Assessment at Havergal College – Information for Parents Grades 1-12

Havergal is a school of many proud traditions but it is not the traditional school that you may have
attended as a child. In the past, the job of the teacher was to teach, test, and hope for the best and
the job of the student was to learn the material, repeat back what the teacher said and forget most of
it. The goal of school was to sort students into the university group, the college group and the
workplace group. Students were assessed in comparison with each other (norm referencing) and
teachers were expected to mark along a bell curve with a certain number of A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s. As a
student, your placement in the class was dependent on your peers. In a class full of students smarter
than you, you might be a C student; in a class full of students less smart, you might be the A student.
That was just the way the system worked.
Let’s look at an example of this. Three students are taking a course in how to pack parachutes. The
class average is represented by the horizontal line in the centre of each box in the diagram below.
Which student would you want to pack your parachute and why? In the traditional assessment
method, student C would be the only one who would fail the course because of how an arithmetic
mean works. A and B would both pass and would be packing parachutes.

(Image source: Davies, Anne. Making Classroom Assessment Work. Victoria: Connection, 2011. Print.)

Since 1999, Havergal has been committed to Teaching for Understanding which is a way of planning
instruction and assessment that focuses on teaching for the long term, teaching both the facts and
the skills that are important in different disciplines but more importantly teaching in a way that
students understand the concepts and transferable understandings that will allow them to be flexible
thinkers – something they need in the 21st century.

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While this method of planning is perhaps different from what you would have experienced in school it
is not a new idea. The American curriculum designer, Ralph Tyler spoke about this idea in 1949. This
type of planning for units and lessons explains why when you take your child out of school for an
extended vacation and ask for the “work” or the “lessons” it is hard for teachers to give you what they
are doing – it isn’t a worksheet or chapter in the book. Teaching is complex and nuanced and aligned
to the goals of the unit and it involves the student in doing the thinking necessary to achieve
understanding, knowledge and skills.
Let us just consider the second stage of this planning which focuses on assessment OF Learning or
evaluation. Teaching for understanding requires teachers to think differently about assessment
because they are interested in not only what students know and can do but also what they
understand and what they can do with their understanding. At all Ontario schools, our assessment
practices are guided by the Ministry policy document, Growing Success, as well as by research based
best practices. The goal of school in the 21st century has shifted to be about developing proficiency
and understanding for all students.
Now students are graded based on established criteria, a criterion referenced system. Individual
marks on assignments are aligned to both content (curriculum expectations) and performance
standards (achievement chart categories and levels of performance) that are common across Ontario.
The performance standards, or achievement chart categories, represent four broad areas of
knowledge and skills within which the expectations for any subject can be organized. They help focus
on the acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills of thinking, communication and
application as well as understanding. Assessing using achievement chart categories focuses student
attention on thinking about the content, rather than focusing on the product itself. Each assessment
measures student success on some of the different achievement chart categories and a single score is
NOT given for an assignment, rather scores for each achievement chart category is recorded and
reported back to the students.

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The achievement chart categories are as follows:
Knowledge/Understanding (subject-specific content and the comprehension of meaning and
significance)
Thinking/Inquiry (use of critical/creative thinking skills and/or processes)
Application (use of knowledge and skills to make connections within and between various contexts)
Communication (conveying meaning through various forms)
The performance standards are descriptors of quality of thinking, understanding, knowledge and skill.
Level 1: The student is beginning to develop some understanding of the required knowledge, concepts
and skills. The student requires on-going support to demonstrate her understanding.
Level 2: The student is developing an understanding of the required knowledge, concepts and skills.
The student requires frequent support to demonstrate her understanding.
Level 3: The student consistently demonstrates a competent level of understanding of the required
knowledge, concepts and skills. The student may require support to demonstrate her understanding.
Level 4: The student consistently and independently demonstrates and applies an in-depth
understanding of the required knowledge, concept and skills. Her understanding is accurate and
thorough.
The report card grade represents a student’s achievement of overall curriculum expectations as
demonstrated to that point in time. Report card grades are determined by the teacher looking at the
most consistent pattern of assessment evidence a student has provided with more emphasis on more
recent evidence of learning. Most consistent is defined as the level that represent more than ½ of the
marks in a category. Most recent is defined as the level that represents more than ½ of the most
recent marks in a category. The most recent pattern may change move the consistent level up, down
or not at all. In this grading system, packer #3 would not be failing because packer #3 has learned how
to pack that parachute and can do it consistently and predictably and her most recent evidence shows
that.
The learning skills are assessed and reported on separately from academic proficiency and reflect
important workability skills. Teachers assess students in six areas that are defined on the report card.
These include: responsibility, organization, independent work, collaboration, initiative, and self
regulation
The report card comments themselves are intended to provide information to parents about an area
of strength related to an important curriculum expectation (but not all of them); an area of
improvement related to an important curriculum expectation (if appropriate for that student) and a
specific suggestion to aid improvement (if appropriate for that student). We have asked teachers to
write approximately 3-4 sentences (less than 100 words) for each subject or strand (for example the
strands in Language Arts are reading, writing, oral communication, medial literacy).
The April report card is a progress reports, intended to give you a quick view on how your child is
doing. The December and June report cards contain full comments to give you more information
once a solid body of evidence has been collected. Interspersed between report cards are parent
teacher interviews where teachers and parents can talk about a student’s strengths and weaknesses.

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When you get your child’s report card, look at the learning skills and the comments about how she is
doing in class. That assessment will likely give you some insight into how she is doing academically.
When looking at the grade for each subject, have a conversation with your child about where she sees
her strengths and weaknesses and what she is doing to work on areas where she is perhaps
struggling. Keep her focus on the learning she is doing, rather than the mark.
In grades 7-12, you will also see more attendance data and a record of missed assessments. This
missed assessment data includes all the times your daughter has asked for an extension for any
reason, even when missing school for a trip or sports event. This data is helpful to see any patterns in
how many times a student is asking for an extension or missing an assessment.