TYPE OF

ASSESSMENT:
Observation
Checklist,
Anecdotal
Records, and
Portfolio
Assessment
Prepared by: Dr. Mary Argie Lyn Soriano
 Observation Checklist
Observing students as they solve problems, model skills to
others, think aloud during a sequence of activities or interact with
peers in different learning situations provides insight into student
learning and growth. The teacher finds out under what conditions
success is most likely, what individual students do when they
encounter difficulty, how interaction with others affects their
learning and concentration, and what students need to learn next.
Observations may be informal or highly structured, and incidental
or scheduled over different periods of time in different learning
contexts.
 Observation Checklist
Observation checklists allow teachers to record
information quickly about how students perform in relation to
specific outcomes from the program of studies. Observation
checklists, written in a yes/no format can be used to assist in
observing student performance relative to specific criteria.
They may be directed toward observations of an individual or
group. These tools can also include spaces for brief
comments, which provide additional information not captured
in the checklist.
 Observation Checklist
Tips for Using Observation Checklists
1. Determine specific outcomes to observe and assess.
2. Decide what to look for. Write down criteria or evidence
that indicates the student is demonstrating the outcome.
3. Ensure students know and understand what the criteria
are.
 Observation Checklist
4. Target your observation by selecting four to five students
per class and one or two specific outcomes to observe.
5. Develop a data gathering system, such as a clipboard for
anecdotal notes, a checklist or rubric, or a video or audio
recorder.
6. Collect observations over a number of classes during a
reporting period and look for patterns of performance.
 Observation Checklist
7. Date all observations.
8. Share observations with students, both individually and in a
group. Make the observations specific and describe how this
demonstrates or promotes thinking and learning. For example;
"Eric, you contributed several ideas to your group's Top Ten
list. You really helped your group finish their task within the
time limit."
9. Use the information gathered from observation to enhance
or modify future instruction.
 Anecdotal Records
 Anecdotal notes are concise, objective narratives
about an incident or person. In classrooms, teachers
can write anecdotal notes recording their
observations of students – behaviors, skills,
attitudes, performance, and classroom incidents.
Teachers can write, compile and use their anecdotal
notes on students as a documentation system.
 Anecdotal Records
Anecdotal notes must contain factual information about a
significant event, behavior or learning outcome. Here are some
tips which can help teachers to write good anecdotal notes:
 Pre-Observation plan: Teachers must decide in advance which
specific behaviors and learning outcomes they intend to
observe and record. This helps teachers prepare and avoid
confusion while recording. Teachers can also decide when to
observe to gain balanced profiles of their students.
 Anecdotal Records
 Content of anecdotal notes:
• Must be dated and include the name of student being observed.
• Should specify student strengths and positive traits.
• Can follow the ABC format for recording – Antecedent (why or
how), Behavior, Consequence of behavior and Context of incident.
• Can include teachers’ comments, plan for action and
recommendation for further observations.
• Can summarize identified learning patterns.
 Anecdotal Records
 Time for writing: While in class, teachers can quickly
write down any observations on sticky notes (dated
and named) and stick them in the specific student’s
records. After class or when time permits, teachers
can refer their sticky notes and write properly
formatted notes for the record.
 Anecdotal Records
How are Anecdotal records useful?
 Anecdotal records are useful as they:
• Are quick and easy to write.
• Require no additional training for teachers on how to
document record sheets.
 Anecdotal Records
The notes help teachers:
• Record qualitative information about students.
• Identify students’ needs, behavior and learning patterns.
• Track progress and changes in students’ behavior and performance when
generated over a period of time.
• Plan for activities and strategies to use in classroom.
• Determine the efficiency of pedagogies in learning.
• Demonstrate students’ progress to parents at parent-teacher conferences.
 Anecdotal Records
Teachers can share their notes with students in one-on-one
sessions:
• To give them feedback on behaviors and academic
performance.
• To identify their areas of weakness and plan for
interventions, thereby enabling students to improve
themselves.
 Anecdotal Records
 The few disadvantages of anecdotal records are that they:
• Are not standardized.
• Accuracy of records depends on teacher’s memory and may be
biased.
