Student Engagement and Assessment

Saskatoon Public Schools is conducting a multi-year Collegiate Renewal initiative that will touch the lives of every secondary student.  At its core is the goal: “All collegiate students will be engaged in their learning so they will graduate as active participants in lifelong learning and as responsible and caring citizens in the community, nation, and world.” 

The district has begun to achieve this goal through a strategic, sustained focus and by providing the necessary resources so that educators may consciously, consistently, and deliberately support all students in becoming engaged learners. In addition, Saskatoon Public Schools  is finding that student engagement is directly connected with assessment methodologies used by teachers.

Understanding Engagement

Here’s what the district has found in its study of educational research over the past year:

• Motivation is the precursor to engagement.  Motivation is the reason for being engaged.  While extrinsic motivators such as grades, awards, praise and punishments,  will sometimes engage, intrinsic motivators will lead to deeper, lasting learner engagement.
• Instructional practices strongly influence learner engagement.  When instruction draws on students’ prior knowledge, interest, culture and world experiences, the curricular goals become more meaningful.
• Engagement precedes learning.  Authentic engagement is the necessary state to ensure deeper understandings and greater retention of key learnings.
• Engagement is a worthwhile end in itself.   Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this end as “flow”.  Flow is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”  Such "flow", according to Csikszentmihalyi, is "optimal experience" that leads to happiness and creativity.
• Engagement is a more reliable, long-term indicator of future economic success and health and well-being than achievement.  Teachers, parents, and administrators are better informed by behaviours that signal authentic engagement. 
• For the district, these findings have provided a compelling rationale necessary for professionals’ commitment to the goal of student engagement.  Compelling also, are the power and promise of assessment of and for learning as key strategies that help the district  to realize its intent.

Assessment for Learning and Learner Engagement

ETS author Rick Stiggins indicates that in the past, schools “have believed that, as the adults make better instructional decisions, schools will become more productive.  But this perspective overlooks the reality that students may be even more important data-based instructional decision makers than adults.” 

Involving students in setting and using criteria and increasing specific, descriptive feedback (while reducing evaluative feedback), for example, help to shift the locus of control from teacher to student.  Learning goals expressed in students’ language and teacher-feedback that is instructive rather than judgmental are a few of the changes that have significantly affected engagement and by extension, learning.  As one student observed, “I no longer feel doing well is just about getting lucky.”  Such an observation is the outgrowth of an examination of encoded messages such as 75%, C+, or “good job!” which can interfere with, if not terminate, students’ interest in learning.

Assessment of Learning and Learner Engagement

“Excellence can be revealed in a multitude of ways.  As the diversity increases amongst our students… teachers need to learn how to allow for [these] differences,” writes Dr. Anne Davies and co-authors Beth Parrott Reynolds and Sandra Herbst-Luedtke in their book Transforming Barriers to Assessment for Learning: Lessons Learned from Leaders.  

Further to the work of Dr. Davies, Saskatoon Public Schools has chosen to develop “Quality Evidence of Success” through the use of triangulation, which includes:

• Products such as:
  - Student response to the written portion of individual student interviews
• Conversations such as:
  - Principal interviews in spring 2008
  - Student voice captured through student presentations to teachers in fall 2007
  - Student voice captured in 120 individual student interviews
  - Teacher and student “What Did You Do At School Today” survey results
  - Formal teacher feedback related to professional development opportunities
• Observations such as:
  - Learning Leader reports of evidence of progress at each of their schools

As teachers become more proficient at engaging students and gathering quality evidence of success, the district hopes to use other evidence of student success besides a percentage mark in some of its classrooms.  While there are external requirements to report percentages in senior grades, staff are identifying opportunities to utilize other “indicators” of success in some subjects and grades.

A key resource for a number of Saskatoon Public School teachers this past year has been the ETS book A Repair Kit for Grading: 15 Fixes for Broken Grades by Ken O’Connor, which has guided them in reflecting on their grading practices.  Of particular interest has been the discussion regarding the use of poor quality evidence to report to students and parents.  Teachers are recognizing the confidence range that is associated with any numerical representation of student achievement and are exploring other ways of providing academic achievement information.  One school staff is examining removing percentages from all midterm progress reports and replacing numbers with high quality, standards-based comments, observations and recommendations.

Other collegiates have begun to offer “markless math” courses at the Grade 9 level where specific, descriptive comments replace the traditional percent grade. Teachers who have taken this route in the past few years have indicated that parents appreciate the quality of the comments that now come home and students focus more on the learning agenda rather than the chase for a particular mark.

As teachers continue to focus on student engagement during this and successive years, Saskatoon Public Schools anticipates further discussions concerning the best ways to describe student progress to the students themselves, parents and the broader community.  Perhaps most fascinating is the emerging paradox: as educators give away control over student learning through quality classroom assessments, the growing, quality evidence of student success has granted professionals more control of, or influence over, classroom learning.