Leadership in Assessment

Throughout my time in PQP, it has become clear that leadership plays a crucial role in creating assessment policies in schools as it sets the tone for the entire school community and ensures that the policies are aligned with the school's vision and goals. Effective leadership in this area can lead to better assessment practices, which can have a positive impact on student learning outcomes.

Effective leaders involve all stakeholders in the assessment policy-making process, including teachers, parents, and students, to ensure that everyone understands and shares the same vision for the school's assessment practices.  These practices align with board mission and vision, and SIPSAW and BIPSAW goals.   Using these guides, leaders set clear expectations for assessment policies and practices, and communicate them effectively to all stakeholders. This helps to ensure that assessments are administered consistently and fairly across the school.  A school that has consistent practices create an environment where staff are more likely to collaborate with shared goals.

When consistent practices are prioritized, leaders provide the necessary resources, such as professional development opportunities and assessment tools, to support teachers in implementing the assessment policies effectively.  They encourage a culture of continuous improvement, where teachers regularly reflect on their assessment practices and make adjustments as needed to improve student learning outcomes.  Leaders ensure that resources and time are allotted to allowing staff to work to improve practices regularly, ensuring that assessment policies comply with equity and Ministry standards.

As outlined in the Catholic leadership framework, Catholic leaders must set directions, build relationships, develop people and the organization, improve the instructional program and secure accountability.  Leadership is crucial in creating assessment policies in schools as it sets the direction and expectations for the entire school community and ensures that assessment practices align with the school's vision and goals.  Allowing time to develop these practices creates a better school environment where students can trust in their teachers to be partners in their success.  When a team is behind a student, they feel safe to make mistakes, knowing that the purpose of assessment is to improve.

You're Too Late? Lateness and Assessment

 

The issue of deducting marks for lateness is a highly debated issue in evaluation and assessment study and among teachers.  Teachers reference “fairness” and “encouragement” and “long term consequences” as the reasons why lateness should both be penalized and why it should not (Sun et al 2014).  There are 17 suggestions in Growing Success (pg. 43) to help prevent and/or address late assignments.  Only one of these suggestions involves deducting marks for late assignments.  That provision allows for “deducting marks for late assignments, up to and including the full value of the assignment” (pg. 43).  Some school policies add that a teacher may deduct up to one achievement level for late assignments and further adds “Once a class set of assignments has been returned to students, a teacher is under no obligation to accept late assignments”.  This arbitrary addition eliminates the fairness of the policy since it is open to interpretation, marking speed and bias of the teacher and is inequitable on a number of levels.  Further, this added statement violates the classroom assessment standards in the area of use, both in effective feedback and grades and summary comments and quality in unbiased and fair assessment.

Effective feedback is considered fair when it is transparent, consistent and justified (Rasooli et al, 2018).  The standards of practice build on this and define effective feedback as “timely and useful in improving student learning” (Klinger et al, 2015).  Klinger further explains that students will be able to use the feedback to “revise their work to meet the learning expectations” and provide “opportunities for self-reflection" (pg. 28).  This standard is supported by the work of Tierney (2004) and Williams (2011), who argue that assessment as learning can effectively support learning, encourage student engagement in productive learning and add value to an assessment.  Valuing a task is critical not only for having continuing interest in a topic, but also for voluntarily electing to do a task which leads to the pursuit of mastery (Brookhart et al, 2003). William states that for assessment to encourage learning, it "must be provided in a way that encourages the learner to direct energy towards growth, rather than well-being", where attention, instead, is focused on preventing threat, harm or loss (2011).  By denying students the opportunity to submit work after an inexact timeline, a student’s focus shifts to wellbeing and they are denied the opportunity to grow and learn through the assessment process.  Effective feedback can allow a student to improve by developing effective error detection skills and will lead to self-feedback which will allow them to strategize and regulate to solve problems or use their self-regulatory proficiencies (Hattie et al, 2007). The students who submitted on time will be advantaged in this (if given the opportunity to resubmit) or the next assessment by critically examining their work through the lens of previously received feedback.

The assessment standard of use in “grades and summary comments” states that “grades and comments should reflect student achievement of the learning expectations” (Klinger et al, 2015).  This standard insists that class assessment grades and comments reflect a students’ level of mastery of the learning expectations.  Lowering a student’s mark or giving a mark of zero based on lateness clearly does not reflect a student’s achievement since the student has not yet demonstrated their learning.  Learning cannot be evaluated appropriately with insufficient opportunity for its demonstration (Tierney 2004). Rasooli et al (2018) noted that “students perceive unfairness when teachers base their grade decisions on insufficient, unsuitable, and insignificant data”. Klinger suggests using tardiness of an assignment in the comments but states that “summary comments provide additional information, but they should not be used to adjust the grades” (Klinger et al, 2015).  Feedback that does include these construct irrelevant factors and strays from intended goals results in lower engagement, motivation and effort and is the least effective way to create self-regulation (Hattie et al, 2007, Brookhart et al, 2003).  When a mark does not reflect a student’s achievement, it renders the mark meaningless.  “Including both achievement and non-achievement factors in grading threatens the interpretability of the grades assigned by teachers” (Sun et al 2014). This is particularly true if assessment is being used a tool to gauge a student against the standard or against others in the class (Baharloo, 2013). 

The third, and perhaps most important, assessment standard that some school lateness policies violates is the quality standard in the area of “unbiased and fair assessment”.  This standard states that “classroom assessment practices and subsequent decisions should be free from all factors unrelated to the intended purposes of the assessment (Klinger et al, 2015).  Certainly, the policy of refusing to accept late work ignores the variety of reasons that a student may have to submit work late and relies on the generosity of the teacher.  Effective teaching, learning and assessment practices are dependent upon the knowledge and value systems of educators and many teachers struggle with the idea that good work habits can be encouraged without grading penalties, despite evidence to the contrary (Tierney et al, 2011). Sun et al (2014) noted that “even when teachers use the same grading scale and the same grading guidelines, there is little consistency in teachers’ grading across schools”.  Rasooli et al (2018) also noted this saying “teachers show high levels of disagreements and numerous conflicts in the scenarios associated with avoiding score pollution”. Although teachers agree that grade decisions based on students’ misbehavior and gender are unfair, teachers may consider factors such as “effort, progress, compassion for students, desire to teach life lesson, and impact of grades on students’ opportunities in their future lives as fair when deciding or adjusting grades (Rasooli et al, 2018).  The variability and ambiguity of some school late policies is too reliant on these values of the teacher and is, therefore, vulnerable to unconscious or conscious bias.  Judging lateness may also unfairly reward some students since higher income parents, who understand the qualities needed to achieve higher education, can use their financial resources to improve the performance of their children through buying private lessons and learning materials (Tieben et al, 2010).  Students from low-income households may lack support at home for a number of reasons, including the need to work, and therefore may not obtain work habits associated with higher achievement (Tieben et al, 2010).  Those students may need more time to fine tune assignments and may lack the time to complete assignments in a timely manner if they, themselves are working to maintain the household.  Penalizing these irrelevant factors directly violates the assessment standards (Klinger et al, 2015) and creates an unfair advantage for some over others, most often those who are marginalized.

Although Growing Success (Pg. 42) acknowledges a student’s responsibility to submit work on time and accept the consequences of lateness, it offers a variety of methods before marks should be deducted.  Teachers want an assessment that is both fair and beneficial to students (Sun et al 2014). The purpose of assessment, itself, is at question here.  If assessment is used as a measure of achievement, it is clear that using study skills or other personality factors to determine marks is an unfair practice (unless a teacher has come to believe that equality, not equity, is a measure of fairness).  If, however, assessment is being used to encourage good qualities like study habits and esteem or to reduce the long-term consequences of not developing effort or responsibility, deducting marks for lateness seems reasonable.  Unfortunately, teachers often blend these two, depending on previous knowledge of the student and their own lived experience (Sun et al 2014), allowing for bias when grading.  It is this possibility for bias that makes many school policies on lateness unfair.

 

 

 

 

 

References

Baharloo, A. (2013). Test fairness in traditional and dynamic assessment. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(10), 1930+. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A351082074/GPS?u=ko_k12hs_d2&sid=GPS&xid=e027de3d

Brookhart, S. M., & Durkin, D. T. (2003). Classroom Assessment, Student Motivation, and Achievement in High School Social Studies Classes. Applied Measurement in Education, 16(1), 27–54. https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1207/S15324818AME1601_2

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102_00346543077001081

Klinger, D.A., McDivitt, P.R.,Howard, B.B., Munoz, M.A., Rogers, W.T., & Wylie, E.C. (2015). The Classroom Assessment Standards for PreK-12 Teachers. Kindle Direct Press.

McMillan, J. H., Hellsten, L., & Klinger, D. (2011). Classroom assessment: principles and practice for effective standards-based instruction. Pearson Canada.

Rasooli, A., Zandi, H., & DeLuca, C. (2018). Re-conceptualizing classroom assessment fairness: A systematic meta-ethnography of assessment literature and beyond. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 56, 164–181. https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1016/j.stueduc.2017.12.008

Sun, Y., & Cheng, L. (2014). Teachers’ Grading Practices: Meaning and Values Assigned. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 21(3), 326–343.

Tieben, N., & Wolbers, M. (2010). Success and failure in secondary education: socio-economic background effects on secondary school outcome in the Netherlands, 1927-1998. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31(3), 277–290. https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1080/01425691003700516

Tierney, R. D. (2014). Fairness as a multifaceted quality in classroom assessment. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 43, 55–69. https://doi-org.proxy.queensu.ca/10.1016/j.stueduc.2013.12.003

Wiliam, D. (2011). What is assessment for learning? Studies in Educational Evaluation, 37(1), 3–14.

Ontario Ministry of Education, Growing success: assessment, evaluation and reporting: improving student learning (2010). Toronto.  http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/growSuccess.pdf.