 Nonetheless, anecdotal records are an informal documentation
system, which, if implemented in classrooms, simplifies
documentation of student performance and facilitates easy sharing
of records between teachers, students and parents.
 Portfolio Assessment
WHAT IS PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT?
 As an evaluation tool for community-based programs, we
can think of a portfolio as a kind of scrapbook or photo
album that records the progress and activities of the
program and its participants, and showcases them to
interested parties both within and outside of the program.
 Portfolio Assessment
WHAT IS PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT?
 While portfolio assessment has been predominantly used
in educational settings to document the progress and
achievements of individual children and adolescents, it has
the potential to be a valuable tool for program assessment
as well.
 Portfolio Assessment
Many programs do keep such albums, or scrapbooks,
and use them informally as a means of conveying their
pride in the program, but most do not consider using them
in a systematic way as part of their formal program
evaluation. However, the concepts and philosophy behind
portfolios can apply to community evaluation, where
portfolios can provide windows into community practices,
procedures, and outcomes, perhaps better than more
traditional measures.
 Portfolio Assessment
Portfolio assessment has become widely used in
educational settings as a way to examine and measure
progress, by documenting the process of learning or change as
it occurs. Portfolios extend beyond test scores to include
substantive descriptions or examples of what the student is
doing and experiencing. Fundamental to "authentic
assessment" or "performance assessment" in educational
theory is the principle that children and adolescents should
demonstrate, rather than tell about, what they know and can do
(Cole, Ryan, & Kick, 1995).
 Portfolio Assessment
Documenting progress toward higher order goals such
as application of skills and synthesis of experience
requires obtaining information beyond what can be
provided by standardized or norm-based tests. In
"authentic assessment", information or data
is collected from various sources, through multiple
methods, and over multiple points in time (Shaklee,
Barbour, Ambrose, & Hansford, 1997).
 Portfolio Assessment
Contents of portfolios (sometimes called "artifacts" or
"evidence") can include drawings, photos, video or audio
tapes, writing or other work samples, computer disks, and
copies of standardized or program-specific tests. Data
sources can include parents, staff, and other community
members who know the participants or program, as well as
the self-reflections of participants themselves. Portfolio
assessment provides a practical strategy for systematically
collecting and organizing such data.
 Portfolio Assessment
Portfolio assessments are not a type of assessment
item, but rather a compilation of student work.
Portfolio assessments ask students or teachers to
collect work products that show growth over a specific
period of time. Examples of work products include
collections of student essays, artwork, lab reports or
reading logs. We use scoring guides and rubrics to
score portfolios.
 Portfolio Assessment
There are two main types of portfolio assessments:
“instructional” or “working” portfolios, and “showcase”
portfolios.
Instructional Portfolios Instructional or working
portfolios are formative in nature. They allow a student to
demonstrate his or her ability to perform a particular skill. For
example, a working portfolio may include a collection of lab
reports from over the course of the semester that highlight a
student’s improving ability to create hypotheses.
 Portfolio Assessment
Showcase Portfolios Showcase portfolios are
summative in nature. They include samples of a student’s
best work to demonstrate mastery at the end of a unit of
study, semester or school year. A showcase portfolio may
include several drafts of an essay with comments that
indicate how each draft improves upon the last, with the
most polished draft on the topic demonstrating a student’s
mastery of the relevant skills.
 Portfolio Assessment
Portfolio assessments offer several benefits. First and
foremost, portfolios are a rich source of information
about student learning. Unlike stand-alone
assessments, portfolios are composed of multiple
artifacts, which can paint a full picture of what
students know and can do.
 Portfolio Assessment
Second, portfolios are versatile. You can use them to
measure almost any content area or skill. In contrast to
assessment items that are more granular and focused,
portfolio assessments can contain a wide variety of student
work to demonstrate mastery of a particular standard. These
work products can include essays, lab reports, reading logs,
photographs, journal entries, presentations, copies of
assessments, conference notes from teachers and many
other types of materials.
 Portfolio Assessment
Third, portfolio assessments can build students’ self-
confidence and “self-appraisal” skills through the opportunity
they provide for students to reflect on and celebrate their
accomplishments. Working portfolios can be helpful
resources during parent–teacher conferences. Showcase
portfolios can help students prepare for real-world careers.
