Part A:
Using what you know about O’Conner and Popham, compare and contrast their views regarding how assessment should drive instruction.
Imagine yourself taking off in an airplane… You have just left the ground and feel the lift under your wings as you are propelled upward. Suddenly on your upward rise you feel a jolt as your plane shifts in midair. Afraid to go any higher, you back off the throttle and don’t challenge the aircraft to rise above what you now know was the turbulence. Your aircraft floats downward just as a paper airplane would and you feel content cruising at this lower altitude. Now imagine something different… On your flight upward you feel the turbulence, but instead of backing off into a slight descent, you do just the opposite. You challenge your plane to rise to the occasion and pull through the turbulence because you know it can. Your altitude increases and suddenly you are soaring above the clouds looking down at the world around you.
Just as you challenge a plane to “rise to the occasion,” you can also challenge a student to pull through the “turbulence” and critical thinking to a new level where they can soar. The type of assessment that an educator uses, and how that assessment drives their instruction, are topics that professionals and studies have focused on more and more as the years go by. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development is the backbone that separates the cutting edge views on assessment from the more traditional thinkers.
Some professionals argue that instruction requires us as educators to “teach toward the skills or knowledge a test represents, not toward the test itself” (Popham, 2003). While this view offers us insight into the fact that we need to formulate a goal for our students and teach toward it, it’s lacking in critical thinking. If the test is designed from the standards, we do need to teach toward the test. Professionals such as Popham state that assessments should be used to determine a student’s status and knowledge. He does not however take the student’s status past that knowledge level with assessment, since he supports the use of more traditional selected response assessments that focus on facts, knowledge, and comprehension. Popham’s curriculum would focus on getting these facts across to the students, assessing to make sure all the students understand, and continuing to teach more knowledge and comprehension. It would not however push students beyond their comfortable learning toward the ZPD and more critical thinking. In the book, Scaffolding Children's Learning, Berk and Winsler discuss Vygotsky's dissatisfaction with “achievement tests as valid measures of children's capacity to learn.” Popham’s selected responses, which are often used on achievement tests, would not match up adequately to the expectations of Vygotsky. Popham would take students just to that lower level of “turbulence,” where they are starting to be challenged, but then would stop and his students would float downward, just as a paper airplane would.
Taking assessment to an entirely new level, however, are those professionals that define assessment as an effective tool before, during and after instruction. These professionals, like O’Conner believe in the use of the Understanding by Design formula. They design instruction only after they have picked an assessment that is directly correlated to the standards. By doing this, they are not only teaching toward the knowledge of the test, but can also take learning to a higher level of critical thinking. They focus on “the design of curriculums to engage students in exploring and deepening their understanding of important ideas, and the design of assessments to reveal the extent of their understandings” (Wiggins, 1998). By doing this, they are challenging their students to think critically. “Meaningful content and enriched environment, from an assessment point of view, mean that teachers provide assessment that promotes learning, not just assessment that is easy to score” (O’Conner, 2002). These professionals would not support the traditional method of assessments that are easy to score as Popham does, even though that would be the easy road. Instead they believe in assessing to locate where their students are at, teaching what needs reviewed before instruction, and designing assessment that make their students think critically. In addition they support stretching their students through learning above and beyond the ZPD, thus not backing off as Popham would, but challenging their students to pull through the “turbulence” to a higher level of thinking.
Whilethe type of assessment that an educator uses, and how that assessment drives their instruction has been a debated topic, for me, it only makes sense to decide what we want the students to accomplish first, and teach to that and beyond. In doing this we need to remember to allow assessment to drive our teaching. This is accomplished by assessing our students to make sure they are learning all throughout the instruction. Vygotsky would agree to not just settle for comprehension, but rather push students to the “level of potential development as determined through problem solving" (Vygotsky, 1978). By helping students to think critically in the classroom through engaging assessments, teachers are creating students that can be the next generation of problem solvers. “When in doubt, teach up! Good instruction stretches learners” (Tomlinson, 2003). By stretching students to this higher level of critical thinking, the focus is on challenging students. If used properly, this type of thought implemented along with assessment can be used as an effective tool that gets students to this new level of learning, and drives the instruction in the classroom. My question to you is, will you challenge your students to fly and reach their potential, or will you just be satisfied to let them cruise?