When it comes to measuring student growth, independent schools should design an assessment strategy that works best for them, selecting the right combination of tools that align with their mission. Yet educational leaders not only have to decide what to assess and how often but also analyze and use the data.
Whether you’re developing a new assessment strategy for your school from scratch or evaluating an existing one, the steps below can help ensure you’re getting real value from your investment—of both resources and time—in assessments.
5 Steps to Develop an Assessment Strategy
1. Get Clear on Your Values and Goals
Before you select an assessment provider or decide which assessments are right for your school, clarify how you hope to use testing to support your school’s overall strategic vision and to set specific and measurable goals.
Your school’s goals might include nurturing a rigorous learning environment, achieving recognition as a top independent school, or developing a culture of continuous improvement. Within the context of assessments, this could translate to the following goals for your assessment plan:
- Identifying and admitting the most academically qualified students
- Ensuring your curricular and pedagogical approaches are resulting in significant student progress
- Testing the efficacy of curricular changes or interventions and iterating based on those results
Once you’ve honed in on those goals, you will be better prepared to evaluate and select the assessments that can help you move toward them. Today, thorough assessment plans employ multiple types of assessments, ranging from standard interim, formative, and summative assessments to evaluations of social-emotional skills and student well-being. Identifying your needs early on will help you narrow down the list of providers offering all those products.
2. Assess Your Capacity and Resources
Standardized assessments take time, and administering an assessment itself is often the simplest part. Too often, schools rush to conduct assessments without identifying their internal capacity to analyze and apply the results, which results in unnecessary stress for students and educators without meaningful benefits.
Before moving forward with an assessment, “Make sure you’re committed and you have a practice for understanding the results and turning them into a plan,” advises ERB’s Chief Program Officer Glenn Milewski.
Start by asking the following questions:
- Are we committed to using the assessment results to improve our school?
- Do we have the requisite staff to review and understand the results? If not, where can we get help?
- Have we set aside time in our school calendar to review results and plan action steps?
If you don’t yet have internal buy-in or time set aside, it’s worth focusing on those goals within your team before moving forward. If you don’t have internal staff who are prepared to analyze and interpret assessment results, consider working with a provider like ERB that streamlines the process by providing interpretive summaries and easily sliced data.
3. Research Assessments and Providers
With your goals clear and internal buy-in in place, take the time to consider your options. Talking to leaders from peer institutions that use different assessments and providers is a great place to start; then, do your own due diligence.
Most assessment providers have extensive websites with details on their assessment offerings, levels of support, and features. Education conferences are also an excellent place to meet providers and discuss their products—especially if you have questions about customization options or particular use cases.
In addition to evaluating providers’ reputations, price points, and customer service, it’s also important to critically evaluate the assessments’ quality.
“One step that schools often overlook is defining in advance what they want to use the assessments for and researching what evidence assessment providers offer to support these uses,” Milewski says. “For example, a school may want to use an admission test to make selection and placement decisions. When considering options, the school should understand what research assessment providers have conducted to support these uses and make an informed decision about whether it’s sufficient.”
Schools may also want to consider the level of data each provider offers about schools’ performance against broader cohort groups. For example, ERB offers comparative data from several different norm groups, giving members objective reference points against which to benchmark their school’s performance.
4. Consider Options for Customization
In some cases, measures from a single provider may not provide the data you need to inform your school’s practices. This is often a particular concern, for instance, for independent schools with specific goals like religious education.
Some schools choose to use multiple measures or incorporate school-created assessments in their strategy; however, this approach can create data sets that are cumbersome to combine and difficult to use when evaluating multiple dimensions simultaneously.
“Schools will undoubtedly want to measure unique skills that are not part of any assessment provider’s offerings,” Milewski says. “That’s why ERB invested in allowing schools to customize our Check-In Survey to include specific questions and ensure they’re connected in a reporting platform that is conducive to exploration and understanding.”
Once again, the key to success is to ensure that every measure—whether it’s created internally or externally—is part of a broader strategic framework and that there is a specific plan in place to analyze and use its findings.
5. Seek Out Additional Support
Creating, implementing, and updating a high-quality assessment strategy or plan isn’t always straightforward, and using outcomes data to its maximum potential takes skill. That’s why independent schools can benefit from support from assessment experts, as well as by learning from other schools with similar challenges.
Member organizations like ERB create a community of like-minded schools that can engage with each other and partner on solving common problems. ERB recently launched the EduSight data-informed community of educators to facilitate more of these conversations, both from ERB to members and between members and each other.
Over ERB’s long history, membership has also given schools a way of comparing their student benchmarks to other independent schools. Our Independent School Norm is one way we respond to this need. ERB also offers member schools extensive hands-on support, as well as professional development opportunities including webinars, digital resources, and regional and national conferences.
Creating an Assessment Strategy That Works for You
No two independent schools are alike, and their assessment needs are similarly unique. While building a successful assessment strategy usually takes iteration—and sometimes a bit of trial and error—it’s well worth the time and effort to find and put in place a set of assessments that give you the actionable insights you need to advance your school’s goals.
Find out more about how ERB can support your school with proven assessments and accessible data.
