UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Grant Wiggins and Jay Mc Tighe
Chapter 7
Thinking like an assessor
“How do I know they really know?”
Well, another important task to carry out: To assess. As all of us know what assessment is, I’d like to start briefly defining this crucial and complex term. According to the author, assessment is “the act of determining the extent to which the desired results are on the way to being achieved and to what extent they have been achieved” (p.6). In other words, we need clear evidence of understanding and we are supposed to gather it somehow. We as teachers sometimes fear assessment and evaluation because we don’t understand it and, therefore, cannot gain control over it. Somehow we have to decide what students must know and how they are to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. And all this process leads us to wonder a couple of questions: How well are students learning? How effectively are teachers teaching? And more importantly, we as teachers must be clear about the following questions: To what extent do the assessments provide valid, reliable and sufficient measures of the desired results? What will students do to show me they understand? What is the most appropriate assessment(s) method? So as we can see, many questions emerge from this very “simple” word that must be crystal clear for us as teachers, and a very general definition of the purpose of assessment has to do with the documents we gather regarding the students’ movement from knowledge and skills to critical reasoning and communication and that it informs instruction and lesson design. Regarding this last word DESING, we teachers tend to be “activity designers” rather than “assessors”, which is crucial to be clear about. And here is a checklist to notice this difference.
Backwards design (assessor) vs. traditional design (activity designer)
Assessor’s design:
Ø Requires sufficient and revealing evidence of understanding
Ø Distinguishes between those who really understand and those who don’t.
Ø Has distinguishing work criteria
Ø Checks for predetermined misunderstandings
Activity designer’s design:
Ø Looks for interesting and engaging activities on topic.
Ø Identifies available resources and materials.
Ø Thinks about what students will be doing in and out of class and what assignments will be given
Ø Wonders if the activities worked – why or why not
We need to know the learner’s thought process along with their answers
