When I was a novice government and economics teacher fired up about facilitating class discussions on socially relevant issues, I would start the year by asking students to share their opinions on capitalism and socialism. A few students would raise their hands, but most just looked confused.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out why. Even the most confident teens simply had no idea what they were talking about. Based on pop culture, they thought socialism was just like capitalism, except with higher taxes and universal health insurance. Out of hundreds of students, perhaps only one could actually define either of the systems we were discussing.
My naive foray into Socratic discussions highlights an important principle: You can’t teach well until you’ve assessed the limits of your students’ knowledge. And when students lack core knowledge, it doesn’t make sense to dive into higher-level tasks. Analysis and judgment can only come after you know the facts.
In this article, I’ll explain why diagnostic assessment isn’t just a formality imposed by out-of-touch administrators. Instead, it’s the foundation of good pedagogical practice.
Diagnostic Assessment: The Basics
Diagnostic assessment plays a distinct role among the various assessment types that we teachers put into place. If formative assessments help you gauge student progress during a learning period, and summative assessments help you measure student performance at the end of a learning period, then diagnostic assessments allow you to determine a student’s level before a learning period starts.
It’s worth clarifying that, unlike the other assessment types, diagnostic assessments are not for grading, benchmarking, or accountability. They’re just a way to gauge where your students are at.
In an ideal world, you can take your diagnosis and build your instructional plan around it. Of course, reality is far from ideal, but even with the limited time you do have during the school year, you can adjust your lesson plans quite a bit to make sure you’re targeting the right mix of knowledge and skills for your classroom.
Here are a few ways that diagnostic assessments should inform your teaching practice:
Instructional planning
In California, roughly half of all students do not read at grade level, and over two-thirds are below grade level in mathematics. This highlights an important reality: A grade is just a number and doesn’t represent what students know. Without a diagnostic assessment, you have no idea who you’re teaching, and could end up mislabeling students or teaching at the wrong level.
Practically speaking, it’s impossible to draw up lesson plans on the spot. To ensure you can adjust to meet the student needs revealed by your diagnostic assessment, you should have a few lesson plans prepared in advance. For novices, this will be difficult, but remember that all the work you do now will pay off in the years to come, when all you’ll have to do is adjust your already existing lesson plans.
Plus, you can look at grade-level performance in your district and school to get a rough sense of where your students are likely to be struggling ahead of time. That way, you won’t be caught completely off guard by the results of your diagnostic assessment.
Differentiation
Differentiation has become a buzzword in educational circles lately, and for good reason. At its core, differentiation recognizes a basic reality of teaching: students do not enter the classroom with the same intelligence, family situation, experience, or prior knowledge.
This helps explain why the whole-word reading approach that became widespread in the mid-20th century didn’t undermine literacy among affluent students in the same way it did among poorer students: Wealthier students likely had the vocabulary and background knowledge needed to recognize and remember whole words, while poor students lacked the context to assimilate them.
This is what makes diagnostic assessment so important. It doesn’t simply help you gauge the overall level of your class, but it also allows you to identify the knowledge gaps between your students. That, in turn, can help you give your advanced students the challenging, higher-level tasks they need, even as you provide weaker students with the elementary knowledge they lack. It also gives you an opportunity to correct any misconceptions before you move forward.
Sounds easy, right? As anyone with teaching experience knows, this is one of the most challenging aspects of age-based grade differentiation. However, it’s also one place where digital assessment technologies can help. EdTech-powered approaches like adaptive testing automatically give stronger students more difficult questions, even as they present simpler test items to students who need additional support. That way, you’re not only assessing the mean, you’re also assessing the outliers at both ends.
Placement and grouping
If you have the ability to make placement and grouping decisions, they’ll make your job much easier by narrowing the range of students that you’ll have to plan for at any given moment. And of course, diagnostic testing is absolutely essential for any placement effort. In fact, if your school practices grouping without robust diagnostic tests, they’re risking incorrect placement, which can be seriously detrimental to individual students and whole classrooms.
If you can bump students into more advanced or remedial courses, diagnostic assessments will provide you with the evidence you need to make fair and defensible decisions. It’s vital that you fully document the outcomes of these assessments so that you can refer to your records in case your determinations are challenged by colleagues, parents, or administrators.
