Assessment to Help Students Learn
by
Gerald Hess

In class, law teachers monitor student learning through students' questions, comments, facial expressions, and body language. They depend on these informal sources to make important decisions about the course, such as its pace and level of difficulty.

However, law teachers who get more detailed feedback from students often find that the informal information does not provide a very accurate picture of students' skills and knowledge. See, e.g., Katherine Pratt, Using Graded Assignments: The Benefits and Burdens, The Law Teacher, Fall 1993, at 7.

Many law teachers obtain detailed feedback on their students' learning only at the end of the course through an exam or paper. Some teachers regularly evaluate students through graded assignments, problems, papers, or mid-term exams. Although it is an excellent practice to evaluate students in varied ways throughout a course, those evaluative assessments are often too late to affect students' learning.

A recent monograph, Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross, Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers (2d ed. 1993), is an impressive resource for legal educators who are interested in obtaining useful feedback on what is happening in their classrooms.

Classroom assessment is a way for legal educators to obtain accurate, systematic feedback on students' progress in learning the essential skills and knowledge for a course. Classroom assessment also allows the law teacher to provide feedback to students and to help them improve their learning at the critical time - before evaluating them.

Characteristics of classroom assessment

The authors describe classroom assessment as a systematic approach for teachers to find out what students are learning in their classrooms and how well they are learning it. Effective classroom assessment has the following characteristics:

• Learner-centered. The primary focus of classroom assessment is to observe and improve learning. When teachers gather detailed information about their students' learning, they are better able to help students learn the essential skills and content of the course.
• Teacher-directed. Classroom assessment respects faculty academic freedom and professional judgment. Each individual teacher decides what to assess, how to assess, and how to respond to the information gathered.
• Mutually beneficial. Classroom assessment requires the active participation of students, who focus on their own learning and strengthen their self-assessment skills. Faculty improve their teaching by clearly defining the skills and knowledge they are trying to teach, by regularly finding out whether students are learning those skills and that knowledge, and by using the feedback to help students learn more effectively.
• Formative. Classroom assessment is formative rather than evaluative. It is not designed to provide evidence to evaluate or grade student performance. Instead, its purpose is to provide information for teachers to use to help students succeed on subsequent graded evaluations and in the real world.
• Ongoing. Classroom assessment is an ongoing process. Teachers employ a number of simple assessment techniques to get feedback from students on their learning. Next, teachers share the results of the assessment with the students. Then, teachers adjust their teaching accordingly and make suggestions to students for improving learning. The process repeats itself throughout the course.

Assumptions of classroom assessment

The authors created their model of classroom assessment based on seven assumptions about learning:

1. The quality of student learning is directly, although not exclusively, related to the quality of teaching. Therefore, one of the most promising ways to improve learning is to improve teaching.
2. To improve their effectiveness, teachers need first to make their goals and objectives explicit and then to get specific, comprehensible feedback on the extent to which they are achieving those goals and objectives.
3. To improve their learning, students need to receive appropriate and focused feedback early and often; they also need to learn how to assess their own learning.
4. The type of assessment most likely to improve teaching and learning is that conducted by faculty to answer questions they themselves have formulated in response to issues or problems in their own teaching.
5. Systematic inquiry and intellectual challenge are powerful sources of motivation, growth, and renewal for college teachers, and classroom assessment can provide such a challenge.
6. Classroom assessment does not require specialized training; it can be carried out by dedicated teachers from all disciplines.
7. By collaborating with colleagues and actively involving students in classroom assessment efforts, faculty (and students) enhance learning and personal satisfaction.

Although the authors' assumptions are based on learning in higher education generally, the assumptions appear to be equally valid for legal education.

Classroom assessment techniques

The book has two parts. After explaining the characteristics and assumptions of classroom assessment summarized above, Part One sets out an extensive inventory of teaching goals to help faculty identify specific goals for their courses. (Legal educators can review a set of detailed goals for a law school course in Lisa Lerman, Teaching Legal Analysis: An Inventory of Skills, The Law Teacher, Fall 1993, at 5.) Then, the authors describe how to plan and implement classroom assessment. Part One ends with detailed descriptions of twelve different classroom assessment projects that have been implemented in a dozen disparate college courses.

Part Two contains 50 classroom assessment techniques that college faculty have used in various courses. Each description of a classroom assessment technique includes the following:

A brief description of the technique;
• The kinds of skills and knowledge that the technique can assess;
• An estimate of the amount of teacher and student time and energy that the technique requires;
• A step-by-step procedure for planning and implementing the technique;
• Ideas to help the teacher make effective use of the information gathered through the technique;
• Pros and cons of the technique;
• Examples of how teachers have used the technique in their courses;
• References to more information about the technique.

Many of the techniques are appropriate for use in law school classrooms. Here are three relatively simple techniques that law teachers could implement without much trouble:

Minute papers

Minute papers are a quick and simple way to collect written feedback on what students are learning. One way to use this technique is to stop class several minutes early and ask students to respond to some variation of one or both of these questions: "What is the most important thing you learned in class today?" and "What important question remains unanswered?" Students write their responses on a sheet of paper or index card and hand them in on the way out of class.

The results of the minute papers will show whether students are getting the main points of a class and what issues need to be addressed in future classes. The teacher should report the results to the class. Then the teacher may make adjustments in future classes or give suggestions to students on ways they can answer their own questions.

Minute papers are extremely flexible. Teachers can tailor the questions to their individual course and goals, and they can adapt the technique to assess student learning from reading assignments, study group meetings, videotapes, simulations, field trips, or virtually any other activity in law school.

Documented problem solutions

Documented problem solving assesses how students solve problems or analyze issues. To use this technique, the teacher prepares a problem for students to analyze and asks the students to write an explanation of the steps they went through to try to solve the problem. The teacher should emphasize to the students that their responses will not be graded, and that it is more important to document the steps in their analyses than to arrive at the "right" answer. The students work on the problem outside of class and hand in their written explanations.

The results of the documented problem solving will give the teacher a view of the students' thinking processes. This is important feedback for most law teachers who have as part of the goals of their courses to teach analysis, problem solving, or other thinking skills. The teacher can use the results to diagnose students' flaws in problem solving and analysis. Responses that contain clear, elegant, or sophisticated analysis can provide helpful examples to students who are having difficulty with these skills.

Chain notes

Chain notes can give a teacher a limited amount of feedback from each student about the teaching and learning during a class period. To use this technique, the teacher composes a question that will elicit the desired feedback, such as "What are you paying attention to right now?" or "What are you learning at this moment?" The teacher distributes an index card to each student before class and writes the question on an envelope. The envelope circulates during class. Each student spends 30 seconds answering the question on the index card, puts it into the envelope, and passes it on.

The chain notes give the teacher concrete, specific feedback from all students about their learning experiences in class. The teacher should look for patterns in the responses and should share those patterns with the class. Discussion of the patterns can lead to more effective teaching and learning.

The literature on adult education is full of ideas for law teachers who are searching for ways to improve their teaching and their students' learning. One of the best is Classroom Assessment Techniques.