Reassessment vs. Retakes

There has been a lot of discussion in educational circles over the past 5 years or more regarding reassessment vs. retakes. How many chances should a student get to show that they’ve mastered the material? What strategy works best to move students to success?

Let’s define these terms before we discuss them. A retake is to when you take an exam again because you failed it the first time. The whole premise of a redo is to provide students an additional opportunity on the same or a similar summative assessment in order to show improvement in their knowledge base and raise their score. There are many different approaches to redos but the basic idea is that students are given an opportunity to review, remediate and retry. Very laudable as a premise. Students complete corrections or supplemental work outside of class time.  They schedule a time, also outside of class time, to retake the assessment. Repeat until the student is out of attempts, happy with their score, or frustrated and stops coming. All of this is occurring while the class has continued on to the next concept. Since the process of reviewing, remediating and retrying is happening concurrently with new learning, this splits their attention, which we know from cognitive load theory is detrimental to learning. While these policies are intended to level the playing field, they unintentionally do the opposite by placing an inordinate burden on this group of students, not to mention the teachers scrambling to keep on top of the workload.

While deeply thinking about this, we noticed that our 10 practices spiral through the curriculum, appearing in every unit we study. Because of this, students have a new attempt on the practice over and over again, therefore we could eliminate redos and focus on reassessment. After each assessment, students are provided descriptive feedback on where they are in the learning progression and their next steps to progress to the next developmental level. We move into the next unit with individualized goals in place and continue to hone these skills. Students do not need to do extra work different from the rest of the class, except for any extra help that they chose to get.  Since students only get one opportunity to take each assessment, we limit the split attention. They are not working on multiple units simultaneously.  Recall that the practices appear on numerous assessments throughout the year, so each time we assess that practice, it replaces the previous assessment. This allows students to continually look forward, as opposed to looking back. Like redos, it also eliminates the lasting negative impact of a bad day or delayed progress, but it does not place the unnecessary burden of additional hoops to jump through. They are now free to take academic risks, grow and ultimately succeed. In addition, the teacher workload remains the same, certainly not easy, but with no need for extra exams to create or score.

Now that you understand the assignments in which students are engaged, I am ready to discuss how I monitor learning. Join me in the next post to begin to dig into the recording and reporting of student progress.

If you explore further on this website www.reimaginedschools.com, you can find the professional development course “The Essentials of the Learning Progression Method”, in which you will learn how to create your own Learning Progressions. You can find Dave’s podcast “From Earning to Learning”, here or on your favorite podcast provider. The book “Going Gradeless: Shifting the Focus from Earning to Learning” describes the development of the Learning Progression Method from its inception, and can be found on Amazon.