And even if you can’t reassign students to another course, you may be able to meaningfully group students in your own classroom—particularly if you have a teacher’s assistant. Though it does require some effort at the beginning of the year, this can help you make strategic decisions about how to allocate instruction time during class time.
That said, placement and grouping are not without debate. Historically, complex literacy rates were higher in the one-room schoolhouses of the 1800s than they are today, suggesting that separation by grade level isn’t always necessary to cultivate mastery. However, it’s unclear whether you can generalize from this example.
For one thing, those one-room schoolhouses didn’t have the same disciplinary challenges as many modern remedial classrooms. If younger or weaker students are studying quietly, it’s plausible that having older students teach them their lessons—as was sometimes done historically—could strengthen performance all around, not to mention teach important leadership and communication skills. But if a section of the class is loud, disrespectful, or even violent, then their presence will certainly degrade the learning environment for other students.
This is all to say that you should carefully evaluate placement and grouping decisions based on your student population, your school’s disciplinary policies, and your lesson plans.
Early intervention
One of the most useful things you can do with a diagnostic assessment is use it for early intervention. If you identify that students are missing core knowledge right at the beginning of a learning period, you may have a chance to help them catch up. Wait until a mid-unit formative assessment, and you’ll have much less time to get back on track.
If you identify serious gaps in students’ knowledge during a diagnostic assessment, I recommend reaching out to parents to let them know how they can support their students. This serves a dual purpose: First and foremost, it’s one of the most important things you can do to help your student catch up. If parents get involved, the student is more likely to improve.
However, reaching out to parents immediately also serves another purpose: It sets expectations early. We all know what it’s like to get emails from parents when students receive bad grades; unfortunately, there are always cases where more effort is put into pressuring teachers than into making sure students do their homework. By communicating as early as possible, you create a record of evidence that makes your grading unassailable.
How Diagnostic Assessment Fits into a Balanced Assessment Strategy
Diagnostic assessments tell you what your students know, but they don’t tell you why. Some students will perform well because of innate talent, while others will have earned their scores through discipline and hard work over the years. Conversely, some performers will rank low due to gaps in foundational knowledge or poor study habits.
These issues will become apparent over the course of the school year. As you get to know your students better, it will help to use formative assessments to track their progress. In many cases, this will only confirm what is already clear from their classroom participation and presence, but you’ll also find a few surprises each time you assess.
And of course, summative assessments are indispensable to measuring student performance at the end of each learning unit.
One Platform for Every Assessment
A diagnostic assessment is essential any time you start a learning unit. Without one, you won’t be able to gauge your students’ needs until it’s far too late to make a meaningful adjustment to your lesson planning.
By using diagnostic assessments properly, you can plan instruction more effectively, identify learning needs earlier, and use assessment time more productively. For more helpful educational resources, take a look at these articles on the TAO blog:
- Where Educators Can Find High-Quality Open Educational Resources (OERs)
- An Educator’s Guide to Diagnostic Assessments and Reading Level Tests
- Why Schools and Governments Are Turning to Open Source Assessment Software
How TAO Can Help With Your Assessment Strategy
Whether you’re implementing diagnostic, formative, or summative assessments, TAO has the intuitive item authoring, analytics, and reporting capabilities you need to speed through test prep and evaluation. Schedule a demo to speak with us about your assessment needs.
FAQs
What is an example of a diagnostic assessment?
One example of a diagnostic assessment is a pre-test administered at the start of a math unit to assess students’ prior knowledge and identify gaps. Another would be a reading inventory that checks vocabulary and comprehension skills.
How is diagnostic assessment different from formative and summative assessment?
Diagnostic assessment occurs before instruction, and it helps you identify existing knowledge and skills. Formative assessment, on the other hand, occurs during instruction so you can monitor progress and adjust teaching. Finally, summative assessment takes place at the end of a learning period to measure performance and assign grades.
When should you use a diagnostic assessment?
You should use a diagnostic assessment at the beginning of each learning period. They’re also valuable when a new student is added to your course, so you can identify their learning needs and strengths.