Featured Speakers:
- Julie Webb, Senior Program Associate, Assessment for Learning Team at WestEd
- Tiffany Katanyoutanant, Research Associate, Assessment for Learning Team at WestEd
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director, Events and Digital Media at WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello everyone, and welcome to the 14th session of our “Leading Together” series. In these 30-minute learning webinars, WestEd experts are sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults, and help build thriving communities. Our topic today, Building Effective Assessment Systems Aligned with LEA Teaching and Learning Goals. Our featured speakers today are Julie Webb, senior program associate for our Assessment for Learning team at WestEd, and Tiffany Katanyoutanant, research associate for our Assessment for Learning team at WestEd. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’m associate director of events and digital media for WestEd. I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. As a non-partisan research, development, and service agency, WestEd works to promote excellence, improve learning, and increase opportunity for children, youth, and adults. Our staff partner with state, district, and school leaders, providing a broad range of tailored services, including research and evaluation, professional learning, technical assistance, and policy guidance. We work to generate knowledge and apply evidence and expertise to improve policies, systems, and practices. Now, I’d like to pass the mic over to Julie. Julie, take it away.
Julie Webb:
Great, thank you, Danny. And welcome to you all. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Julie Webb, and I’m a senior program associate on the Assessment for Learning team here at WestEd, and I’m joined by my colleague. Tiffany, would you like to introduce yourself?
Tiffany Katanyoutanant:
Thanks, Julie. Hi, good afternoon everyone. I’m Tiffany Katanyoutanant. I’m a research associate in WestEd’s Assessment for Learning program.
Julie Webb:
Great, thank you Tiffany. So we’re really excited that you’re all here with us to learn about building effective assessment systems aligned to local education agency, or LEA, teaching and learning goals. So with our agenda today, we’re gonna review just very briefly, we just have a brief time with you today. First, we’re gonna ask and answer the question, why the focus on assessment? I think we probably have a lot of good answers already to that question. We’re also gonna talk about some assessment system components that a lot of us are probably already familiar with when we think about assessment systems. And then we’re gonna move into speaking specifically about coherent and effective local assessment systems.
So we’re gonna differentiate a little bit there and include some key characteristics that we’ve identified, and a resource for you that goes into greater detail. We’ll also be talking about the importance and really purpose around local assessment system evaluation. And we’re gonna do a deep dive into one of those key characteristics that we’ll introduce to you and get a sense of all that’s entailed in at least just one of those lenses that we can use to evaluate and think about our assessment systems. And then we’ll have a little bit of time at the end for some reflection and some suggestions for local leaders about moving forward in this space. So… So, we asked that question why the focus on assessment? So I’m sure you’re all aware in education, we focus a lot of our time and energy on assessment, and really for good reason. Our assessment tools and practices provide us with evidence of student learning for lots of different purposes.
So one purpose might be to inform immediate next steps in learning for an individual student, or even to gain a better understanding of how well a program is supporting a whole group of students. So really, no matter the purpose, we need to ensure that every assessment activity is used to make decisions that can improve learning for students, and really improving student learning is why we focus on assessment, right? That’s kind of, you know, the foundation really for our work today. But it’s not enough to consider really each assessment tool and practice individually. So that really actually gets us into a problem. So, school and district leaders really have to consider how all of the assessments that are used in their system really work together in a coherent way in their local assessment system. And we have to do that if we really want all of our students to meet their learning goals. So I’m actually gonna pass things over to Tiffany so she can start us off sharing more information about assessment systems.
Tiffany Katanyoutanant:
Thank you, Julie. So we wanted to start by just thinking about assessment systems and their different components. So we wanted to first take a look at the different parts of the education system in which we might be using data to inform instructional, programmatic, and system design decisions. The purposes and uses of assessment data are gonna differ depending on the level of the education system and the different partners within those levels who are gonna be accessing data. So we wanted to start by looking first at the classroom level. When we talk about the classroom level, we are talking about, say, formative assessment processes that teachers might use to inform immediate next steps in their learning, to share data with students, and then to come together to think about what the next steps are. This may also include formal classroom assessments that measure individual student achievement.
