The way teachers assess their students can be a determinant factor in students’ engagement, motivation and academic achievements as well as in their emotional, cognitive and social development. Although many projects are being delivered that introduce innovative teaching and learning methods in schools, few of them focus specifically on assessment. In a time where school innovation is becoming a trend and teachers are seeking ways to update their practice, innovative assessment methods need to be developed. It is important to understand that in this fast-evolving century where student-centred approaches are being favoured and students’ skills are ever more important, a standardized assessment method that favours competition is no longer effective. Much more than aiming to achieve a final score, assessment can be used as a powerful tool to promote both teachers’ and students’ learning and development. ASSESS addresses this and aims to develop a powerful and meaningful assessment framework, a toolkit for teachers and a training course that will bring an assessment update to the schools. The ASSESS philosophy stands on the importance of a differentiated and personalized assessment of students through the embedment of equity, inclusion, gender balance and the general principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) not only in the evaluation of students but on their education as a whole. Moreover, while it also includes summative assessment, it privileges the focus on formative assessment, including a component of student self-assessment, privileging a constant communication between teacher and students and the sharing of regular development feedback reports between both. Furthermore, ASSESS will aim at adjusting the assessment methods to the digital Era. As such, the ASSESS toolkit will include tools that can be deployed both in a paper-based and digital-based manner like checklists and rubrics and will also include a final digital assessment tool that will generate automated reports based on the data inputted by the teachers, which they can regularly share with the students. Taking the process a bit further, ASSESS will integrate the tools into a smartphone app that will allow for the optimization process of assessment and will include a teacher end, and student end as well as a tutor end, involving parents and other tutors in the process. Finally, a full training course in the form of a MOOC will be developed that will train teachers not only in the use of the ASSESS tools, but also on the creation of their own assessment tools. ASSESS will thus empower teachers to create their assessment tools, adjusted to them and to their students’ needs. To support this, a Design Thinking framework will be created to guide teachers on the choice of the indicators that should be included in their assessment given the particularities of their students and educational context. In sum, ASSESS will provide teachers with an innovative meaningful framework to update their assessment methodology, through the use of the proposed tools and through the development of the necessary skills to adapt such tools and create their own methods even beyond the project. The partnership will recruit teachers as advisors to co-create the methodology and tools and to pilot test them to produce the most effective outputs for teachers and students. The project will run over the course of three years, being the first devoted to the creation of the outputs, the second to pilot test the developed tools and refine them and the third to perform a large scale implementation of the finalized tools. Partners will maintain a constant monitor and support to the teachers implementing the project and school heads will be invited to participate and support the teachers on their schools. An evaluation of the impact and efficacy of the assessment tools will be put in place and subject to publication. The final project book “ASSESS - a guide on student assessment in a changing digital era” will be the legacy of the project, featuring the best practices of the teachers involved as well as the compilation of all the outputs. This book will be distributed at an international level and will be freely available to be used by whoever wants to test, implement and enrich the proposed methodology. ASSESS expects to have a high impact on the teachers and students that implement the project, by providing them with a meaningful assessment paradigm that both can see as useful and beneficial to their development. As a long-term goal, the ASSESS partnership envisions the empowerment of schools to uptake an equity, inclusion and gender balance mindset and to create their own assessment methods to promote the students’ highest academic achievement as well as cognitive, social and emotional development of both students and teachers.
Our goal with this project was to deliver to teachers a comprehensive and reflective framework inviting them to rethink the way they assess their students, to motivate them to question themselves about why they assess their students and if the way they are doing it is allowing them to achieve their teaching goals. It was our goal to provide a comprehensive and meaningful assessment strategy that would allow teachers to classify their students (when mandatory, following their national rules) while providing them with a meaningful formative assessment that promotes the well-being and development of skills. Furthermore, we wanted to provide teachers and students with one digital tool that aggregated all the important features of both formative and summative assessment based on comprehensive rubrics focusing on the development of skills. In sum, our aim was to develop and share a different way of thinking and doing in what concerns student assessment, considering development instead of judgement, collaboration instead of competition, reinforcing formative assessment instead of summative and embracing human diversity as a richness to be promoted and enjoyed.
Student assessment is one of the most influential pillars of education, determining how flexible the curriculum and the teaching methods can be. It is often also a stressful part of education, causing anxiety and negative emotions in students. This, together with the need to update teaching and learning practices, led us to consider that a project focused on rethinking and updating the student assessment mindset, methods and tools was a fundamental part of the movement to update teaching as a whole. The team decided that it was very important to focus on student assessment as a tool to promote development rather than a tool to classify and judge students' performance with few options for improvement. The team also considered that to update the assessment practices, the assessment tools needed to be updated, leading to the conclusion that the development of an app would be an important step to turn formative and summative assessment into a coherent and more time-efficient approach for teachers and students. Finally, the team focused on rethinking assessment in the view of diversity and equity, in an initiative to integrate the psychology of education, pedagogy and the Universal Design for Learning in student assessment.