What are students learning at Lydian?
How do we know?

These are the questions that assessment tries to answer. At Lydian, we have many forms of assessment as well as the check-and-balance of hundreds of course evaluations to show that students are mastering skills and building the foundation they need to continue their education.

Research-based assessment

Lydian’s assessment strategies integrate the work of Benjamin Bloom, who dedicated himself to understanding thinking and to teaching educators how to measure thinking.

Bloom focused on  three forms of educational assessment: formative, process, and summative. The integration of these three forms of assessment in the instructional process has been demonstrated again and again to improve student performance and instruction.

Formative Assessment

Formative Assessment is the brief, frequent concept-by-concept assessment used to adjust teaching and learning while they are happening. Formative assessment informs both teachers and students about student understanding at a point when timely adjustments can be made. These adjustments help students achieve targeted learning goals within a set time frame. Formative assessment cannot be separated from instruction. It is what good teachers do. 

Lydian’s Practice of Formative Assessment

Some of the instructional strategies that Lydian teachers use formatively include the following:

Criteria and goal setting: Research has shown that students are successful when they have an a priori, clear understanding of learning objectives and how those objectives will be measured. Lydian teachers review learning goals and measurement with their students on an ongoing basis. Teachers also show work samples demonstrating acceptable quality so students have a clear idea of how they can achieve proficiency targets.

Questioning strategies are embedded in lessons. Both teachers and students ask thoughtful questions as a natural part of the learning process. Teachers ask directed questions to foster student discovery through active learning. Students are encouraged to ask questions, thereby engaging in dialog that uncovers and expands learning. Consistently, Lydian’s teaching evaluations highlight that students feel that the ability to ask questions helped them learn course content.

Student self-assessment is about reflection. This meta-cognitive (thinking about thinking) helps students better understand their own learning. This process of students’ consideration of their own work not only engages students, it also helps them, beyond a "grade," to see where they started and the progress they are making toward the learning goal. Students and parents at Lydian report that they (or their student) feel prepared, confident and motivated when they complete a course at Lydian.

Process Monitoring

A significant benefit of process monitoring is early detection and remediation of problems at the student, family and teacher levels.

Process monitoring at Lydian is the identification of course milestones to be reached, activities to be undertaken, projects to be delivered, and the extent to which the milestones are achieved in a timely manner. Process monitoring at Lydian occurs in two ways. First, students and parents have access to a daily online record of course milestones and progress against those milestones. Second, each week, the Instructional Supervisors review every student’s progress against milestones. Progress monitoring and suggestions for improvement are conveyed to teachers and re-evaluated the next week.

Summative Assessment

Summative assessments are given periodically to determine what students know at a particular point in time, they are the periodic assessments given to students at appropriate times during and at the end of the course. We use two forms of summative assessment: chapter and unit tests usually supplied by the textbook publisher, and standardized exams. AP exams are an example of relevant summative assessment. While norm-referenced standardized assessments provide valuable objective feedback, they do not take the place of the immediate, contextualized feedback which is useful for helping teacher and student throughout the learning process.

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