achieving? What evidence do you have to support your thinking? Principals should promote teachers’ conversations about how students are doing and about ideas to adjust instruction.

In order to help principals reach a level of expertise regarding data, professional development opportunities are available to principals. While administrators have attended some out-of-district workshops, most of the training occurs within the district. Yearly retreats focus on this topic, as well as shorter sessions for principals. Principals are required to create a data summary of their schools’ progress. The summary includes evidence they have regarding student achievement, questions the data raise, and strategies to consider.

What have been the biggest difficulties in implementing this practice district-wide?
The biggest difficulty is that people aren’t familiar with it. Assessments have generally been linked to accountability and are summative in nature. The idea of using assessment to inform instruction to reach all learners has not been well spread. As our principals and I talk with teachers about student growth as evidenced by the data, we need to make the conversations nonthreatening. Although they are accountable for student achievement for all of their students, teachers can be empowered with the use of data. Teachers have indicated that with data they feel more confident when talking to parents and when making decisions for each student.

How are you getting teachers and students to act on the data they have?
Teachers and students need to be looking at data together. They need to have a common understanding of what it looks like to have reached the target. The best example I have in our district is in the area of writing. Here teachers have learned the process of scoring student writing using a holistic rubric. Each year teams of teachers come together to score student writing from the district writing assessment. Strengths and weaknesses of the writing are also recorded. The scores are entered into the district database for longitudinal study. The individual papers are returned to students in the fall. Teachers guide the entire class through a scoring exercise using the sample papers created from the range finding. Students discuss and share their own thinking about what makes a good paper and why another paper is weak. Students will set goals for their writing for the year. This next year we will give students a document to maintain in their writing folders that includes samples of writing for a low, medium, and high paper along with a rubric in student-friendly language. This document will serve as a guide to students all year to compare their own writing, modify their goals, and discuss with their teacher. This process really allows students to take ownership of their own learning and progress.

What are you working on for the 2005–06 school year in terms of using formative assessment to improve learning?
We really want to have more opportunities for formative assessment in our district. We will be developing quarterly assessments in math this summer for fall implementation. We want teachers to be able to download assessments from the district database, print the student answer documents, give the assessment, and then scan the sheets for an automatic scoring and uploading of the results. We have already started conversations about how to provide immediate intervention for identified students. I want to be able to take a database and encourage a teacher to break those quarterly assessments into weekly assessments or mid-quarter assessments, however the teacher wants. But I want to be able to say, here are the database and the questions that our teachers determined match our curriculum.