Why I don’t hate Testing
Learning about Assessment
The word assessment may bring on some bad memories for you. It may go against your reasons for homeschooling in the first place. I’d highly recommend learning about assessment, mastery, and testing as a homeschool parent because we are the experts when it comes to our children. Having one more tool in your homeschooling toolbox is a useful thing!
In a homeschool setting assessment doesn’t mean testing. We’re not trying to keep up with outside data, we are taking the “data” our children give us and using it to shape and guide their (highly custom) education.
Curriculum & Assessment
Curriculum is underpinned by our values and beliefs about what a student should know and how they should come to know it. (Prideux 2003)
The heart of My Texas Homeschool was around long before I had homeschool experience or understood teaching to mastery. I gave a talk at a local homeschool conference years ago about curriculum and didn’t cover assessment. It matters so much because aside from very curriculum specific questions, I always get questions about what mastery is and how to figure out if you’ve gotten something mastered or not!
Teaching to Mastery
Mastery can feel elusive as a homeschool parent. A lot of that is likely due to us teaching all the things, and not being able to slow our own brains down and recognize what our children are telling us.
This is what mastery looks like:
A child who had an easier time reading today, than yesterday
A child who no longer or extremely rarely makes mistakes on letter reversals or vowel sounds
When a specific math concept no longer requires your step by step guidance
When your child remembers concepts well enough to build on them
It’s also the reason we know when our child approaches mastery or has mastered a concept. We see their educational and life experiences first hand. You can judge mastery, especially when you know the content first and thus, how to assess it.
Read through - and at the bottom of this post is a freebie meant to help you track mastery and growth areas for your child!
What is assessment?
There’s two types of assessments: Formative and Summative. High Stakes testing falls under summative assessment, which is why it’s unpopular.
Here’s the thing, though. Assessment has gotten all scrambled up over the years. Assessment is about guiding instruction, not being the end result. When we make the goal of assessment the end of instruction, it loses it’s usefulness because you can’t retool instruction when the goal is to immediately move on. It doesn’t make sense to demonstrate learning in a cumulative way. It makes way more sense to demonstrate learning bit by bit as we learn. If something obviously didn’t stick, then hey, let’s look at what specifically was the problem.
Say your child doesn’t have a firm grasp on multiplication memorization.
In a traditional scenario, you get your poor grade and the school year barrels on whether you can keep up or not.
Ideally formative assessment took place along the way, and some time was spent trying to catch your child up on their times tables.
When you homeschool though, you have time to slow all the way down. We have time to stop and work on times tables until they’re mastered. Not taking the time to do this is setting a child up for issues in mathematics down the road. I was one such kid, and I’m sure many of you can relate.
Two types of assessment
Formative Assessments are the day to day assessments in our education and life. They are natural, and often don’t need a script.
They include things like:
worksheets
discussions
projects
quizzes
basic checks for understanding (what many of us would call narration, which has more depth that basic checks)
and whatever other form of casual check-in that allows you to see how your child is doing in their various studies.
Summative Assessments are:
the unit tests
end of course tests
final papers
Standardized tests
If a student can’t perform on a summative assessment, the opportunities formative assessments should have provided were missed - and that’s unfair to the child in question.
There’s a reason that every assessment in college studies are summative. It’s believed you arrive knowing how to study and conduct your own self-check formative assessments. In that setting, summative assessments do make some sense.
It’s also kind of easy to see how student’s arrived to college unprepared, on the basis of assessment alone.
How you can assess and document
I’m going to give the homeschool answer: Do what works for you, while keeping the laws of your state and goals for your child’s education in mind. That’s a big statement, with a lot to consider.
Documentation Ideas
First, have documentation at the ready that complies with your state laws and what they require
You can keep a portfolio - this works great in elementary
Projects or scrapbooks serve as documentation too - so long as they have work samples!
Keep report cards or progress reports
Regarding High School, I highly recommend a transcript
Mix and match the above to create a document that shows your child’s academic journey
Match your child’s goals for education
If the goal is love of learning, for instance, a portfolio will fit the bill with samples of work
If your hope/goal might be college, keep documentation through beginning high school credits. This means that you can document in whatever form you choose up until your child starts taking high school credits, then you need to switch to a transcript.
Whatever your goals may be, a document of the projects, activities, and time spent together learning will always be appreciated.
A free resource for you
If you have a way of doing assessment or documentation, I’d love to know! You can join me on Instagram @mytexashomeschool or email me at hello@mytexashomeschool.com - Thanks for reading!
As an additional thank you, below you can get a free mastery tracker. This would be a great cover sheet to a portfolio subject area, or just a good way to remind yourself you’re doing a great job and your kids are progressing!
