What to Ask Before Creating Your Assessment Calendar

When planning an assessment calendar, you should always start with the question:

What are we going to do after we give the assessment?

This is true for an individual teacher planning for their classroom or a Director of Assessment planning assessments for an entire district. Rather than simply focusing on giving the assessment, you should always have a plan or goal in mind with what you hope to do with the data after the assessment. 

Without having a clear plan, the data collected from the assessment risks being underutilized or even wasted. But when you have a clear plan, the data collected from the assessment becomes a powerful tool for driving targeted instruction. It allows you to identify areas of strength and weakness, tailor instruction to meet individual student needs, allocate resources effectively, and evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs and interventions. 

We like to think of this as reverse engineering your assessment planning. By reverse engineering, you know exactly what your goals are once you get your data and you can act right away, adjusting instruction accordingly.

In addition to the first question we asked above, you should also be asking yourself these questions during the assessment planning phase: 

1. What is the outcome we are trying to achieve?
2. What type of instruction is going to get us to our goal?
3. How much instructional time is needed to get us to our goal?
4. When will we plan the changes to instruction to get us to our goal?
5. What data do we need to plan the instruction to get us to our goal?
6. What is the least disruptive assessment tool we need to use to get the data we need?
7. Is there anything we can do to make the assessment experience itself a more valuable learning experience?
8. How will we prepare our students for the assessment to ensure:some text
   1. We collect accurate data
   2. Students derive some value from the assessment experience

Remember School A in our previous blog post? They used Horizon Education’s PreACT/ACT-aligned grade-level assessments to establish a baseline for test readiness in all grades. The assessments were administered in mid-December but the data wasn’t reviewed until January 30^th. By then, the results were stale and teachers were not working with the latest data.  

For School A, it’s important that they shorten that gap in future years so that the data can be truly actionable. By reducing this gap, the data will better reflect student performance and can be used right away to provide targeted instruction. They should also make sure to answer our questions above so they know exactly what they plan to do with the data once they have it.

If they had answered these questions, they may have said something like this:

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Ultimately, just collecting data and letting it sit isn’t very helpful. In School A’s case, waiting until January 30 to review the data meant that instruction wouldn’t take into account any of the learning that happened throughout January. Any item review or interventions they do after January 30 may no longer be relevant or effective. That’s why it’s so important to be proactive and schedule your assessments at a time when you can best integrate the insights into your instruction. 

For example, School A’s post-assessment goal was to include 30 minutes of targeted instruction a week for 8 weeks. They should have set up their assessment calendar so that they could administer the assessment, immediately gather the data and review areas of weakness, and use the next 8 weeks to provide targeted instruction in those areas.

Scheduling assessments is just one component of a productive assessment strategy. The rest comes down to what you plan to do with the data once you get it. Be sure to reverse engineer your assessment planning and answer these questions first before creating your assessment calendar so you can act right away and inform your instruction as effectively as possible. 

A more apt name for an effective Assessment Calendar would be a “When-We-Will-Update-Our-Instructional-Practices-Based-on-Our-Newest-Data” Calendar, but of course, that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

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