Looking Critically At A Rich Assessment Task

Sometimes we can come up with a really good question or problem to give our students, but when we go to mark it, we find out that it didn’t turn out like we expected. When we give our students a rich task to work on we need to keep our own success criteria in mind when we create the task. When we start to create the task we have many good ideas, and re-word and re-write the question over and over again. When we are done we need to think about the achievement chart, and if our question A) Does allow the students to demonstrate work at a Level 4 and B) Allows us to have the students perform in all four areas of the achievement chart: Knowledge and Understanding, Application, Thinking/Problem Solving and Communication. Some teachers are Wexford are doing just that.


At Wexford, the school is continuing on its second math pathway of the year. This time they have chosen to work in grade teams instead of by division. What’s nice about this approach is that it lets the team focus on the strand, or issue, that they really want to. This week, two of the grade teams put together a pre-assessment task to administer to their students. The Grade Six team is looking at Data Management and the Grade 7/8 team is looking at Measurement.

Once each team had created their question, they then stepped back and took a more critical look at their question. They went through each area on the achievement chart and then predicted what their students would demonstrate for each area. They then created their own success criteria of what they expected to see in each of the categories.

For the Grade Six team, they also wrote out a list of possible questions that they could ask the students about the problem. They then went back and also looked at what areas on the achievement chart they question covered (e.g., was it really a higher thinking question, or was it a more basic knowledge and understanding type question). They also discussed what responses might look like at all four level s of achievement.

                                                                     Grade Six Sample
For the Grade 7/8 team, they too went through each category on the achievement chart, but then found that when they got to communication, the question didn’t allow their students to communicate at a Level 4. So with some quick tweaking, they were then able to fix the question to allow their students to communicate at all four levels.

More information on Success Criteria can be found in the Growing Success document. It’s a great activity to co-teach with either myself or the literacy coach as not only will you provide the students with information on how to improve, but it will help you to clarify what you are looking for in their work.