How can we assess student learning in an inquiry classroom? 

The decision to do an inquiry activity in the classroom has many considerations. Most likely the biggest hurdle is making the time in the curriculum and perpetual time management throughout the activity. Whether the activity is more teacher-driven or student-driven, choosing the appropriate assessment method is the first step. Do you want your students to keep a journal or a log throughout the activity? Write daily reflections and keep them in a portfolio with assignments/work samples? Multiple methods provide multiple sources of information for you, as the teacher, to make inferences and decisions about students' learning and achievement.  

Inquiry follows the impulse of the learner, so it is difficult for teachers to develop common criteria for achievement across students, unless the criteria becomes so generalized and disconnected from the content and the context of the activity as to fit all students.  Unfortunately, this is often what happens with the increasing development and reliance upon rubrics (see the rubric section).  Whenever using a rubric or criteria for judging your students' learning, regardless of what or where the criteria comes from (i.e. state standards, teacher criteria or teacher-student negotiated criteria), you should share your expectations with the students.  Nothing can be more discouraging to your students who have engaged in pursuing a topic of interest for weeks, to find out that in order to get an "A" they were to use certain vocabulary, etc. (see Paradigms).

With an inquiry activity, you (as the educator) have many opportunities to use multiple methods of gathering information on your students' learning.  You will observe, they will create and reflect, and everyone will discuss.  Often inquiry leads different learners in different directions concerning the same topic.  This is the main reason that allowing the students the opportunity to show what they know is very important.  Because inquiry learning is contextualized, the assessment method should be authentic, in other words, the task of the student should be related and relevant to their experience and ideally embedded within the curriculum (as opposed to an add-on test at the end of the unit).

There are a variety of types of constructed response tasks that have the benefit of allowing the learner the opportunity to show what they know and possibly pursue in-depth a topic of interest to the learner, and they have the limitation that they are not necessarily reliable when analyzed using traditional psychometric definitions.

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• Portfolios: a collection of information by and about a student to provide a broad perspective of the student’s achievement. A portfolio contains samples of student work in one or more areas. It may also contain narrative descriptions, grades or other evaluations by teachers and others, official records, student reflection or self-evaluation, responses from parents, suggestions for future work, and audio or photographic records.
• Profile: a collection of ratings, descriptions, and summary judgments by teachers and sometimes by the student and others to provide a broad perspective of the student’s achievement. A profile typically includes a variety of contents, which may vary from checklists to certificates to narrative descriptions of what a student knows and can do. It may document academic achievement, nonacademic achievement, or both. A profile differs from a portfolio in not including samples of student work.
• Performance Task: a task, a problem, or question that requires students to construct (rather than select) responses and may also require them to devise and revise strategies, organize data, identify patterns, formulate models and generalizations, evaluate partial and tentative solutions, and justify their answers. 
• Project: a specialized, often interdisciplinary inquiry devised and undertaken by a student or group of students. Project work results in personalized (and perhaps new) knowledge, subtle skills, and professional-like motivation and habits.
• Demonstration (or Exhibition) of Mastery: often a formal, more or less, public performance of student competence and skill that provides an opportunity for a summative assessment. Demonstrations may also be formative, ongoing, informal, and embedded in curricula and everyday practice.
• Discourse Assessment: evaluation of what a student tells about what he/she knows. Typically with talking with an assessor, the student illustrates what he/she has learned, offering evidence of critical thinking or problem-solving by producing narratives, arguments, explanations, interpretations, or analyses. The assessor listens and probes for evidence of achievement, such as responses that synthesize relevant information and apply it to a new situation. This is similar to Think Aloud Protocols & Interviews (Informal & Formal/Structured) where a student performs a problem or activity and answer questions about it (See Resources - Books)
  (adapted from Mabry, 1999).

