Selecting Your Assessment and Planning Your Evaluation Criteria

The purpose of Task Three is for you to demonstrate that you can analyze assessments and develop next steps based on that analysis. It is not important that your class perform well on your assessment.

CRITICAL DECISION: What kind of student work should I analyze for my edTPA?

In Task Three, you are expected to analyze your students’ thinking and learning—not just, for example, whether or not they got something right or wrong. Scorers want to see insight into your students' learning. The assessment you design and analyze should allow the students to demonstrate their thinking in some way. Keep in mind that you learn less about what your students are thinking and learning from multiple-choice questions or single-word response questions. Try to use open-ended questions, writing samples, performance tasks, projects, problem sets, lab reports, or other more complex assessments.

You will likely have to make your own assessment but you are not required to.

RULE OF THUMB in choosing/developing an assessment:
If it is simple to "grade" then it is most likely not complex enough to give the type of analysis that edTPA is looking for.

Basic Guidelines/Rules in choosing/developing your assessment for Task 3:

For Assessment Task 3, you should select one assessment that was given to the whole class during your learning segment. Your "whole class" should reflect your Context for Learning from Task One. (If you have a question about this, see this post.)
- If you are PE, please go here to read about the TWO assessments that you will give.
- If you are Early Childhood, you have multiple forms of assessments. Please read this.

The assessment must reflect each student’s individual work; it cannot be the work of pairs or groups of students.
This task focuses on your ability to analyze student work, thus self- and peer-assessments are not appropriate for Task Three.
To be able to analyze student thinking you should avoid multiple choice, T/F, or fill-in-the blank questions.
The one assessment you choose to analyze should align with the central focus and one or more of the stated learning objectives of your learning segment.
The assessment you choose may be formal or informal, formative or summative, but it needs to result in evidence of student learning according to the evaluation criteria you describe.
If you are not sure what evaluation criteria is, then read this post.

How specific should the evaluation criteria be?

The evaluation criteria you use should make clear the features or qualities of the students’ work that will be assessed. A simple answer key does not give the type of information needed here. Your assessment should be complex and so should your evaluation criteria.

Most importantly, your evaluative criteria should

align with the objectives of the learning segment;
measure the outcomes of your learning segment as related to the central focus;
address the elements of the subject-specific emphasis as defined in your edTPA handbook.

Task 3 of edTPA: The Assessment & Evaluation Criteria

Selecting Your Assessment and Planning Your Evaluation Criteria

How specific should the evaluation criteria be?

You can do this!! Don't let edTPA stand in your way!

Mamaw Yates

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