These can also be used for instruction and planning, but also just to get a kind of a better sense of student learning and gauge process along benchmarks. So at the classroom level, we might see things like an end of unit assessment, or we might see teachers asking students to turn to one of their partners and share their thinking. So that’s what we’re looking at when we’re thinking about what’s happening with classroom level assessments. Moving then to the school and district level, assessments may also inform instruction and planning and include things like interim and benchmark assessments to understand student progress towards content mastery. It might also include screening and intervention assessments that help identify students who might need additional learning supports.
So at the school and district level, your local system might use something like MAP to do an interim check of performance, or use a screener to gauge students’ developing literacy skills. So those are the things that we are thinking about when we look at the school and district level. And then when we to the level, we’re thinking about assessments that include standardized summative assessments that inform evaluation of programs and policies. So in your case, this might look like your state’s end of year English language art and mathematics assessments. Now at the state level, we know that state assessments are designed to provide broad data that informs student mastery at the end of a specified learning period.
The thing about state assessments that we also know is that they’re designed to provide comparable information across schools and districts. And because of this focus on trying to do those state level comparisons, local leaders are afforded little choice when it comes to the tests that make up a state assessments system. So without kind of a say in that, we know that those state assessments may not always perfectly align with things that are decided at the local level. So things like learning values, priorities, agreements about what we mean when we say student learning. So our local assessment systems do offer leaders more agency over the way that evidence of student learning is understood and responded to. And in the chat, you’ll see a resource that it expands on these different levels and the components within the classroom, school and district, and state levels, and think about how they might work in concert with one another to inform the teaching and learning that Julie had referenced.
So going back to our title, what do we mean when we’re talking about what it means to have a coherent and effective local assessment system? When we’re talking about this, we’re talking about one where districts and schools are selecting the assessments that address their particular learning objectives. What we’ve learned from prior research and from our work with districts and schools, that there are some key indicators that tell us when a local assessment is working in concert with the teaching and learning system. What we see is that a coherent and local effective, a coherent and effective local assessment system is one that is one intentionally designed to improve learning outcomes for all students. We see a clear alignment to a shared vision for teaching and learning that’s reflective of the commonly held agreements about valued learning goals, about how students should be experiencing learning, and then what it looks like for students to demonstrate their content mastery.
This is the kind of system that also uses multiple measures to present a complete picture of student learning over time. And it’s one where we know that the assessments are being used for their intended purposes and to collect the particular pieces of data of learning that we really love to understand. This such system also contains accessible assessment tools and strategies for all learners so that all students have the necessary supports they need to address any barriers that might hinder their participation. And then such a system is focused on identifying and building on student strengths. The system values students’ languages, cultures, experiences, and it invites students to draw upon this knowledge, upon this background when they are participating in assessments. So that’s kind of what we’re looking for when we talk about what it means to have a coherent and effective local assessment system.
So the bigger question then is, right, how do we know when we see such a system, what are the things that we would look for? What are the things that would signal this is happening to us? Julie and Senior Project Director Jessica Arnold have identified eight key characteristics of such systems. And we can use these characteristics as a reference just to see if there are areas where we’d like to take a closer look, maybe ask a couple more questions, do a little bit more analysis, or we can look at it as a way to identify priorities for future actions we’d like to take in terms of designing and refining our assessment systems. So let’s take a look at those characteristics together. So you can see, we’ll start on the upper-left side, move clockwise together across this graphic, and we’ll spend a little bit of time just unpacking what each of these characteristics are and what are the things that we might look for or to signal that these things are happening in systems.
So starting with “Informative.” What it means when the system is informative is that the assessment selected in the system provide data that are relevant for teaching, learning, and system improvement. The tool selected provide an understanding of student learning, and are key in helping identify any additional learning supports that might be needed. When we move to “Aligned,” this is where we’re talking about, again, that closer alignment to what’s happening at the local level. So in the such un-aligned system, the assessment tools are aligned with the standards, curricula, and instructional approaches that your particular locality has selected. When you’re “Comprehensive,” a comprehensive system is one that uses data for multiple measures to create a complete picture of learning.
So in such a system, student performance is not gonna be determined by just one tool, but by a number of measures that tells how students are doing on different dimensions of learning that are important to us. And then “Worthwhile.” We’re looking at assessment and tools that, assessment tools and strategies that are gonna prioritize student learning over data production. So assessments aren’t administered without purpose. And additionally, this means that all partners who are within your system have the knowledge and tools they need to access these data to inform their teaching and learning decisions. “Strengths-based” means that the system identifies and builds on student strengths, not just focusing on deficits.
We have assessments here that are not focused on, say, ranking students, but instead we’re focused on highlighting all the different ways students might share what they know and use their information to complete a picture of their learning. “Appropriate.” Here, the assessment tools and strategies are made accessible for all learners. We’re making sure that all assessment tools and strategies have accommodations that are needed, or they have options that allow all students to participate and to respond fully. “Relevant,” and when we talk about relevance, we’re thinking about assessment opportunities that are meaningful and engaging to students. We also wanna make sure that in terms of relevance assessments are aligned with what students have been learning. So the assessments shouldn’t feel like gotchas. They should feel like opportunities for students to share fully what they’ve learned.
And then “Fosters Agency.” Assessment tools and strategies encourage students to develop their own learner agency. When they’re taking assessments, students can see the purpose. The assessment data helps them take stock of their own learning, and the data helps them identify any additional supports they’d like to support their learning, or places they’d like to extend their learning to move on. So as I mentioned previously, local assessment systems differentiate themselves from state assessment systems in that they are aligned with a locally developed vision for teaching and learning. And you’ll see that represented in the center of the graphic because it’s so key to what we are talking about today. Additionally, you’ll see around the entire graphic a representation of local leadership.
As we feel like local leaders are really key to this entire design and maintenance process, we wanna make sure that we highlight the importance of local leaders in making the decisions about design and about maintenance that are ensuring that the alignment is there, from assessment tools to local visions. So again, in the chat you’ll see a link to the article that describes these characteristics in greater detail. And we encourage you all to download, bookmark this article. It can be a valuable tool as we’re talking today, and it can be a valuable tool as you think about how your local assessment system aligns with the ideas we’re sharing today. So again, when we go back to the question, how do we know when a local assessment system is coherent and effective?
So Julie and I have done a lot of work in terms of thinking about system evaluation as a vital process for understanding how all these tools are working together and how assessment data are gonna be used. But when we brought about, you know, evaluation may call it different things and different ideas for people. When we talk about evaluation, we’re talking about the process of asking particular questions about your system, collecting data points that shed light on your system’s inner workings, its components, and then thinking about how people and partners are distributed, have distributed data sharing responsibilities within your system. So when we’re thinking about evaluation, this might entail asking questions about, say, how many literacy assessments is your locality administering when you compare it to the number of mathematics assessments?
We might ask questions about, who is particularly using the data from each assessment, and what are they using it for? Are they using it to make lesson planning decisions? Are they using it to make classroom placement decisions? Those are the questions we might ask. We might also ask if, let’s say, do we have an assessment that accurately tells us whether or not our students are attaining our reading learning goal? And if we don’t have that tool, what are our next steps? Last Thursday, Jessica and Special Education Program Manager Elizabeth Zagata held a webinar on creating assessment systems that support strong outcomes for students with disabilities. And if you weren’t able to join last Thursday, that recording will be available shortly as Danny had mentioned.
But those of you who were able to join may recall, we had some discussion about systematically evaluating assessments and thinking about who’s really making these design decisions? Who do we need to involve in these design decisions? And what are the questions we should be asking when it comes to system design? Effective system design is informed by these evaluation processes, which helps us understand, again, what’s happening in our local assessment systems. And it also helps us identify what are the strengths and opportunities for improvement? So in these processes, we like to encourage people to think about who are the different partners who might be involved in these evaluation activities? As Julie mentioned, assessment’s not just centralized, right, in assessment by itself. We wanna make sure that it’s incorporated into teaching and learning systems.
We also wanna think about the role of local leaders in asking these questions and engaging in evaluative activities. We know that, again, local leaders play such a vital role in enacting and sustaining their systems. And we wanna make sure that when we’re conducting such an evaluation, we’re getting leaders the data they need that informs any kind of design considerations, any kind of revision, any kind of maintenance. We wanna make sure that local leaders have what they need to ensure coherence and effectiveness in the system’s design. So thinking again about evaluation just as a broad category, we like to think about it as a way to shine a light on things like, again, how aligned are your assessments to your particular learning goals, and your locality’s learning goals, no one else’s.
