Prioritizing and Assessing Standards to Accelerate Learning

The 2020-21 ALN sessions will explore implications for teaching and assessing in virtual environments. As educators and students embrace the responsibility to impact learning in new distance, virtual, and hybrid environments necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we will amplify and enhance what we know about good assessment practice and its ability to support learning.

When students and their teachers return to learning for the 2020-21 school year, they confront learning interruptions from COVID 19. Prioritizing grade-level standards and focusing instructionally embedded assessments and formative assessment practices on current grade-level standards promises to accelerate student learning. This strategy can help schools avoid the loss of valuable time identifying what wasn’t taught last year, and it provides the most equitable option available for Michigan’s students.

Four principles guide the assessment of prioritized grade-level standards:

• Assessment should be used to determine how to bring students into grade-level instruction, not whether to bring them into it. Assessment should not be used as a gatekeeper to grade-level content.
• The formative assessment process is our strongest tool to support and accelerate learning and growth; we must use it.
• Targeted checks using instructionally embedded assessments (IEAs), followed immediately by the use of that information, will support instruction; use of diagnostic assessments, as suggested by IEAs and/or formative practices, will be helpful.
• The first several weeks of school should focus on students’ social, physical, and emotional well-being and strengthen relationships and establish cultures conducive to learning.