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Mike Ruyle, EdD, served as a teacher, athletic coach, adjunct professor, and school leader in the San Francisco Bay Area and Bozeman, Montana, for twenty-eight years. He is a professional development associate with Marzano Research and the author of Leading the Evolution: How to Make Personalized Competency-Based Education a Reality. He led the creation and implementation of the first fully functional, performance-based school in Montana and is a recognized authority in the areas of social justice, educational equity, mindfulness, and trauma-informed care in schools. His leadership experience in personalized, competency-based education has made him a sought-after national and international presenter for numerous schools, districts, state agencies, and conferences.
Dr. Ruyle earned bachelor of arts degrees in history and English from the University of San Francisco, as well as master’s and doctoral degrees in educational leadership from Montana State University.
To learn more about Mike Ruyle’s work, visit www.linkedin.com/in/mike-ruyle-070118119 or follow @MikeRuyle on Twitter.
To book Robert J. Marzano, Jennifer S. Norford, or Mike Ruyle for professional development, contact [email protected].
Preface
This book is part of a series of books that focus on the The New Art and Science of Teaching framework (Marzano, 2017). That framework presents current research, theory, and practice regarding classroom pedagogy across various subject areas such as writing, reading, mathematics, and science within three general categories: content, context, and feedback.
A major aspect of effective classroom pedagogy is assessment. More specifically, within The New Art and Science of Teaching framework, classroom assessment falls within the general category of feedback. By its very nature, assessment is a form of feedback to students, teachers, and parents. As such, effective classroom assessment must go well beyond traditional uses which simply assign scores to students on specific tests and then average all those scores to compute a grade for an individual student. Rather, classroom assessment must be viewed from a new paradigm that allows it to be used to its full potential as a tool for feedback. That is precisely what this book, The New Art and Science of Classroom Assessment, is designed to do.
Starting in the first chapter, the book challenges many assumptions on which traditional classroom assessment practices are based. These challenges are designed to expose the sometimes illogical assumptions and lack of utility of many current assessment practices based on the traditional paradigm of assessment, such as averaging scores from all assessments to come up with an overall grade. However, the central purpose of the book is not to cause havoc with current classroom assessment practices, but rather to improve and augment those practices with techniques that result in more precise information about students’ status and growth on specific topics.
One major theme in the book is that effective assessment begins with clarity regarding the content that will be the focus of instruction and assessment. To this end, we strongly recommend the use of proficiency scales to define specific learning goals (also known as learning targets) and various levels of proficiency relative to those goals. Another theme in the book is that classroom teachers should never rely on a single assessment to determine a student’s status at any point in time. Rather, teachers should consider the pattern of scores on specific topics for individual students across multiple assessments. A third theme is that teachers should expand what they consider to be viable forms of assessments. Indeed, we make the case that anything a teacher does that provides information about a particular student’s status relative to a particular topic should be considered an assessment. The traditional test, then, is one form of assessment among many other forms including observations, conversations with students, short written responses, and student-generated assessments. In effect, teachers should test less (use pencil-and-paper tests less) but assess more (use a variety of ways to collect assessment information). Still another theme is that the process of assessment should be intimately tied to the process of instruction. Finally, assessment should be experienced by students as one of the most useful tools they have to increase their learning.
This book is not your ordinary classroom assessment textbook. We recommend that teams of teachers use it to systematically examine and change their assessment practices. We firmly believe that adherence to the suggestions and principles articulated in this book will create a paradigm shift in classroom assessment whose time has definitely come.
INTRODUCTION
The New Paradigm for Classroom Assessment
This book is about a paradigm shift in the way teachers use and interpret assessments in the classroom. It is also about increasing the rigor and utility of classroom assessments to a point where educators view them as a vital part of a system of assessments that they can use to judge the status and growth of individual students. This is a critical point. If we are to assess students in the most accurate and useful ways, then we must think in terms of merging the information from classroom assessments with other types of assessments. Figure I.1 shows the complete system of assessments a school should use.
Source: Marzano, 2018, p. 6.
Figure I.1: The three systems of assessment.
Perhaps the most visible of the three types of assessments in figure I.1 is year-end assessments. M. Christine Schneider, Karla L. Egan, and Marc W. Julian (2013) describe year-end assessments as follows:
States administer year-end assessments to gauge how well schools and districts are performing with respect to the state standards. These tests are broad in scope because test content is cumulative and sampled across the state-level content standards to support inferences regarding how much a student can do in relation to all of the state standards. Simply stated, these are summative tests. The term year-end assessment can be a misnomer because these assessments are sometimes administered toward the end of the year, usually March or April and sometimes during the first semester of the school year. (p. 59)
The next level of assessment in the model in figure I.1 is interim assessments. Schneider and colleagues (2013) describe them as follows: “Interim assessments (sometimes referred to as benchmark assessments) are standardized, periodic assessments of students throughout a school year or subject course” (p. 58).
Professional test makers typically design both types of assessments, and they include the psychometric properties educators associate with high reliability and validity, as defined in large-scale assessment theory. As its name indicates, large-scale assessment theory focuses on tests that are administered to large groups of students like year-end state tests. As we indicate in figure I.1, the most frequent type of assessment is classroom assessment. Unfortunately, some educators assume they can’t use classroom assessments to make decisions about individual students because the assessments do not exhibit the same psychometric properties as the externally designed assessments. While this observation has intuitive appeal, it is actually misleading; in this book we