We wanna think about how accurately your assessments are measuring your students’ learning. Is it giving you the data that you need to understand learning outcomes? We wanna know if assessments are gathering meaningful data. Is it data that you and your partners can use? Or is it data that unfortunately sits somewhere and then nobody looks at it again? And then we also wanna take a special look at partners’ capacities for analyzing assessment data and translating that data into practice decisions. Again, making sure that the assessment data really gets to be part of those teaching and learning cycles and not something that we did, we checked it off, and then we never touched it again. So for our team at WestEd, we like to use the eight key characteristics that we reviewed as a framework to conduct these thorough evaluations of local assessment systems.
Part of the key in our process is that we wanna take into account the nuances of whatever your local context are, your local values, and the ways that you all individually design learning and teaching. A big part of our work is that system evaluations should be conducted regularly. So again, we know that priorities may shift, goals may shift. We wanna make sure that we’re working to help people understand that that alignment is something that can be disrupted or misplaced, and that a part, the evaluation, the regular evaluation, keeps the coherence tighter. What we wanna learn from these evaluations too is that we want to get actionable steps for system improvement, that again, really are directed at providing leaders with the clarity that they need to build coherent and effective local assessment systems.
And part of our, what we wanted to talk about today is to like helping move beyond a sole focus on accountability and compliance when it comes to assessment. We wanna move into that sphere where we’re talking about how assessment works hand-in-hand with teaching and learning. So given our time today, we wanted to focus on just how we might use one of those key characteristics that we reviewed as a lens for starting an assessment system evaluation and starting to ask these questions. So Julie’s gonna help us dive a bit deeper into the informative characteristic as an entry point into analyzing a local assessment system and taking a closer look at the decisions that are behind that system design. So Julie, I’ll turn it back to you.
Julie Webb:
Thank you, Tiffany. So WestEd’s eight key characteristics that Tiffany described on that previous slide allow us to look critically at and improve our assessment systems for greater coherence and effectiveness. So those lenses are gonna be really important to signal what we need to be looking at and attending to. And the article that we shared in the chat, I will actually help you to recall those characteristics and further explore them, because of course it goes into greater detail than we can do together with you today. But we do have enough time to dive a little bit deeper into at least one characteristic. So we thought we would start with the informative characteristic today. So an assessment system is informative when assessment is used efficiently to make decisions regarding teaching, learning, and system improvement.
So we can ask ourselves questions about how often we spend time to really understand the investment of time and resources within our assessment systems. How are we really actually gathering that information, and is that a good investment for the return, or what is the return on investment there? And also, can we actually be more efficient in our use of our assessment systems, and how can we do that? We can also have more informative systems when assessment tools and practices are of high quality and provide meaningful information that inform decision making. So do we gather input from our teachers about how assessment data is informing their instructional decision-making? Are we doing that? Are we not? How can we build their assessment and data literacy to improve their use of that assessment data and the evidence that they collect?
Also, redundant and misaligned and even underutilized tools are removed from informative systems. So we don’t always take stock of what we have or what we’re using, but the informative lens helps us do that. So are we regularly evaluating the assessment tools and their relationship to other tools in the system? And are they used for the purpose for which they were designed? This is a key area that Tiffany and I have seen in different districts where assessments aren’t always being used for the purpose for which they were designed. And that’s a key consideration and a problem that we need to address. And then finally, in informative systems, all education partners, including teachers, leaders, students, and families, have access to timely usable information about student learning. So do we understand the assessment and data literacy knowledge and skills of all of our partners? And how are we supporting their use of assessment data?
So these are definitely things we need to be thinking about, especially as local leaders who have responsibility in those areas. So as you can tell, there’s a lot to consider just when it comes to making sure our assessment systems are informative. And that’s of course just one of the characteristics in that article that we talked about earlier. So let’s actually continue with this idea of the informative characteristic and think about it maybe in another way. So we actually have, oops, I think I went too far. There we go. We have a description here of a local assessment system that is really less informative than it could be. And as you listen to this vignette, think about how this example compares to your current assessment system in your LEA. A district requires all K8 students to participate in a standardized reading assessment and a math interim assessment every six weeks. The resulting reports provide to teachers and families consist of a raw score and a percentile score.
