Assessment
drives the learning and supports and promotes higher order thinking
skills. As mentioned above, assessment needs to be built in at the
beginning of the project, and needs to be an integral part of every
stage of the project. Assessment should be used to determine prior
knowledge, to continually measure progress toward the project objectives,
and to measure the final products and extent of student learning.
Some appropriate assessment strategies include: rubrics and checklists,
charting what students know, want to know, and learn (KWL), walk arounds,
journals, and peer review.
Ideally
assessment should drive instruction. Assessment tools and strategies
should be clear to the student from the very beginning of a project,
and students should be encouraged to participate in the assessment
process though self and peer review, reflection activities, and development
of the assessment tool.
Assessment
needs to be both formative and summative. Formative assessment is
embedded throughout the project and is designed to improve the project
as it is being done. Summative assessment helps provide critical feedback
for the learner that can be used to improve future projects and learning
experiences.
As
educators, we have been taught to think of assessment as summative.
We have been taught that test scores will fall along a bell shaped
curve with most learners scoring somewhere in the middle of that curve.
This allows us to quantitatively assign grades to our students. Standardized
tests compare students' achievement in percentile ranks on a bell
shaped curve. While this can be useful information for educators,
all too often it is misused. Grant Wiggins explains the distinction
between assessing
and evaluating or grading. According to Wiggins evaluating or
grading is placing value on or using the data to judge performance.
He sees assessing as merely reporting achievement.
Formative
assessment means embedding assessment strategies throughout the
project to improve the project and student learning.
To be effective, this ongoing assessment must be part of the project
planning. Instead of thinking of assessment in relation to where student
projects fall on a bell shaped curve, think of ongoing assessment
as helping students to move in a straight line toward improvement
of learning outcomes and excellence.
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At
each step of the project, from establishing baseline information about
prior knowledge to evaluating the complete project and helping students
to reflect on their own learning process, assessment helps teacher
and students develop a deeper, more collaborative relationship. Involving
students in the assessment process helps them to develop better higher
order thinking skills.
Here
are some other PBL assessment resources that might be helpful:
Global
Schoolhouse--Assessment of Project-based Learning
Virtual
Schoolhouse--Assessment Practices
4Teachers--PBL
Checklist
Some
strategies for involving students in ongoing assessment are:
