PBL and Actionable Assessment (Part 1): Assessing Along the Way to Support Learning Goals

Introduction to this Series

Project-based learning (PBL) is packed with exciting opportunities for students. They learn through engaging strategies, they meet new people, and they get to make an impact beyond their classrooms.  But in your effort to get kids to the “good stuff,” you might forget or think it’s less important (as I once did)  to intentionally plan a variety of assessments. In fact, I learned in my work as an inclusive high school English teacher, as a school coach for EL Education, as a director of secondary education in a district, and as national faculty for PBLWorks, good assessment can make your project even better. 

In this three-part Project Based Learning Assessment series, we will explore best practices in aligning and planning ongoing assessments to support a project’s learning goals, help you design assessment trajectories that motivate students to grow, and explore structures that help teachers and students use assessment information efficiently.

While these practices help support strong PBL implementation, they aren’t exclusive to PBL. They represent sound assessment strategies that benefit all classrooms, ensuring students receive the feedback they need to grow. Even if you aren't implementing project-based learning, you will still get a lot out of this blog series! Let's get started.

Why Assess Along the Way?

One of the most common misconceptions that we at Applied Coaching for Projects encounter in our work is the notion that assessment occurs mostly at the end of a project when students present their products and explain their learning. It is true that the product that students make or do at the end of a project often feels the most “high stakes” and therefore worthy of sound assessment, but potentially the assessment that occurs throughout a project, even before students begin to create their products, is the assessment that matters most.  In fact, when intentionally planned and aligned with goals, assessment throughout a project can make the assessment of the product less of a burden while improving the quality of those products at the same time.

Most projects have a variety of learning goals but they all tend to fall into a couple of broad categories. Some learning goals focus on content that students should learn, such as the reasons why groundwater becomes polluted or the events leading up to a turning point in history.  Some goals are focused on the academic skills students have or will develop, such as how to read a new genre of text or how to write a video script. A third type of learning goal has to do with 21st-century competencies such as collaboration or communication. It turns out that there are known efficient and effective ways to measure student progress toward different types of learning goals. Who doesn’t need to work smarter, not harder?

Assess Content Knowledge Early

You might think that the best time to measure students’ acquisition of content, the things that students should know as a result of their work, is through the product. While it’s true that students should apply their understanding of the content to their product work, their actual individual knowledge can be masked at that time since so much support from peers and the teacher is often part of the product development phase. Not having mastery of the content is also the sometimes hidden reason why students’ products aren’t as developed or sophisticated as we might hope. 

We encourage you to think about determining whether students have learned the expected content early in your project plans, long before you expect students to start to synthesize and transform those ideas into a product. This can be done quickly and efficiently through quick, selected response quizzes such as multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, or well-designed true/false questions. If teachers discover gaps in students’ content knowledge early in the process, they can intervene with new or review lessons before getting too far down the product path, eliminating barriers to some students’ success.

Assess Academic Skills Throughout the Project

Projects require students to apply previously-learned skills, and to learn new skills. There’s little doubt that the work students do on products are great demonstrations of their skills, but your support of students throughout a project rests on you knowing where their skills lie and moving them from where they are to the next level of proficiency throughout a project.  Knowing which students have advanced skills and which need some boosters is wildly helpful in your daily lesson planning. It’s easy to assess students’ skills -- have them apply the skills you’re focused on to simple parallel tasks and see how they do.  

For example, if you’re planning to have students read scientific studies, you might give them a short selection from one and ask a few questions to see who can handle the task and who might need more support. It’s also worthwhile to ask the students which of the skills-based learning goals in a project are strengths of theirs and where they might need more help from the teacher, expert, or peer.  Once you have that kind of information, you can plan skills lessons based on how much scaffolding kids do or don’t need, ensuring that all students move closer to or beyond the ultimate goals. 

Evaluating 21st Century Competencies Along the Way

The 21st century competencies are another set of learning goals that you assess by watching students actually do the thing that you’re hoping to develop in them. The trick here is to be sure that you’re very clear in your own mind about what something like “creativity” actually looks and sounds like and that you’ve cued your students into that vision. Here is where it is very helpful to have rubric and an exemplar, or better, find an exemplar (like a video or scenario) and save some time for students to co-create a rubric with you by analyzing the exemplar.  

For example, students might watch the video Caine’s Arcade and talk about the evidence the video supplies that Caine is creative. The things that they mention (he uses materials in unusual ways, he independently problem-solves when he hit barriers) become the criteria that you would build into a class rubric. That kind of rubric doesn’t live in the teacher’s gradebook. It’s posted and referred to often and is the basis for feedback to students as they work along the way.  

Actionable Formative Assessment as a Pathway to Success

Collecting evidence of students’ knowledge, skills, and competencies throughout a project potentially means that some of those things don’t need to be part of the product assessment. Imagine that you have several quizzes that show your students have mastered the content of a project. You can focus your assessment of content in the product, then, on how students have made that content their own or transformed it, for example, rather than on if they have it at all. My friend Kristy has written a great blog post about assessing individual students that might be helpful to you when you think about knowing how each and every kid is doing.

You’ve probably already thought to yourself, “ah, that’s a lot of formative assessment.”  That’s right!  Use the right types of formative assessments, intentionally aligned with your learning goals, throughout a project to ensure that your students head into product development as prepared as they can be to be successful. Products will be celebrations of all that students have learned rather than stressful summative assessments.

To make this process even more manageable, we’ve created a helpful table below to guide your assessment throughout a project. If you’re looking for additional support, check out our services in this area or reach out to let us know how we can assist you!

Using Formative Assessment to Drive Project Success

Type	When	Why	How
Content	Early	Understanding of content can be masked during product development due to peer/teacher support. Lack of mastery can lead to less developed products.	Use early quizzes (MCQs, True/False) to identify gaps. Intervene early with additional lessons.
Skills	Throughout	Projects require students to apply and develop new academic skills. Knowing current skill levels helps plan effective support.	Use parallel tasks to assess skills. Tailor lessons based on assessments and provide scaffolding as needed.
Competencies	Throughout	Competencies like creativity are best assessed during active tasks. Clear expectations help students succeed.	Co-create or use rubrics and exemplars with students. Provide ongoing feedback based on the rubric.

What’s Next

Our next blog post in this series will focus on structures that help make the relationship between a project’s goals, formative assessments, and success on the product transparent to students and families, as well as how to use aligned and targeted feedback to support your learners. Our third blog post in this series will help you help your students make the most of the feedback that they receive. If you have specific questions about assessment in projects, write and let us know!

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