“Classroom assessment [is] anything a teacher does to gather information about a student’s knowledge or skill regarding a specific topic,” Marzano, R. (2010)

In competency-based education (CBE), assessment should be viewed as a means of gathering evidence to determine where a learner is in the learning progression and inform possible next steps to improve their status in the progression. This is done instead of a more traditional accumulation of points to generate a grade. The new paradigm of assessment emphasizes that the artifacts of learning, what students do, say, write, or create, should be treated as evidence mapped to explicit levels on a proficiency scale. Therefore, a teacher should align every assessment opportunity to the proficiency scale and use the resulting evidence to inform instructional moves. 

While assessment that happens during instruction is often informal, a practical habit for the teacher to develop is capturing the evidence and indicating which scale level (e.g., 2.0, 3.0, 4.0) a given task or observation targets. This way, incidental evidence is not lost. More formal opportunities, such as tests, quizzes, papers, and projects, remain essential in CBE as confirmations of learning; however, any aligned assessment that produces usable evidence should be captured. To do this, the evidence must come from assessments that are 

• valid (right evidence for the target), 
• reliable (clear, consistent criteria), and 
• unidimensional (each task can be traced back to one scale level). 

The teacher should also ensure they are capturing evidence for the right cognitive level of the scale. In other words, if a learner is successfully engaged in an activity, where they accurately retrieve the acquired foundational knowledge, the evidence should be labeled as evidence of Scale Level 2.0. 

A teacher should design assessment opportunities following this flow:

1. Identify the critical content you want learners to understand or be able to execute without significant error within a unit, and then
2. Clarify the foundational knowledge and simpler skills.

At this point, the proficiency scale becomes operational: Level 2.0 descriptors verify foundational knowledge and skills; Level 3.0 confirms the target; Level 4.0 elicits transfer or extension. Existing tasks should be inventoried and tagged to the different scale levels (2.0/3.0/4.0), followed by the development of additional opportunities if gaps or limited options exist for the critical content.

Assessment formats vary.  A selected- or constructed-response item is valuable when its prompt deliberately targets a specific scale level so the resulting evidence can be interpreted against that scale and help determine a learner’s status within the learning progression. The same principle governs performance evidence: in a lab, speech, or classroom performance, the scale informs the task setup and success criteria; in a probing discussion, it can guide the sequence of questions and anchor how responses are judged. 

Across forms, written, spoken, performed, or observed, the design remains unidimensional, with each task focused on one primary construct at one scale level, so the evidence stays aligned and actionable.

With CBE classroom assessment, the form matters less than the precision with which each task channels the proficiency scale. It is quite common for the CBE educator to have multiple pieces of aligned evidence that are synthesized to determine a learner’s current status on the proficiency scale and to plan the next instructional move. The format of an assessment matters less than the degree to which the evidence of learning generated during the task aligns with the scale and supports timely, specific feedback. When every assessment opportunity is explicitly aligned to the scale, systems accumulate sufficient, valid evidence to certify proficiency and to determine individualized next steps.

In next week’s blog, we will generate specific procedures you can use in your classroom to help design effective and useful classroom assessments to determine the learner’s status. 

For access to evidence-based, on-demand resources to support your development and use of Competency-Based Education classroom assessment practices, as well as a community of educators who are actively implementing CBE in their classroom, consider subscribing to the Learning Hub, a resource powered by Marzano Academies featuring resources aligned to the research of Dr. Robert Marzano, as well as tools built for you by educators like you. 

Marzano, R. (2010). Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading. Bloomington, IN: Marzano Research Laboratory.