Equity and Assessment

BY COURTNEY BROWN


What is equity? How do we define and use it in education?

​Whenever there is a buzzword at play in education circles, we like to unpack, define, and interpret how the term applies to educators and schools. 

Let’s start with the difference between equity and equality.

A simple, working understanding of equity involves “trying to understand and offer people what they need to enjoy full, healthy lives." In education, equity means truly striving to achieve the best possible outcome for each individual student. 

Equality, in contrast, aims to ensure that everyone is offered the same things in order to enjoy full, healthy lives. As educators, the notion of offering all people the same things immediately contradicts our understandings of differentiation. We know that not all students have the same needs. Furthermore, students from underserved backgrounds, generally low-income or students of color, may benefit from a variety of resources to succeed academically. 

All students benefit from equitable practices. I’d like to suggest that we not only offer students additional opportunities or resources to “catch up” or to “level the playing field”, but instead create a new playing field in education. We can start with our own assessment policies and systems in our classrooms, departments, schools, and districts.

Creating equitable education and assessment practices doesn’t end with offering students what they need or deserve to succeed. Equitable policies and practices aim to empower students to recognize and develop their own talents and skills; to become agents of change for their futures. Equity means achieving lasting results for all people, regardless of their socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.

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Examining our assessment practices

​Equity work in any context may require seeing differently, thinking differently, and even working differently. Therefore, it may be helpful to start by asking ourselves some probing questions about our own assessment practices and beliefs. Consider discussing these questions at your next faculty meeting to norm understandings around assessments, or answering them individually, as a way to understand your own beliefs.
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• What are our ultimate goals for our students? 
• Specifically, what are our goals when assessing our students?
• How many different ways can we assess key skills?
• How many different approaches to an assessment are viable and realistic? 
• Is our aim for students to complete tasks so we can enter grades for them?
• How can we develop assessment practices that offer students meaningful opportunities to demonstrate their learning, their progress, skills, and understandings?
• How can an assessment drive students forward on the road to becoming empowered?

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Creating equitable assessments

To work toward equity in education and in assessment, let’s examine our assumptions about educational achievement and assessment. 

Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Anti-Racist, explains how traditional testing policies perpetuate racist (and inequitable) ideas and policies in education. He explains that “achievement in this country is based on test scores, and since white and Asian students get higher test scores on average than their black and Latinx peers, they are considered to be achieving on a higher level.”

We may not have the power to single-handedly change high-stakes testing policies that use assessment scores to measure educational achievement, but we do have influence over our curricular decisions and how we assess and grade our students. We can create more equitable curricula and assessment practices and policies to create more equitable education. To do this, we must:
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• Ensure our assessments align with what we actually teach
• Formatively assess students on a regular basis
• Differentiate assessment products whenever possible 
• Offer a variety of ways to demonstrate mastery
• Be flexible (but not too flexible), and offer time to make up assessments
• Create relevant, engaging assessment methods
• Make assessments rigorous, not rote
• Develop and maintain a growth mindset
• Emphasize effort and progress, not grades
• Acknowledge and cultivate students’ strengths and talents

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Assess what we teach & teach what we assess

There are some basic rules of thumb that we can use to create a more equitable foundation for assessing students. As a starting point, we can simply ensure that we assess what we teach and teach what we assess. 

Backwards design, from Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s Understanding by Design model, offers a framing to ensure that we first plan our assessments — including all the key teaching points and skills needed for them — as a guide to our instruction. Next, we “backwards plan” our units and lessons to ensure that we are meeting each of our teaching goals as we work our way toward the end of unit assessment. 

In addition to planning for end of unit assessments, we can also plan our formative assessments, which will help us understand students’ mastery of each discrete skill throughout our lessons. This will also create space to reteach concepts as needed, as well as ensure that we are offering students a range of possible opportunities to learn throughout a unit. 

When formative assessments reveal or confirm for us which students are struggling or need to revisit a concept or skill, we can differentiate how we reteach or review. If the teaching didn’t stick as we’d hoped the first time around, why would we teach it again in the same way? 

These practices can help us take initial steps toward ensuring our students are offered fair assessment opportunities, and we can build equity from there. 

