TEACHING MULTI-GRADE CLASSES

Topic 17. Assessment Strategies in Multi-Grade Schools

Teachers continually monitor the progress of their students even when they first entered schooling
up until the last day of the school year. Assessments and evaluations are done in order to determine the
learnings acquired by the learner.

Most of these assessments are similar to the monograde class’ way of assessing their students. Here
are as follows:

Individualized learning
Individualized learning, or individualized instruction, is a method of teaching in which content,
instructional technology, and pace of learning are based upon the abilities and interest of each learner.

Self-assessment
Self-assessment is a powerful mechanism for enhancing learning. It encourages students to reflect
on how their own work meets the goals set for learning concepts and skills. It promotes metacognition about
what is being learned, and effective practices for learning. It encourages students to think about how a
particular assignment or course fits into the context of their education. It imparts reflective skills that will be
useful on the job or in academic research.

Learning Log
The Learning Log is a technique to help students focus on what they are learning in their classes by
writing their thoughts, reactions, and responses to class lectures, videos, or discussions. A Learning Log is a
written reflection of the students' perceptions of what is being learned and how they are learning. It also
provides a record of students' growth over time. Writing a learning log is an excellent way to help use writing
as a process of discovery and to clarify ideas.

Collaborative Writing
Collaborative or team writing is the process of producing a written work as a group where all team
members contributed to the content and the decisions about how the group will function. Group assignments
can be difficult for many students with busy schedules because they require planning, coordination, and
frequent communication with other students. However, teachers nonetheless view group work as good
preparation for the types of complex assignments students are likely to receive in workplace settings. Also,
collaborative assignments offer students the benefits and experience of building on existing knowledge
through the dynamic interplay with and among other students, the subject matter, and you, the teacher.
With careful coordination and communication, group writing assignments can yield excellent results and
valuable experiences.

Assessing Learning and Teaching Performance in Multigrade Classes

As you know, the evaluation of the learning outcomes of the diverse students found in your
multigrade classroom is not always easy. But assessment is essential to find out how well y our students are
performing and whether your teaching is going in the right direction.
 This section looks at two important uses of assessment:
(i) learner assessment, and
(ii) assessment of your own teaching.

Focusing More on Learner Assessment Than on Evaluation

As a multigrade teacher with students of many different ability levels, you must decide what
information to collect on each learner’s progress and how to collect it. Individual learner assessment is just
as important as comparative evaluation across students. The latter is useful to evaluate one student’s
progress against his/her peers, but too much and too public evaluation around performance can lead to
negative labelling of some students as “clever” and others as “slow”. Like all children, students in a multigrade
classroom learn in a continuum moving from easier to more difficult material and from simple to more
complex learning steps. They follow a path of progress at their own pace. Since such self-paced learning, as
an integral part of multigrade teaching, promotes social, emotional, physical, aesthetic, and cognitive
development, one goal for you is to focus not only on cognitive/academic achievement (e.g. reading and
writing skills) but also to consider psychomotor skills and the psychological and emotional development of
your students.

Another goal you should have is to develop a positive attitude among students about teachers and
about learning. You can do this by assessing and rewarding other aspects of your students’ development such
as their willingness to assist in doing classroom tasks, share resources with friends, and organize their own
work. These outcomes deal with attitudes, values and behaviors, but they are not easy to measure despite
their importance.

The assessment of students may be done daily or on a periodic basis depending on the size of the
class and y our capacity as a teacher to work with each student in the classroom individually. What is
important is that assessment is not a one-time event but is cyclic and continuous. It must also be adapted to
the type of activity on which your students are being assessed – group or paired work, individual work, etc.
It is always helpful to reflect on the purpose of assessment and to plan for it at four different times during
the teaching and learning process:

before a new topic is introduced, to determine what experiences or understanding students already
have about that topic; this information will help you decide what new information they need to be taught

during a lesson, to find out if your students are learning the concepts being taught; if you note
problems for the class as a whole or for individual students you may be able to solve them during the lesson

at the end of a topic, to assess mastery prior to progression to the next topic, decide if further
remediation is required for some students, and provide feedback to you about your own teaching methods

at the end of a term or the school year, to assess if students have retained their understanding of
the lessons delivered It is therefore important for you to adopt a cyclic process of assessment as illustrated
in Figure 5. The process may begin with the identification of grade- and agespecific competencies expected
to be mastered by your students.
 Figure: Cyclic Process of Assessment

METHODS OF ASSESSMENT
In a multigrade teaching situation, you will have to use several methods for assessing learner
performance and learning outcomes:

❖ Individual assessment – select activities that help measure the learning of each student. This may
include collecting basic information through administering a test, checking individual assignments and
projects, using checklists, observing each student’s activities and reading his/her written work, and keeping
anecdotal records of each student’s development. Keeping a portfolio for each student is an especially rich
resource that will help you assess the progress of your students over time and maintain a more permanent
record of their work.

❖ Group assessment – observe how well each group works as a team who are the leaders, who needs
encouragement to participate, who prevents others from taking part – and the quality of the group’s results.
What did each individual student contribute to the results and how?

❖ Self-assessment – ask your students about their favorite and most difficult subjects. What
additional help do they think they need to do better?

