Essentials and Extensions change the paradigm of Assessment and Evaluation

Riverview, Canada

Changing assessment practices in secondary schools allows students to follow passions and teachers to personalize learning and innovate

This model is fundamental for teacher innovation. Teachers purposefully prioritize high leverage skills and content, struggling students have more time to learn content and demonstrate proficiency, all students have time to pursue passions, and teachers bring innovative projects into their classrooms. This model decreased failure rates from 30% to 5% and allows students to solve real problems.

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Overview

Information on this page is provided by the innovator and has not been evaluated by HundrED.

Web presence

2012

Established

3K

Children

1

Countries

Updated

January 2019

About the innovation

Built by teachers

This model of assessment was built by teachers collaborating together to address many of the challenges they encountered when trying to implement current assessment practices in the classroom.

Since its development and implementation it in, primarily math and science classes, it has been adopted in language arts and humanities and continues to be adopted by an increasing number of teachers and schools.

The model has been published in the following

Ryan, C (2018). Two Teachers Journey, One Teacher’s Tale: An Autoethnographic Narrative of Creating an Assessment and Evaluation System Using a Learning Community Framework (Masters Thesis). University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB.

Dealy, D., Ryan, C., Fowler, P., and Flinn, M. (2017). Hosting the Saxby Gale at Riverview High: Using Disaster Day to Teach Universal Design, Increase Student Engagement, and So Much More. In Sherman, A. (Ed.), Universal Design for Learning Action Research, New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development: Fredericton, NB. January 2017.

Fogarty, I., & Ryan, C. (2017). Bringing Assessment Research to Practice Using an Essentials Model. In J. Cummings, & M. Blatherwick (Eds.), Creative Dimensions of Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century. Boston. Sense Publishers.

Ryan, C. (2016). Filling an Assessment Literature Gap: A Systemic Example of Formative Assessment in a High School Physics Course. In Proceedings of Global Learn 2016 (pp. 52-64). Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

Ryan, C. (January 01, 2014). Changing the philosophy of education with an education in philosophy. Antistasis, 4, 2, 38-42.

Media

The boring assessment stuff and interesting projects too.

Implementation steps

Structured meeting time

Ideally teachers would be able to access weekly meeting time to determine essentials and extensions, co-create assessments, and analyse student data. The time requirements would be a minimum of 30 minutes every second week. Ideally 60 minutes once per week would be secured to start the process. This can be an intensive process at the beginning and time for discussion is vital.

Once the essential are identified and assessments are created/used, struggling students need additional time to take in and demonstrate their learning. Building this time into the school schedule is paramount in having success in this model.

Identify Essentials From Curriculum

The following list of questions is used to help define the essentials of a course. The first four come from DuFour (2006, Learning by Doing) and help teacher teams set priorities in addressing student learning are summarized as:

What knowledge and skills should every student acquire as a result of this unit of instruction?

How will we know when each student has acquired the essential knowledge and skills?

How will we respond when some students do not learn?

How will we extend and enrich the learning for students who are already proficient? (p 28)

We found that, like many teachers trying to answer these questions, the answers created a list of daunting expectations. By building on Reeves’ (2002, The Leader's Guide to Standards) questionsabout essential skills and knowledge we were able to take small steps towards establishing an assessment system that reduced the daunting nature of expectations.

Does it have endurance? Do we really expect our students to retain the knowledge and the skills over time as opposed to merely learning it for a test?

Does it have leverage? Will proficiency in this standard help the student in the other areas of curriculum and other academic disciplines?

Does it develop student readiness for the next level of learning? Is it essential for success in the next unit, course, or grade level? (p 283)

Each of these sets of questions are addressed and a manageable portion of the curriculum is defined.

Examine assessments and evaluations

To clarify some terminology, assessment is defined as a student tasks that informs a teacher of student progress and is used as a teaching/learning tool while evaluation is the act of a teacher determining a level of proficiency and assigning a grade.

Teachers need to determine how they will assess and evaluate the essentials and the extensions. In our experience most unit tests are divided into to separate tests, one essential and one extension. Some projects may have essential components and extension components or a project may be defined as wholly essential or extension.

Teachers need to recognize that the purpose of differentiating between essential and extension is to focus on learning. Essential skills and content can be learned and demonstrated over a more flexible timeframe, with multiple opportunities, and in a variety of medium. Extensions topics or skills might be time bound, or in a medium specific to the content area.

Personalize learning

Because teachers have identified the essential content and skills, there is now flexibility to pursue innovative projects.

Teachers can access resources like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the HunderED projects, build on 21st Century Skills, or allow students to pursue passion projects. If teachers have properly identified the essentials, they are confident that the students have the content and skills to move on to the next course.

Determine how to evaluate students

Based on local factors, teachers determine how to report on student progress. In our system the essential skills and knowledge count for either a 60% or 50% on a 100 point scale where 60% is a pass. Teachers need to determine how to partition the marks and weight essentials/extensions with traditional divisions between units, assessment types, etc.