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Differentiating assessments

Traditional assumptions about assessment may lead us to believe that asking students to complete different assessment tasks to demonstrate mastery may not feel fair — but it may actually be more equitable. I admit that early in my teaching career, the concept of differentiated assessments took me a while to grasp and to actually believe in. 

Many of us use differentiation expert Carol Ann Tomlinson’s helpful framework to guide our daily planning and instruction. We plan differentiated processes using a variety of scaffolds, tools, extensions, student groupings, pacing and modalities. We differentiate content in the form of offering or using a variety of “levels” of texts, math problems, and complexity of tasks. We strive to create a supportive and differentiated learning environment to meet a variety of students’ needs. But, when it comes to differentiating products or assessments, it is a little more complicated. 

Here are a few simple ways to differentiate assessment products to create equity:

• Create a variety of approaches to assess the same skills and understandings. Make sure that you are assessing students based on their understanding of key content, concepts and mastery of skills — not task completion. Can an assessment be shortened or adapted to solely assess the primary standards or skills? For example, a history assessment may ask students to develop an evidence-based claim about a particular topic. While some students will be able to cite and explain evidence from four sources in the assessment’s timeframe, other students may only be able to gather and outline evidence from two sources. To support a variety of capabilities, we can offer additional scaffolds, such as sentence starters, outlining formats, or quotations that can jumpstart students’ thinking as they support their claims. 

 

• Offer realistic timelines for students to make up or redo assignments. Allow students an opportunity to retake or redo an assessment (or part of it) for a stronger score — within a specific timeframe. We know that having no deadlines for completing work is not generally helpful, since students (and teachers) may have already moved so far beyond an assessment that it no longer makes sense to make it up. But if we can create realistic windows in which students can revisit assessments, we can encourage them to demonstrate their learning, without feeling that they’ve missed their chance. 

 

• Alternatively, offer students streamlined or distilled, shortened assessments as make up options. For example, instead of asking students to retake a test or rewrite a lengthy argument essay, you may ask that students write a shorter piece (for a lowered grade) that allows them to demonstrate each of the target skills. Or, instead of an essay that requires them to use three pieces of evidence, you might offer students the opportunity to write a shorter essay with one body paragraph using and explaining a single piece of evidence, a strong introduction and a conclusion with a counterclaim.

 

• Strategic use of technology can offer additional opportunities to students who need to complete an assessment, but may be struggling to access it in a specific location or at a specific time. For example, a missed lab can be completed using a recorded video of the experiment. Similarly, a student who has missed school due to a crisis or circumstances out of their control can utilize a remote learning platform to make up their work. You may also consider providing a video that students can use as they complete assessments.

 

• Develop project-based assessments that include choice and a variety of components, which students can use to demonstrate their learning in a way that is most relevant and appropriate for them. Project-based assessments that include a choice of topics or modalities can offer students opportunities to apply their knowledge in ways that let them shine. For example, if you’re seeking written arguments from students, consider also offering the opportunity to record a TED Talk-style speech, which may demonstrate the same skills as the written assignment, but create a clearer pathway to success for students who struggle with writing skills.

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Make assessments rigorous, not rote 

Research shows that, especially in marginalized or lower income neighborhoods, lessons for students often focus on rote skills and procedures. Often, this means that students are not expected to achieve, nor learn more rigorous skills and content, when compared with their peers in higher income communities. As we know, rote and procedural learning tends to be boring, and when learning is boring, we often disengage or act out. This may become a serious equity issue in marginalized communities, especially for students of color, where, when students opt out of learning or act out, they may face harsh (or criminalized) punishment. Either way, students lose.

Instead of focusing assessments on acquisition or mastery of rote skills or procedures, we can aim to emphasize reasoning and problem-solving skills. Research consistently proves that opportunities for supported, productive struggle can motivate students to stick with a task and to stay engaged as they learn. We all do better when we can engage in productive challenges.

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Make assessments relevant

Culturally relevant curriculum and instruction create more equitable education for all students. Zaretta Hammond, in her wonderful book Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain, defines culturally responsive teaching as “encompassing the social-emotional, relational, and cognitive aspects of teaching culturally and linguistically diverse students.” She believes that when we teach with these concepts as our guiding lights, we create more equitable education.

