Ensuring Equity with Differentiated Assessments

So, you're coming up on the end of a unit and you've decided to mix it up a bit with your final assessment. You'd like to give your students some choices in order to differentiate based on their interests and possibly also their learning styles.

The only problem is, you're concerned about equity. How can you provide a variety of choices while still being fair? How can you ensure certain options aren't perceived as "easier" or "harder" than others?

Here's my suggestion. It all comes down to the objective -- what's the purpose of the assessment? What is the skill and/or knowledge mastery it's supposed to be assessing?

You need to answer these questions first. If you're having difficulty, revisit your essential questions for the unit. What's the big picture? What are the big take-aways for students?

Once you've decided upon what you want to assess  -- what do students know and/or are able to do? -- you need to commit to this for each option you provide to students. In this way, what varies is not the objective of the assessment, but the product -- the way the student demonstrates their mastery of this objective.

For example, you may decide that what you really want to assess is the student's ability to answer a particular essential question of the unit and to include evidence to support his or her points. With this in mind, you can provide all kinds of choices to your student: an essay, a powerpoint, a poster, a formal debate, a RAFT, a video, a newspaper article, etc., etc., etc. The key is to establish the common criteria for any of these options -- regardless of what the student chooses, he or she must provide an acceptable answer to the essential question and must include evidence to support his or her points (with some of the more visually-based options, you can always require the student to include a separate written explanation of their piece that meets this criteria). What students come up with is going to look different, but it is still going to allow you to assess everyone based on universal criteria. It's only when you don't establish this kind of common criteria, when you don't ensure that you're measuring the mastery of the same objective, that inequity can creep in -- you might end up with lots of cool projects, but you run the risk of this collection of cool projects actually measuring all sorts of different objectives. That's not overly "fair," and, more importantly, it doesn't give you data on how all of your students are performing within a particular standard or objective.