What am I Assessing?

Process: Matching assessment to your goals

When thinking about matching our assessments to the goals of instruction, we must keep the end in mind. The endpoint is the performance assessment – the application of learning to a real-life or authentic communication situation. With this endpoint clearly in mind, we then need to ask ourselves what other assessments will be useful along the way to monitor our students’ progress. These assessments should be viewed as opportunities to provide meaningful feedback to the students concerning their learning. The better the feedback to the student, the better their final performance will be.

The assessment tools we use to check on student progress during a unit of instruction will vary with the goal or objective of what in the lesson we want to assess. We might use a quiz, a journal entry, a pairwork activity, an essay, a test, a class discussion, or an oral question/answer activity to see how well the students have learned the concepts. Remember, these assessments are all part of the process or practice needed in order to complete the final performance. These assessments will tell if the students understand a concept or how to use a particular structure correctly. They indicate how many vocabulary words the students know. They can provide evidence that the Standards for Culture, Comparisons, Connections, and Communities are being addressed in the class. But if we stop assessing here, we haven’t reached our endpoint: the final performance assessment.

The final performance assessment is the application of what the students learned in the unit to a real-life or authentic communication situation. We understand from the Standards that there are three aspects to communication: an Interpretive mode, an Interpersonal mode, and a Presentational mode. Our final performance assessment must reflect those three modes. And when we look back at our unit plans, the instructional strategies and assessments should provide practice in all three modes. Matching our assessments to our goals means thinking of that final communication situation as we plan our unit.