As an instructional leader, you know that effective math assessments are about more than just a final grade. They're a powerful tool for understanding what students know, guiding instruction, and shaping your entire math program. However, with so many different types of assessments—from standardized tests to classroom quizzes—it takes some effort to ensure they’re truly serving their purpose.
To ensure your assessments are driving student success and not just creating data, it's essential to pause and ask some critical questions. Here are five questions every instructional leader should ask to make sure their math assessment strategy is effective for all students.
1. How can I use assessments as part of my vision to advance our mathematics programs toward the success of all my students?
School and district leaders can use assessments as a powerful tool to advance their mathematics programs. By shifting the purpose of assessment from judging performance to using assessments to truly support student learning and growth, leaders can drive a culture of continuous improvement as a core part of their instructional vision.
Instead of seeing assessments as a final verdict, leaders can use them to get a clear picture of what each student knows and what they need to learn next. Leaders can guide teachers to use assessment data gathered during instruction to adjust their lessons and provide targeted support to students where needed. This moves the program away from a one-size-fits-all approach to one that is responsive to individual student needs.
The data from these assessments can also inform school-wide decisions, such as identifying students who would benefit from extra support, creating small-group interventions, or allocating resources to specific grade levels that need support with certain standards.
A school's assessment strategy communicates what is valued in a mathematics program. Leaders can use assessments to show that they believe in every student's capacity to learn. By using assessments that measure growth over time, rather than just a single performance, leaders can shift the focus from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. This can be achieved by celebrating progress and providing students with opportunities to revise their work.
2. How well do the math assessments we use align and integrate with one another?
Assessments are embedded into the learning environment through a collaborative and coherent instructional model, aligning with objectives, standards, curricula, and instruction. Having a clear progression of learning that defines the interconnectedness and flow of standards, knowledge, and skills learners are expected to master, as well as ensuring assessments are designed and deployed to measure that progression, is an important feature in assessment for learning.
A collection of assessment opportunities that is integrated and aligned with the curriculum and instructional goals provides a complete and timely picture of where a student is on their learning trajectory. Additionally, low-stakes assessments given during a set of lessons or module provide opportunities for retrieval practice and feedback, which has been shown to support better learning and retention.
3. What kinds of opportunities are provided for our teachers to learn and plan together, and how closely tied are these to the work of math learning and teaching?
Assessments are most effective when they are an integral part of a teacher's practice, not a top-down mandate. Leaders can empower their teachers by building assessment literacy. Professional learning can help teachers design effective and rigorous assessments as well as improve how to analyze the data they collect. This transforms teachers into experts who can diagnose and address student learning gaps.
Leaders can also create opportunities for teachers to come together and analyze student assessment work, discuss assessment data, and co-plan lessons based on their findings. This collaboration builds collective expertise and ensures the entire math program is aligned and responsive. Teachers are a vital part of creating a culture that shows the power and purpose of good math assessments, so building teacher trust while improving their assessment knowledge will go a long way in creating a supportive and learner-focused assessment strategy.
4. Do our math assessments provide multiple ways for students to demonstrate what they know and understand where they need to grow?
Assessment systems should include a variety of authentic, rigorous, and aligned assessment opportunities for all students. Additionally, assessment content can have a range of rigor, methods, item types, and media that allow students a choice in demonstrating what they know and how they are learning. Infusing assessments with multiple item types beyond traditional multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank also provides a deeper assessment experience by moving beyond lower levels of understanding, such as recall or recognize, to higher levels like applying, analyzing, and creating.
Students need feedback from their assessment opportunities that is timely, specific, and actionable as part of the pathway to learner growth and success. Learning science research points to feedback, within a system of learning and assessment, as an effective feature that can help students learn about what they know and what else they still need to learn. Effective feedback comes in different forms and can include opportunities for misconception surfacing, reteaching, and near transfer of ideas and methods. By drawing on learning science principles of feedback, a well-designed assessment system gives students the variety and experiences they need to support deeper learning and growth in the mathematics they are learning.
5. What kinds of data do we get from our math assessments, and do we ensure all stakeholders understand that assessment data?
Effective assessment data collection is systematic and timely; the data is used to adjust learning targets, goals, instructional plans, and teaching methods. Leaders should ensure that the assessment data collected comes from a variety of sources, such as academic content and progress assessments, metacognitive check-ins and surveys, practice problems, individual and collective reflections, and observation checklists.
Assessment data collected on a regular cadence enables teachers to adjust learning targets and instructional goals, and allows for repeated measurement of skills to support learners’ retention and growth of what they are learning. Assessment items and other digital content are tagged across multiple frameworks with globally defined metadata such as standards/benchmarks, learning statements, objectives & skills, cognitive demand & depth of knowledge, and cognitive functions to allow for tight alignments within the assessment system.
Ensuring stakeholders have access to assessment data is crucial - students, teachers, families, and leaders should all have access to up-to-date, easy-to-understand assessment reporting that is useful, growth-driven, and accessible.
Why We Must Analyze Our Math Assessments
While these five questions aren’t the only ones to answer regarding your mathematics assessment strategy, they can be a catalyst for you as a leader to take a deeper look at what you are providing to students. Ultimately, educators aim to do work that matters to students and challenges them to grow and develop. By continually asking good questions, such as those provided here and many others, you will better equip your school or district with the assessment knowledge it needs to ensure all students can succeed.
If you're looking for a math assessment that helps clearly answer these questions for instructional leaders, check out our Compass Math assessment.