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.

Taking a Page from Cris Tovani's Book

     In the district where I am an instructional coach, I am consistently impressed by how many teachers directly inform their students of the objectives of the day’s lesson. Providing students with a road map like this is essential; what better way to begin a lesson than to know what it is you’ll be learning, what it is you’ll be able to do by the end of the lesson?

     Well, with this post, I’d like to take our thinking about sharing objectives with students one step further. I’ve been re-reading a favorite educational text of mine lately by Cris Tovani, So What Do They Really Know? Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning (2011). In it, she shares what students see written on the whiteboard as they enter her ELA classroom. Here’s a sample from p. 48 of this great book:

Learning Targets	Assessments
I can show how I am thinking about a text in a variety of ways.	inner-voice sheets
Instead of saying, “I don’t get it,” I can ask a question of the text that might help me build background knowledge to answer my question.	sticky notes

     The first thing I’ll point out is the slight difference between what most of us know as lesson objectives (which usually sound much like standards) and learning targets, which Tovani employs. Posting learning targets basically has the same function as posting objectives – it lets students know what they should know or be able to do by the lesson’s end. I just happen to like how learning targets are student-friendly and are written from the perspective of the student him- or herself. 

     The second thing to take from Tovani’s chart is the real meat and potatoes, though (the difference between objectives and learning targets was just an appetizer, so I hope you’re hungry!). Tovani shares with her students how each learning target of the lesson will be assessed. I won’t go into huge detail explaining what inner-voice sheets or sticky notes are, but suffice it to say they are useful, if not “unfancy,” assessments Tovani uses on a regular basis with her students. The important thing here is that not only has Tovani planned out exactly how she will assess students on each of her lesson’s learning targets (and what tools she will use to conduct said assessments) – this is huge enough on its own, honestly! – but that she is also sharing this information with students. So, when her students begin filling out that inner-voice sheet or jotting down a question on a sticky note, they know why Tovani is asking them to do these things. They know what the tasks relate to in terms of their learning, and they know Tovani will use the data to determine how they are each doing in terms of that day’s learning targets (actually, for that matter, the students themselves can also self-assess whether or not they’ve met the learning targets based on how they felt they did with the assessments).

     If you’re a teacher who regularly posts daily objectives or learning targets, how hard would it be to take the extra step and also post the corresponding assessments? How much would this extra step help you and your students to be aware of the link between instruction and assessment?