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What Is A Common Assessment

A common assessment is any assessment that is administered to all students in a particular course or grade level at around the same point in the curriculum. Common assessments are developed collaboratively by teachers to ensure consistency, equity, and a shared understanding of learning outcomes. They provide valuable data to teachers by allowing them to compare results across classrooms and identify strengths or weaknesses in student learning or teaching approaches. Developing common assessments also supports meaningful collaboration between teachers and the improvement of instructional practices.

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152 views

What Is A Common Assessment

A common assessment is any assessment that is administered to all students in a particular course or grade level at around the same point in the curriculum. Common assessments are developed collaboratively by teachers to ensure consistency, equity, and a shared understanding of learning outcomes. They provide valuable data to teachers by allowing them to compare results across classrooms and identify strengths or weaknesses in student learning or teaching approaches. Developing common assessments also supports meaningful collaboration between teachers and the improvement of instructional practices.

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What is a Common Assessment?

By Lewis Johnson, Director of Testing and Research, RCS

A common assessment is any means of measuring student performance that meets these criteria for:

Content of the test


Timing of the test
Use of the results

1. The items or tasks measure a set of skills that were taught or will be taught (as in a common pre-
assessment).

2. Has at a majority of the items which are exactly the “same” so performance on these items can
be compared between teachers. Additional items may be added to individualize the assessment,
BUT a score must be derived for the SAME items for each student by ALL teachers.

3. Is administered by all teachers teaching the same content to somewhat equivalent groups of
students.

4. The assessment needs to have been administered to students at nearly the same point in time
relative to the teaching of the curriculum.
For example the Algebra 1 benchmark is a common assessment. However, students in the
semester-long course take benchmark #1 at the end of the first 6 weeks, while the year-long
students take the benchmark at the end of the first 12 weeks.

5. Common assessment should be collaboratively developed so that every teacher has an


understanding of what the expected learning outcomes for their students and a greater
understanding of the curriculum. Creating common assessments is a significantly important PLC
task.

If you are in the same CASA group discussing data, then your students need to have taken the common
assessment.

Why we create and use common assessments?

By Rick DuFour, Becky DuFour, and Bob Eaker September 2007


Authors of Learn By Doing.
We received a question from a principal of a high-performing middle school who wrote: “Although we
have made significant growth in many of the core components of a professional learning community
we continue to struggle with the perception of teacher autonomy as a result of attempting to create
common assessments. A number of teachers continue to believe that common assessments restricts
their ability to differentiate instruction from their colleagues…. our staff still remains hesitant to fully
engage in meaningful collaboration which would result in creating common assessments and sharing
instructional practices.

We have offered our own arguments as to why assessments created by a team of teachers are
superior to the formal assessments developed by a teacher working in isolation.

1. Team-developed common assessments are more efficient.


If five teachers teaching the same course or grade level are responsible for ensuring all students
acquire the same knowledge and skills, it make sense those teachers would work together to
determine the best methods to assess student learning. A team of teachers could divide
responsibilities for creating a unit and developing assessments. Teachers working in isolation
replicate and duplicate effort. They work hard, but they do not work smart.
2. Team-developed common assessments are more equitable.
The use of common assessments increases the likelihood that students will have access to the same
curriculum, acquire the same essential knowledge and skills, take assessments of the same rigor,
and have their work judged according to the same criteria. We have witnessed repeated examples of
teachers who were emphatic about the need for consistency, equity, and fairness in terms of how
they were dealt with as adults, being completely unconcerned about the inconsistency, inequity, and
lack of fairness that characterized the assessment of student learning in their school. If every teacher
has license to assess whatever and however he or she determines, according to criteria unique to
and often known only by that teacher, schools will never be institutions that truly model a commitment
to equity.

3. Team-developed common formative assessments are more effective in monitoring and improving
student learning.
We have cited several researchers who have concluded that team-developed common formative
assessments are one of the most powerful strategies available to educators for improving student
achievement. We know of no research concluding the formal assessments created by individual
teachers working in isolation advance student learning.

4. Team-developed common formative assessments can inform and improve the practice of both
individual teachers and teams of teachers.
Teachers do not suffer from a lack of data. Virtually every time a teacher gives an assessment of any
kind, the teacher is able to generate data – mean, mode, median, standard deviation, percentage
failing, percentage passing, and so on. As Robert Waterman (1987) advised, however, data alone do
not inform practice. Data cannot help educators identify the strengths and weaknesses of their
strategies. Data inform only when they are presented in context, which almost always requires a
basis of comparison.

Most educators can teach an entire career and not know if they teach a particular concept more or
less effectively than the teacher next door because the assessments they generate for their isolated
classrooms never provide them with a basis of comparison. Most educators can assess their students
year after year, get consistently low results in a particular area, and not be certain if those results
reflect his or her teaching strategies, a weakness in the curriculum, a failure on the part of teachers in
earlier grades to ensure students develop a prerequisite skill, or any other cause. In short, most
educators operate within the confines of data, which means they operate in the dark. But in a PLC,
collaborative teams create a series of common assessments, and therefore every teacher receives
ongoing feedback regarding the proficiency of his or her students, in achieving a standard the team
has agreed is essential, on an assessment the team has agreed represents a valid way to assesses
what members intend for all students to learn, in comparison to other students attempting to achieve
the same standard. That basis of comparison transforms data into information.

Furthermore, as Richard Elmore (2006) wrote, “teachers have to feel that there is some compelling
reason for them to practice differently, with the best direct evidence being that students learn better”
(p. 38). When teachers are presented with clear evidence their students are not becoming proficient
in skills they agreed were essential, as measured on an assessment they helped to create, and that
similar students taught by their colleagues have demonstrated proficiency on the same assessment,
they are open to exploring new practices. When the performance of their students consistently
prevents their team from achieving its goals, they are typically willing to address the problem. In fact,
we consider team-developed common formative assessments one of the most powerful motivators for
stimulating teachers to consider changes in their practice.

5. Team-developed common formative assessments can build the capacity of the team to achieve at
higher levels.
As Wiliam and Thompson (2007) found, the conversations surrounding the creation of common
formative assessments are a powerful tool for professional development. When schools ensure every
teacher has been engaged in a process to clarify what students are to learn and how their learning
will be assessed, they promote the clarity essential to effective teaching. When teachers have access
to each other’s ideas, methods, and materials they can expand their repertoire of skills. When a team
discovers the current curriculum and their existing instructional strategies are ineffective in helping
students acquire essential skills, its members are able to pursue the most powerful professional
development because it is specific, job-embedded and relevant to the context of their content, their
strategies, their team, and their students.

6. Team-developed common formative assessments are essential to systematic interventions when


students do not learn.
We argue that if educators were truly committed to high levels of learning for all students, they would
not leave the question, “what happens when some students do learn” to chance. They would instead,
work together to create systems of intervention to ensure any student who struggles receives
additional time and support for learning in a timely and directive way. Team-developed common
formative assessments are a critical element of that system of intervention.

Not every assessment should be a common assessment. There is still a place for individual teachers
to create their own formal assessments. Team-developed common assessments will never eliminate
the need for individual teachers to monitor student learning each day through a wide variety of
strategies that check for understanding. But if schools are ever to take full advantage of the power of
assessment to impact student learning in a positive way, they must include common formative
assessments in their arsenal. Professional learning communities will make team-developed common
formative assessments a cornerstone of their work.

Retrieved online from http://www.allthingsplc.info/wordpress/?p=49 on September 22, 2013.

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