❖ Peer assessment – ask the peer tutors you have selected about the progress each of the students
they are working with is making. Should different peers be assigned to work with students who are having
problems?

In addition to measuring specific learning outcomes such as rea ding and arithmetic knowledge, you
may wish to observe and assess the following skills and attitudes:

✓ Reporting, narrating, drawing pictures, picture reading, filling in maps, etc.

✓ Listening, talking, expressing opinions
✓ Expressing oneself through body movements, creative writing, etc.
 ✓ Reasoning, making logical connections
✓ Questioning by expressing curiosity, asking questions
✓ Analyzing and drawing inferences
✓ Learning by doing
✓ Expressing concern and sensitivity towards students who are
✓ disadvantaged or have various kinds of disabilities
✓ Showing cooperation by taking responsibilities seriously and sharing and working together

Practicing Self-Reflection on Your Teaching and Your Students’ Learning

Equally important to student assessment as a means to improve y our teaching and develop new and
better practices is y our continuous and routine reflection on your own teaching skills, strategies, and
methods – and on any other school responsibilities you may have. One way to do this is to keep a record of
y our teaching activities such as how you plan lessons, manage the classroom, schedule subjects, develop
instructional resources, assign appropriate tasks to students, guide and counsel students with particular
learning problems, and assist parents in monitoring the progress of their children. Periodically reflecting on
how you carried out these activities and what kinds of results were achieved, especially as you go through
another cycle of teaching, can be very useful.

Other sources of feedback on your teaching are also important. This may include assessment from
your head-teacher/principal, your fellow teachers, and even informal feedback from your students – why not
ask them what they like and do not like about the classroom environment and individual lessons?

Assessment is a process to:

• Keep track of learners’ progress

• Promote self-reflection and personal accountability among students about their own learning and;
• Provide bases for the profiling of student performance on the learning competencies and standards
of the curriculum.
• Is an on-going process of identifying, gathering, organizing and interpreting quantitative and
qualitative information about what learners know and can do.

Formative Assessment

✓ Maybe seen as assessment for learning so teachers can make adjustments in their instruction.
✓ It is also an assessment wherein students reflect on their own progress.
✓ Formative assessment maybe integrated in all parts of the lesson.
- Before the lesson
- During the lesson proper
- After the lesson
The Purposes of Classroom Assessment

BEFORE THE LESSON

For the Learner
1. Know what s/he knows about the topic/lesson
2. Understand the purpose of the lesson and how to do well in the lesson
3. Identify ideas or concepts s/he misunderstands
4. Identify barriers to learning

For the Teacher

1. Get information about what the learner already knows and can do about the new lesson
2. Share learning intentions and success criteria to the learners
3. Determine misconceptions
4. Identify what hinders learning

DURING THE LESSON

For the Learner
1. Identify one’s strengths and weaknesses
2. Identify barriers to learning
3. Identify factors that help him/her learn
4. Know what s/he knows and does not know
5. Monitor his/her own progress

For the Teacher

1. Provide immediate feedback to learners
2. Identify what hinders learning
3. Identify what facilitates learning
4. Identify learning gaps
5. Track learner progress in comparison to formative assessment results prior to the lesson
proper
6. To make decisions on whether to proceed with the next lesson, re-teach, or provide for
corrective measures or reinforcements

Summative Assessment

• Measures the different ways learners use and apply all relevant knowledge, understanding and
skills.
• It must be spaced properly over the quarter.
• Maybe seen as assessment of learning, which occurs at the end of a particular unit.

Modes of Assessment:

Traditional & Contemporary

1. Written Assessment (PPFT/NPPFT) long quizzes, tests across cognitive process dimensions, essay,
cloze passage, selective gap filling, reaction papers, script making,
2. Oral recitation, oratorical speech, research reporting, speech choir, extemporaneous speaking, etc.
 3. Performance and Production art making, role playing, dancing, singing, experiment, illustrating,
drawing, etc.

Weight of the Components for Grades 1 – 10 (DO No 8 s. 2015)

*To align the assessment process with the K to 12 curriculum, the adapted Cognitive Process Dimensions may
be used as a guide in the formulation of assessment tasks and activities.

What is assessed in the classroom?

Remembering
The learner can recall information and retrieve relevant knowledge from long-term memory: identify,
retrieve, recognize, duplicate, list, memorize, repeat, reproduce

Understanding
The learner can construct meaning from oral, written and graphic messages: interpret, exemplify,
classify, summarize, infer, compare, explain, paraphrase, discuss

Applying
The learner can use information to undertake a procedure in familiar situations or in a new way:
execute, implement, demonstrate, dramatize, interpret, solve, use, illustrate, convert, discover

Analyzing
The learner can distinguish between parts and determine how they relate to one another, and to the
overall structure and purpose: differentiate, distinguish, compare, contrast, organize, outline, attribute,
deconstruct

Evaluating
The learner can make judgments and justify decisions: coordinate, measure, detect, defend, judge,
argue, debate, critique, appraise, evaluate

Creating
The learner can put elements together to form a functional whole, create a new product or point of
view: generate, hypothesize, plan, design, develop, produce, construct, formulate, assemble, design, devise