And without any context about standards, student learning, or guidance about next steps in learning, the reports are either ignored or used simply to confirm assumptions about which students are getting the content being taught and which are not. So this example describes the situation of which educational partners don’t have access to all the data that they need to understand student learning. And this gap in understanding is really affecting decision making, which also contributes to overall inefficiency of the system. And then this description might actually share some similarities with your local context, especially because it describes some common challenges that we all face in our LEAs. So having an informative lens helps make these challenges easier to spot, and we can make our next steps, make those next steps a little bit clearer that we need to take to make improvements.
So when we, oops, it keeps advancing a little too far. So here we actually have a description of a local assessment system that is more informative this time. So let’s see if you can locate evidence of how this description comes closer to meeting our informative criteria. A district conducts an annual survey of teachers, students, and parents to elicit feedback about the value of assessment data they receive throughout the year, and how these data are and are not used. The district uses this information to guide decisions about specific assessments, including whether to continue using them and what sort of training and resources they can provide to help teachers and others understand and use the assessment data. So this example shows evidence of efficiency, informed decision-making, assessment tool evaluation, and access to meaningful assessment data, which are all elements of informative systems.
So as you’ve likely concluded, there’s a lot to unpack from the informative characteristic alone. And each of these characteristics can be a helpful lens through which we can take stock of our local assessment systems, and really start conversations about teaching and learning in your local context. And to start such conversations, we can ask some probing questions about our local assessment systems, again, through this informative lens. So you can ask yourself, how informative is your local assessment system? Are assessments of high quality, and are they aligned with your vision for teaching and learning? Do data provide meaningful insight into student learning and system improvement? Do data provide timely feedback to inform instructional decisions? And are data provided in ways that are accessible for all for all partners? So questions like these can actually help us reflect on the status of our assessment systems and help us consider areas for further investigation and improvement.
So we’ve shared some big ideas actually with you today, and we’d like to offer some suggestions for how local leaders can start the process of improving local assessment systems. So our first suggestion is to establish a shared vision for teaching and learning through engagement with interest holders. And these interest holders include administrators, teachers, other instructional staff members such as instructional coaches and paraprofessionals, and students and their families. And interest holder perspectives on student experiences and what they value about learning will help shape your commonly held agreements. In addition to the informative characteristic, consider how the other key characteristics apply to your assessment system, and the article we’ve shared can offer some guidance in that way.
Next, create a plan to evaluate your local assessment system. Be sure to attend to the alignment between assessments and the instructional practices, as well as the shared vision for teaching and learning. And implement the plan, analyze the resulting data, and that will inform your next steps. And in the meantime, build assessment and data literacy among all interest holders through professional learning as well as guided engagement with student data. And these efforts can yield additional information that can support your improvement journey. So our time together is just about over, so we wanna leave you with a few closing thoughts. Really, the importance for all of us for those assessments that we use to work together within a coherent and effective local assessment system, really in order to support our efforts to improve learning for all students.
Also intentionally building the assessment and data literacy of educational partners is really important for ensuring that we have access to timely usable information about student learning. And also, regular evaluation of your local assessment system can provide school and district leaders with the data and insights that you all need to move beyond a sole focus of accountability and compliance, and to actually support all students to meet their learning goals. So with that, Tiffany and I would like to thank you again for spending your valuable time with us today, and I’ll pass it back to Danny.
Danny Torres:
Yeah, thank you. For more information about our work on the topic of assessment literacy, visit our Center for Standards Assessment and Accountability website at csaa.wested.org. You can click Assessment Literacy under Featured Services on the homepage. You can also scan the QR code displayed here on the screen, and that’ll take you right to the page. Well, thank you Julie and Tiffany for a great session today. And thank you to all our participants for joining us. We really appreciate you being here. Please feel free to reach out to Julie and Tiffany via email if you have any questions about the work we discussed today. You can reach Julie at Julie, J-U-L-I-E .webb, W-E-B-B, @wested.org. And you can reach Tiffany at [email protected].
And there’s still time to register for our upcoming Leading Together webinars. We’re covering a range of topics including literacy, early math, assessment, and more. During these webinars, we’re sharing insights and evidence-based practices to improve teaching, leading, and learning. For more information about our Leading Together webinar series, visit us online at wested.org/leading-together-2025. And finally, you can sign up for WestEd’s email newsletter to receive updates. Subscribe online at wested.org/subscribe, or you can scan the QR code displayed on the screen here. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and BluSky. With that, thank you all very much. We’ll see you next time.