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Rubrics most often look like a matrix where standards meet criteria for performance. This is when the pre-determined instructional objective, which can be standards-based, is gradated into descending levels in order to assign a score, which is later interpreted as A, B, C...or Exceeds, Meets, Below Standards.  According to Linn & Gronlund,  a scoring rubric is a set of guidelines, typically consisting of verbal descriptions, for the application of performance criteria to the responses and performance of students.  They explain in their text (see Resources - Books) the difference between an analytic scoring rubric and a holistic scoring rubric. The analytic rubric requires the identification of different dimensions or characteristics that are rated separately. The holistic rubric provides global descriptions of different levels of performance. A holistic rubric emphasizes less the specific criteria for achievement, and emphasizes more the overall quality or performance. Rubistar is a web-based rubric generator that some teachers find helpful when time is short to develop a rubric.

Anecdotal Notes (or Teacher-Kept Records) are factual description of the meaningful incidents and events that the teacher has observed. Typically, a teacher records events as a description shortly after the observing the event, and the teacher makes an effort in his/her note-keeping to separate the description separate from the interpretation of the behavior's meaning. Anecdotal notes can be kept on separate cards or in a notebook. This method is particularly helpful when trying to assess group or collaborative work in the classroom. The teacher's notes become an additional source of information when trying to make inferences about student achievement.

Student-Kept Records are when the student records feelings and interests in a notebook that is eventually shared with the teacher.  This helps foster self-assessment and can be used in this way, such as How did you do? How would you describe your learning? What would you have done differently? Student-Kept Records involve reflection and promote meta-cognition because they reflect formatively and summatively.  Peer-Appraisal can be a part of this method, if the appraisal provides an opportunity for descriptive assessment. This is similar to Journals - Response Journal for Reading (Reader Response Theory).

Conferences - Student-led Parent/Teacher - the student takes an active role in explaining what he/she has accomplished in school to parents and/or a teacher.  A Student-led conference promotes responsibility and accountability of the student's own work and fosters motivation.

Testimonials - Please share your assessment practices and experiences from your inquiry classroom. Email us and we'll share your experience with other educators here on the Inquiry Page.

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 Emerging Approaches - What new assessment practices are being investigated?

Inquiry Page - Inquiry Units

StoneSoup - Portfolio Units

Some attributes of Units:

• Units are designed according to an inquiry-learning model.
• Units are written structures. They are rigorous exercises that turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
• Units coax students to think about the process as well as the product of their learning, fostering meta-cognition in students.
• Units foster students’ ownership of the learning process that is connected to their efforts and activities rather than their present skills and abilities.
• Units encourage students to situate their inquiry within a standard, possibly making their Unit standards-based inquiry.
• Units are automatically converted to Web pages, giving students a published record of their work in the classroom and at home.

Units are available to teachers whenever they are needed. The uniform information structure of the Unit makes them easy to review.

• Units can be created with pencil and paper in class or at home. The electronic form is used to make a permanent digital record (a Web page).
• Units can be used to track individual student performance. Teachers can get to know more about individual students as learners.
• Units provide teachers with feedback on how students are receiving their lessons.
• Units can be used to justify and defend teachers’ assessment of students’ work to administrators, parents, and students.

The Unit becomes a portfolio of the student’s work throughout her/his inquiry. The Unit is an electronic information structure that is learner-centered, real-life contextualized, and tells a meaningful story of the student’s learning. This assessment is embedded in the individual student activity and production of the Unit, making assessment a reflective and on-going process. The validity of the Unit lies in the assessment of what students know through the students’ own writings, discussions, presentations, and linkages to national/state standards. Valid inferences of a student’s achievement are enhanced by focus on the individual; therefore, a shift towards more personalized assessment is necessary.

Latent Semantic Analysis

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) captures the essential relationships between text documents and word meaning, or semantics, the knowledge base which must be accessed to evaluate the quality of content. Several educational applications that employ LSA have been developed: (1) selecting the most appropriate text for learners with variable levels of background knowledge, (2) automatically scoring the content of an essay, and (3) helping students effectively summarize material.
A demonstration of using LSA in essay scoring is also available using the Intelligent Essay Assessor To assess the quality of essays, LSA is first trained on domain-representative text. Then student essays are characterized by LSA vectors of their contained words and compared with essays of known quality on degree of conceptual relevance and amount of relevant content.

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This Page is under construction by Juna Snow for The Inquiry Page.
Last updated 5/02/02.
Please direct your comments and questions to j-snow2@uiuc.edu