How to Create an Assessment Plan

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We’re in the middle of a four-post series where I’m going back to basics, giving you a practical overview of the planning process behind effective instruction. Last week we started with the big picture: an overview of the process I use for planning a full unit of instruction. Using a sample topic — food safety — we completed the first step of the process, which was to write a set of measurable objectives for the unit.

Now we’re going to do the next step, designing a unit assessment plan that includes diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments. In the next post, we’ll build the individual daily lesson plans. And finally, in the fourth post, I’ll share my process for differentiating instruction.

As I mentioned last week, what I’m sharing here is my process — one I’ve developed over years of teaching, studying effective practice, and learning from other educators, especially the backward design approach popularized by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in their book Understanding by Design. It’s not the only way to plan instruction, but it’s the approach that makes the most sense to me, and if you’re new to unit planning or it’s always been a challenge, I think it will help you, too.

I’m putting out this series as an introduction to my new online course, Mastering the Lesson Plan. These four posts and companion podcast episodes will give you the big picture, but the course takes a much deeper dive into each step of the process and gives you practical tools you can use to plan stronger instruction. I’ll share more details about it at the end of this post.

In the last post I started my example unit, which I’m expecting will take just about 3 or 4 days. It’s called “Safe Food Handling” and the essential question is “How do your choices in the kitchen affect the safety of the food you prepare?” Here are the objectives I wrote last week:

By the end of this unit, students will be able to…

1. Explain how unsafe food-handling practices can lead to foodborne illness.
2. Describe the basic principles of safe food handling.
3. Apply safe food-handling practices while preparing, cooking, and storing food.
4. Evaluate food-handling situations, identify unsafe practices, and recommend safer alternatives.

Before I plan a single lesson, I’m going to plan how I’ll measure student learning, starting at the end.

Building the Summative Assessment

The first piece of the assessment plan I’m going to create is the summative assessment: What will students do at the end of this unit to demonstrate that they’ve met the objectives?

Before I can answer that, though, I need to get more specific about exactly what students will be learning. My four objectives give me the broad targets, but I haven’t yet spelled out all the knowledge and skills students will need in order to meet them.

For this short food safety unit, students will need to know:

• how unsafe food handling can cause foodborne illness
• the four basic principles of food safety: Clean, Separate, Cook, and Chill
• common ways cross-contamination occurs
• safe internal cooking temperatures for common foods
• basic guidelines for safely refrigerating and storing food and leftovers

They will also need to be able to:

• wash their hands correctly
• prevent cross-contamination during food preparation
• use a food thermometer correctly
• store food and leftovers safely
• recognize unsafe food-handling practices and explain how to correct them

With that list in front of me, I can think more carefully about what kind of assessment would give students a good opportunity to demonstrate what they know.

Ideally, some of these skills would be assessed through an actual cooking performance. And in the larger cooking course this unit is part of, they will be: Later in the course, students will practice hands-on cooking techniques, and at the end of the course, I’m imagining I’ll have them prepare a meal as a final exam, with safe food handling included as part of the evaluation. 

But a full cooking demonstration doesn’t make sense at the end of this short unit. It would take a lot of time, and a single cooking task would only expose students to a limited number of food-safety decisions. A student could prepare one dish safely without ever having to demonstrate what they would do in a whole range of other situations.

So for this assessment, I’m going to use case-based scenarios. I’ll give students several short descriptions of people preparing, cooking, or storing food and ask them to analyze what’s happening. For each one, students will identify what was done safely and unsafely, explain why unsafe practices could lead to foodborne illness, and describe what should have been done instead.

This gets me pretty close to assessing all four objectives. 

• By explaining why certain practices are unsafe, students demonstrate Objective 1: explaining how unsafe food handling can lead to foodborne illness. 
• By identifying safe practices and describing what should have been done differently, they demonstrate their knowledge of the principles in Objective 2, although they don’t technically describe them, so I’ll come back to that in a minute.
• Analyzing the scenarios directly addresses Objective 4: evaluating food-handling situations, identifying unsafe practices, and recommending safer alternatives.

The only one I can’t fully assess with a written test is Objective 3 — apply safe food-handling practices while preparing, cooking, and storing food. Students can describe how those practices should be applied, but they aren’t actually performing them. That part will have to wait until the hands-on cooking activities later in the course. For now, this assessment will at least tell me whether students know what safe practice should look like.

Using several scenarios will allow me to represent a much wider range of situations than I could with a single performance. To make the assessment a little more authentic, I’m going to vary the scenario types, with a different number of mistakes in each, and one that has no mistakes at all. That means students will have to actually evaluate each situation rather than simply hunt for the error they know must be there.

With all of that in mind, here’s the summative assessment I came up with:

Now earlier I noticed that the current version of the assessment doesn’t directly address objective 2, which says students will describe the basic principles of safe food handling. The scenarios give students several opportunities to show that they understand and can apply those principles, but I never actually ask them to describe them. That’s an important distinction. When checking an assessment against your objectives, don’t just look for the content; pay attention to the verbs, too. If my objective says students will describe something, somewhere in my assessment I need to actually ask them to describe it.

So I’m going to add one question before the scenarios: “What are the four basic principles of safe food handling? Name each one and briefly describe what it means.” 

With this in place, I’m hitting all four objectives except a direct measure of objective 3, and I’ll do that later in the course. 

Scoring the Assessment

For scoring, I would create an answer key that lists the specific things students should identify in each scenario, then assign one point for each correct response. Because some scenarios contain more safe or unsafe practices than others, the number of points available for each scenario may vary. This makes the assessment pretty quick to score while still giving me a clear picture of which food safety concepts each student has mastered and where they still have gaps. I’ll also add eight points for the correct identification (1 point each) and description (1 more point each) of the four principles in the opening question.

Choosing the Format

Figuring out this format took me a while: At first I was going to have students write an open response to each scenario, basically answering those four questions in paragraph form. I wanted students to generate the answers on their own so I could really tell what they had learned. Then I realized this would take a really long time to grade, so I switched to asking a few multiple-choice questions after each scenario. But even though this would be faster to grade, the answer choices would give students information they wouldn’t have to generate on their own, and I wouldn’t feel quite as solid about their grasp of the material. Finally, I settled on short-answer questions: This way, students still have to generate their own responses, but the questions break their thinking into small, focused pieces. That should give me the evidence I need without requiring four mini-essays.

Using the same questions for every scenario also makes the assessment more predictable for students and faster for me to score. And because the scenarios contain different combinations of safe and unsafe practices, students still have to evaluate each situation carefully rather than assuming there’s a certain number of mistakes to find.

I’m sharing all of this because I want to show all the decisions that can go into an assessment. The clearer you can get about what evidence you need from students, while also considering practical constraints like grading time, the closer you’ll get to an assessment that works well for your unit.

Creating the Diagnostic Assessment

Now that I’m clear about what I want students to be able to do by the end of the unit, I can create a diagnostic assessment, which is often called a pre-test, to give students before the unit starts. The purpose of this assessment is threefold: 

1. I want to see if any of my students are coming into the unit with substantial prior knowledge. For example, if their family owned a restaurant or something. If I find a student with that kind of knowledge, I will want to provide them with additional challenge, since they may already know a lot of the material.
2. I want to see how much students’ understanding changes over the course of the unit. If there’s a real before-and-after difference in students’ demonstration of knowledge, it will be proof that the unit actually taught them something.
3. I want to uncover any misconceptions students have about the content we’ll be learning. If I can get a sense ahead of time what inaccurate ideas students might be coming in with, that will allow me to address those things proactively in my instruction. 

Before I get into the details of how I create this assessment, I want to be transparent about something: When I was a classroom teacher in a public school, I rarely gave diagnostic assessments at the start of my units. I think a lot of experienced teachers might say the same thing. Skipping them is an easy corner to cut, and it could be argued that you can still teach your unit effectively without it. But in this example, I want to take this step, because I do believe that it ultimately makes for a more powerful unit.

If the diagnostic assessment is going to give you a true “before” picture that you can compare with the “after” of the summative assessment, it should measure similar things in similar ways. But it wouldn’t be practical to have students take the full summative assessment at the start of the unit; for one thing, it would be way too time-consuming. More importantly, you usually don’t want to reveal your exact summative assessment right out of the gate. In this case, the scenarios on the summative assessment should be new to students, so I can see whether they can transfer what they’ve learned to unfamiliar situations. If they’ve already seen and studied those exact scenarios, I’m not really measuring that transfer anymore.

So what I’m going to do is ask the same first question — the one about the four principles of safe food handling, just to see if anyone knows them. Then I’ll write a brand-new scenario, similar to the ones used in the summative assessment. It will show a person preparing food and making a few food safety mistakes. I’ll ask the same questions used on the summative about the person in the scenario. This should give me at least some idea of what students know coming into the unit. 

I’ll plan to give this to students in the last 10 minutes of class a few days before the food safety unit starts. When we get to the episode on differentiation, I’ll explain what I plan to do with the results of the diagnostic assessment. For now, let’s move to the middle of the unit: the formative assessments.

Planning the Formative Assessments

Now I need to think about what quick checks I can do during the unit to make sure students are making progress toward a strong performance on the summative. Here are my considerations:

• They will be learning some content, so I can do at least one entry or exit slip to check on whether they’re getting that. Probably a good one would be to just ask students to identify those four principles. I’m guessing I’ll teach those directly on day 1, so maybe I’ll do an entry slip on day 2 to see how many students remember them the day after.
• I can also observe student mastery of the content by incorporating some kind of game where students have to recall the content they’ve just learned. Along with my own observation of how students respond, they will be doing their own self-assessment while they attempt to answer the questions. I think I’ll just do a Kahoot-style recall game that asks 15 to 20 questions about the content we learn in the first two days. So I need to write those questions from the content I plan to teach.
• Finally, because the summative assessment involves evaluating scenarios, I want to be sure we do some similar work in class to give them practice doing the same kind of evaluation of similarly-styled scenarios. But I don’t have to have them do these in writing. I can have students work on these in groups, getting feedback from each other, and coming to consensus on their evaluation — this also serves as a kind of formative assessment. Meanwhile I can move around the room and observe their group work, noting who seems to be getting it and who seems lost. So I’ll need to write a few more scenarios that have a similar style to the ones in the summative assessment for this group activity.

You might be noticing something else here: As I plan the formative assessments, I’m already getting an idea of the learning activities that will take place in the individual lessons. Building the assessment plan ahead of time like this makes it a lot easier to start plugging activities into place that will lead to success on those assessments. 

The Full Assessment Plan

Now I have my whole plan in place. To recap, here it is:

• A summative assessment where students analyze four different food preparation scenarios
• A diagnostic assessment that asks them to analyze a scenario similar to the ones in the summative assessment
• A few formative assessments that check for understanding of the knowledge and skills needed to do well on the summative assessment

In the next episode, we’ll dive into the last step of the design process, which is to plan the individual lessons that will lead students to success on the summative assessment. And then I’ll do one more episode sharing my process for differentiating instruction

Mastering the Lesson Plan is our self-paced online course that will teach you how to build solid, engaging lesson plans and sequence them into comprehensive units of instruction. Whether you’re a brand-new teacher or you just want to tighten up on the fundamentals, this course will give you a clear, practical process for planning instruction from start to finish.