Similarly, we can create more equitable assessment practices if we offer students experiences that are adapted for their cultural and linguistic diversity and are cognitively appropriate and engaging. 

Here are a few simple ways to make assessments more culturally relevant or responsive:

• Choose themes, questions, authors, and texts that reflect students’ cultural backgrounds and familiar experiences. Make sure that assessment questions both expose students to others, as well as reflect on their own beliefs and identities. Students need to see themselves in their assessments, as well as their daily lessons and assignments. 

 

• Survey students and learn as much as you can about them to inform curriculum and assessments. Students might be surveyed about which topics are most interesting, or asked to offer regular feedback about their experiences with an assessment and what would best support them. We benefit from learning as much as we can about students’ specific cultural backgrounds and experiences for reference or inclusion in our assessments.

 

• Offer choice. Whenever possible, allow students to choose topics or work in modalities that connect to them and that are relevant to them — with assessments, as well as in the curriculum. Simple approaches such as choice boards or project-based assessments can build student agency.

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Develop and maintain a growth mindset

We often think about how important it is for students to develop a growth mindset, yet, as educators, we need to take a hard look at our own biases and assumptions that things may be “too hard” for students. As Carol Dweck points out in the The Power of Yet, with scaffolding and high engagement tasks, we may find that students surprise us and we can reframe our thinking to become, “they don't get it yet.” Many factors contribute to a student’s mindset and development of a learner’s stance, especially a teacher's language and perspective. 

Here are a few simple ways to support a growth mindset for assessment practices:

• Set realistic goals and manageable steps for students to track and mark their progress so that they can see what they can do and have accomplished, as opposed to what they can’t do or haven’t accomplished, which encourages a deficit perspective and a mindset of failure.

 

• Offer actionable feedback for assessments, as opposed to grades or evaluation. Change our language from “not capable” or “never” to “not yet” and “we’ll get there.” Emphasize effort and progress, not grades. Allow students to make up parts of assessments to demonstrate their learning, and motivate them by raising their grades accordingly. Maybe they won’t be able to achieve the highest grade possible, but they should be able to increase their grades to some degree, and in doing so, increase their learning and raise their confidence.

 

• Developing standards-based assessments, combined with standards-based scoring, can increase equity, as these identify the discrete skills that we aim for students to master. Then, instead of evaluating a student's ability to complete a task, we can see how well students have learned each skill or standard.

 

• Rubrics-based grading is another way to support all students by breaking down a task into component parts and more specifically, assessing each skill. This way, students can see their areas of success and of challenge more clearly. Combined with a holistic grading approach, rubrics can offer students feedback and also a more equitable evaluation of each concept or skill they have learned. 

• We may want to rethink our grading policies. While I don’t think we should inflate grades artificially, evaluations should recognize and reward students for meeting and/or mastering standards while also finding ways to acknowledge their effort and improvement. Low and failing grades jeopardize students’ academic opportunities and can be demoralizing and defeating. 

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Cultivating strengths and talents

As educators, our job is to cultivate students’ strengths, as well as help them develop in areas of struggle. All students benefit when teachers recognize and cultivate their passions, talents, and skills. Students also benefit when teachers recognize that a class or subject is an area where they need some extra support and that simply making progress is an achievement, even if their skills have not met or exceeded standards. 

When students are not achieving in a particular subject area, it may be time to think differently about how we assess them. It is possibly a waste of talent and potential if we expect students to spend academic time and energy striving to achieve in an area that continues to be a struggle for them. Instead, we can think more holistically about each student, in an effort to balance supporting improvement in areas of challenge with sponsoring soaring success in areas of strength. We can continue to cultivate and encourage a student’s passions and talents, even when assessing them. 

Measuring and recognizing ongoing progress and effort are important components of assessing a student’s learning.

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Many of us were educated within systems that housed traditional or standardized assessment and grading systems. As educators, we have all consciously or unconsciously based a grading policy or assessment practices on the modeling we learned as students. It can take a leap of faith to imagine new and innovative assessment practices — but we must rethink our notions of fairness and begin to think about developing practices that are equitable for the students in our care. 

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​TAGS: ASSESSMENT, COURTNEY BROWN, EQUITY, TESTING