Differentiated Assessment

This school year I've been thinking a lot about the type of assessments students are doing and about how these can be differentiated.  I've been trying to give students more choice in the IT they are using to show their understanding.  Here are some things I've been trying out as well as ideas that I still want to work on:

• Being more open-ended:  for example with our Grade 3s when they were doing narrative storytelling (adventure stories with that involved decision making) the task was the same for all students but the tools they could use were different.  The idea here is not to be too rigid in what the end product should look like, but to be sure that what we are assessing is the understanding, not the use of the tool.  As someone said recently "painting by numbers only shows how good you are at following instructions".  Often in the past I've given different assignments to different students, now I'm realising that we just need to give the students multiple pathways to a target and not a different target,  showing that there are different ways of getting to the same goal, letting the students choose which is the best way for them, and then providing the support and scaffolding the students need to succeed.
• Observing the process more:  In the past I've tended to assess the final product - and many students have ended up with a similar product which has shown very little about their IT skills or abilities.  The product is important, it must be relevant, but I've come to realise more and more it's the process that counts.
• Focusing on the learning, rather than the achievement: making sure that all students are challenged and are learning something new.
• Encouraging more reflection and discussion:  accepting all answers but then asking students why they think that or why they have done things in a certain way.

Photo Credit:  18 pans of paint by hddod