Watch the RecordingListen to the Podcast

Educators want assessments to be instructionally useful and provide data they can use to help students learn, but not all assessments do that. So what do instructionally useful assessments look like?

In the edLeader “Assessments That Support Ambitious Teaching: What Makes an Assessment Instructionally Useful,” Dr. Carla Evans and Dr. Scott Marion from the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment and co-authors of Understanding Instructionally Useful Assessment defined instructional usefulness and how to design and implement it to ensure that educators have actionable data they can use to improve their teaching and students’ learning.

So, what is instructional usefulness? It means that the assessment provides information about how students learn and think, which educators can then use to improve interactions between students and content. Instructional usefulness is a big part of ambitious teaching—when the educator really knows the student and provides a space where the student feels safe sharing their inner workings. The better an educator understands their student, the better they can teach that student.

Most assessment data given to teachers comes from state and commercial interim tests and covers information such as achievement levels, scaled scores, and subcategory performances. It doesn’t tell teachers anything about what students were asked or their thought processes, yet teachers are expected to use that data to gain insights into students’ thoughts and how to help them learn. This is not what many assessments are designed for, and teachers are often blamed for not being able to use assessments that are not instructionally useful in the first place.

Now, this isn’t to say that state and commercial interim tests are not useful at all. While they are not necessarily instructionally useful, they are useful for program evaluation. So while teachers cannot use their data for instructional purposes, others within the education system can use their data for evaluative and monitoring purposes.

Designing instructionally useful assessments does not have to be difficult. For example, having students engage in cognitive labs (or think-aloud protocols) where they verbalize their thoughts while engaging in new test materials shows how students engage with test items, which helps ensure the test items are academically useful. It helps educators understand what the students are thinking and inform how to teach those students.

Not all assessments are designed to inform instruction. For example, as mentioned earlier, some are designed for purposes such as program evaluation or other outside-the-classroom uses. Most assessments are designed to fulfill one use really well, so before making claims about instructional utility, we need to consider what the assessment in question was actually designed for.

Instructionally useful assessments should be open-ended so teachers can see what students are thinking, have close ties to classroom curricula, focus on one standard or a small group of related standards, be given in a timely manner, and be set up so that teachers can see what questions and problems students are responding to. From this, teachers can compare students’ work to a typical progression of learning, look through the work for connections or issues that need addressing, and consider how to move forward instructionally for the whole class, a small group, or individual students.

In order to really help students learn, it’s crucial that educators know what’s going on in their minds. Assessments that are open-ended, provide opportunities for students to show their thoughts, and let educators see what the students were asked are instructionally useful and allow them to better understand their students’ needs.

Learn more about this edWeb broadcast, Assessments That Support Ambitious Teaching: What Makes an Assessment Instructionally Useful, sponsored by Heinemann.

Watch the RecordingListen to the Podcast

Join the Community

Assessment for Learning is a free professional learning community where educators can learn from top experts about effective assessment practices.

Providing educators with professional development books, curricular resources and services. Innovative, research-based best practices for student-centered inquiry-based classrooms. Trusted for 40 years.

Article by Jon Scanlon, based on this edLeader Panel