For example, photographers, journalists and graphic
designers typically maintain a portfolio of their strongest
pieces to show potential employers.
 Portfolio Assessment
PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT IS MOST USEFUL FOR:
 Evaluating programs that have flexible or individualized
goals or outcomes. For example, within a program with the
general purpose of enhancing children's social skills, some
individual children may need to become less aggressive
while other shy children may need to
become more assertive.
 Each child's portfolio assessment would be geared to his or
her individual needs and goals.
 Portfolio Assessment
PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT IS MOST USEFUL FOR:
 Allowing individuals and programs in the community (those
being evaluated) to be involved in their own change and
decisions to change.
 Providing information that gives meaningful insight into
behavior and related change. Because portfolio
assessment emphasizes the process of change or growth,
at multiple points in time, it may be easier to see patterns.
 Portfolio Assessment
PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT IS MOST USEFUL FOR:
 Providing a tool that can ensure communication and
accountability to a range of audiences. Participants, their
families, funders, and members of the community at large who
may not have much sophistication in interpreting statistical data
can often appreciate more visual or experiential "evidence" of
success.
 Allowing for the possibility of assessing some of the more
complex and important aspects of many constructs (rather than
just the ones that are easiest to measure).
 Portfolio Assessment
PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT IS NOT AS USEFUL FOR:
 Evaluating programs that have very concrete, uniform
goals or purposes. For example, it would be
unnecessary to compile a portfolio of individualized
"evidence" in a program whose sole purpose is full
immunization of all children in a community by the age
of five years. The required immunizations are the same,
and the evidence is generally clear and straightforward.
 Portfolio Assessment
PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT IS NOT AS USEFUL FOR:
 Allowing you to rank participants or programs in a quantitative
or standardized way (although evaluators or program staff may
be able to make subjective judgements of relative merit).
 Comparing participants or programs to standardized norms.
While portfolios can (and often do) include some standardized
test scores along with other kinds of "evidence", this is not the
main purpose of the portfolio.
 Portfolio Assessment
ADVANTAGES OF USING PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT
 Allows the evaluators to see the student, group, or community as
individual, each unique with its own characteristics, needs, and
strengths.
 Serves as a cross-section lens, providing a basis for future analysis
and planning. By viewing the total pattern of the community or of
individual participants, one can identify areas of strengths and
weaknesses, and barriers to success.
 Serves as a concrete vehicle for communication, providing ongoing
communication or exchanges of information among those involved.
 Portfolio Assessment
ADVANTAGES OF USING PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT
 Promotes a shift in ownership; communities and participants can take an
active role in examining where they have been and where they want to go.
 Portfolio assessment offers the possibility of addressing shortcomings of
traditional assessment. It offers the possibility of assessing the more
complex and important aspects of an area or topic.
 Covers a broad scope of knowledge and information, from many different
people who know the program or person in different contexts ( eg.,
participants, parents, teachers or staff, peers, or community leaders).
 Portfolio Assessment
DISADVANTAGES OF USING PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT
 May be seen as less reliable or fair than more quantitative
evaluations such as test scores.
 Can be very time consuming for teachers or program staff to
organize and evaluate the contents, especially if portfolios
have to be done in addition to traditional testing and grading.
 Having to develop your own individualized criteria can be
difficult or unfamiliar at first.
 Portfolio Assessment
DISADVANTAGES OF USING PORTFOLIO ASSESSMENT
 If goals and criteria are not clear, the portfolio can be just a
miscellaneous collection of artifacts that don't show
patterns of growth or achievement.
 Like any other form of qualitative data, data from portfolio
assessments can be difficult to analyze or aggregate to
show change.
 REFERENCES
https://k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com/tlb/using-anecdotal-records
-in-the-classroom/
https://ag.arizona.edu/sfcs/cyfernet/cyfar/Portfo~3.htm
https://csaa.wested.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Portfolio-Asses
sments-Narrator-Script.pdf
https://www.learnalberta.ca/content/mewa/html/assessment/observa
tion.html