Multiple Methods of Assessment
Overview
Using multiple methods of assessment can help educators gain a comprehensive understanding of learner progress across a wide range of skills and content. Allowing learners to demonstrate their learning in multiple formats can be beneficial, particularly when learners are given autonomy in their assessment opportunities. Written, visual, and oral assessments can help educators understand learning from a variety of angles, informing instruction and shaping future assessments. Additionally, it is important to remember that not all assessment activities need to be graded, as many can be used to spark larger conversations about meeting learning goals and in turn inform instruction. Including students in brainstorming and selecting assessment methods is an empowering tool to increase student engagement and autonomy while letting them demonstrate their knowledge through their strengths. This can be especially beneficial for those with learning disabilities. The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework specifically highlights the need for multiple methods of assessment as a strengths-based method of differentiating instruction and assessment and addressing learner variability in the classroom.
Example: Use This Strategy in the Classroom
Watch as these educators in K-12 classrooms discuss the multiple methods of assessment they use with their students to ensure learner progress and understanding. These methods of assessment are embedded within the process of project-based learning and highlight a variety of different assessment methods.
Design It into Your Product
Videos are chosen as examples of strategies in action. These choices are not endorsements of the products or evidence of use of research to develop the feature.
Watch as these educators use observation-based practices to assess literacy learning in elementary students.
Additional Resources
Additional examples, research, and professional development. These resources are possible representations of this strategy, not endorsements.
Factors Supported by this Strategy
More Instructional Approaches Strategies
With this interactive technique, teachers help students become storytellers by listening and questioning.
When teachers provide explicit instruction in comprehension strategies and model when to use them, students learn how to flexibly apply them to make meaning of texts.
As students are learning to read, they benefit from explicit, systematic phonics instruction.
Seeing and using new words repeatedly and in many contexts is critical for Vocabulary acquisition.
Explicit instruction in handwriting, including letter formation, can help Handwriting Skills become more automatic, freeing up Working Memory to focus on Foundational Writing Skills.
Explicit spelling instruction helps to improve not only students' spelling, a key part of Foundational Writing Skills, but also supports reading skills development.
In guided inquiry, teachers help students use their own language for constructing knowledge by active listening and questioning.
Independent reading promotes reading development by emphasizing student choice with teacher support in selecting books, as well as by making time for free reading.
Literacy centers with reading games, manipulatives, and activities support learner interests and promote the development of more complex reading skills and social interactions.
Through short but regular mindfulness activities, students develop their awareness and ability to focus.
Instruction in multiple formats allows students to activate different cognitive skills to understand and remember the steps they are to take in their reading work.
A parent evening meeting about how to support literacy at home with one follow-up meeting with each family has shown strong results for students' reading development.
Talking with students about what they know about the topic of upcoming work helps activate their Background Knowledge or reveals gaps.
A strengths-based approach is one where educators intentionally identify, communicate, and harness students' assets, across many aspects of the whole child, in order to empower them to flourish.
