A step towards restoring assessment?
A Review of Laura Greenstein’s book on Restorative Assessment
“For many students, schools stifle that curiosity by being answer-centered.” This quote from Laura Greenstein’s recent book on Restorative Assessment quite aptly sums up my experience of K-12 education. It reminds me of my examinations through middle and high school which largely required students to rote-learn, and reproduce answers as presented in the textbook. Results from such exams applauded top scorers, and were misunderstood as indicators of intelligence, success and achievement, rather than being used to assess students’ learning and growth.
Laura Greenstein points out that assessment comes from the Latin word ‘assidere’ which means ‘sit beside’. Through this book, she advocates that the true purpose of assessment is to monitor students’ performance in order to inform teaching and learning. However, typically schools conduct examinations that are designed to test students’ ability to memorise, recall, and write answers in a specified format, within limited time. Such measures may not be as effective in depicting students’ actual understanding, application and other higher-order thinking skills. The author argues that we need to restore assessment by focusing on students’ learning and progress, which would accordingly inform practice. While this is an ideal view of assessment, implementing the same would require systemic reforms and cannot be done without driving changes in other components such as teacher training, curriculum, and pedagogy.
Laura Greenstein lays a good foundation for understanding the true purpose of assessment, and differentiating it from examinations. She highlights the various facets of effective design and implementation of assessments, while focusing on issues of diversity, inclusion, flexibility and engagement. The book also talks about the various stages of assessment and how a balanced approach is often useful. However, to me, the explanations seem a bit repetitive and can be made more concrete. Educators reading the book would benefit more if the concepts were described in a succinct and straightforward manner, with greater focus on design and implementation of assessments.
The author touches upon essential considerations of diversity and the need for providing learners with multiple means of assessment, however seems to focus more on differentiation, lacking the concept of UDL. Laura Greenstein’s ideas seem to be more like a precursor to UDL. There is a definite overlap between her ideologies of assessment and the foundations of UDL, and so combining the two might even make a stronger framework. It would be interesting to look at assessment through the lens of UDL and see how each guideline might play a role in crafting effective and purposeful learning assessments. Knowledge of UDL could potentially provide greater structure to Laura’s principles of assessment, which in turn would offer the UDL framework with more focus on universally designed assessments.
