Yvonne Barrett's List: Assessment

• I am a firm believer that even the most jaded students enjoy learning, what they hate, is school.
• ne that is arguably universal across the student spectrum is the fact that far too much of school is organized around testing and not around learning.
• The missing element in the equation is relevance and it is missing because it has been tested out of the school process.
• Formative assessment is the most powerful of the assessments in helping students learn and move toward mastery.
• Project based learning is the process of small bits of convergent learning designed to lead to divergent assessment (that’s my theory on it any way). The small modules are designed to converge into formative checks and then open up directly into the next piece of connected learning (all within the context of understanding the big picture, which is always where learning should begin). By the time the student reaches the cumulative point of the project they have achieved mastery.
• After working through the process of constructing meaning (internalizing learning) and mastering skills, students should be turned lose to generate something new, in other words we need divergent assessment where we now have summative assessment. Students need to add themselves to their new knowledge.
• Divergent assessment is not summative. Upon completion of the mastery phase of learning students need to be set free to use their new wisdom and the requirement should be, “Show us something new, amaze us!”
• Divergent assessment, by design, requires the use of the top layers of Bloom’s ideas about learning. Because students have achieved mastery along the way, of information and skills, they have a new embedded knowing that allows them to take their learning and apply it in ways that intrigue them and allow them to find purposeful meaning in their process. At this point, the restrictions are minimal – very minimal – and students are allowed to evidence their learning in powerful and meaning ways

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