Using Oral Assessments to Enrich Our Understanding of Student Learning

One of the most brilliant writers and thoughtful readers I’ve ever taught failed my class.

It was my second year of teaching, and while she was writing beautiful stories and talking to me about novels we were reading, she wasn’t doing the right tasks to put points in the grade book. It was one of the most eye-opening moments of my career and helped me understand the importance of what a colleague later told me: “Assessment is the art of listening deeply to students.”

Because of this and similar experiences, oral assessment has become a major part of how I grade. I view it through two lenses. One is informal, something that happens when I sit with a student briefly while they’re writing or overhear comments made during small group work—this is informal but still provides evidence that a student understands a given concept. The second is formal, a process of sitting down with every student individually and having a structured discussion where we look at their work to determine their current level of understanding of a concept or skill.

Getting Started

To use either of these approaches, there are a few important tips to keep in mind.

First, use a norming tool like a rubric or learning progression to ensure that you are equitable and accurate in your assessment data, especially if information from an oral assessment ends up in the grade book. Even the best-intentioned teacher can demonstrate elements of implicit bias in grading. The one thing that helps combat this implicit bias? A well-designed, well-calibrated rubric. So whenever you use oral assessment to measure student learning, use a tool designed to help ensure your scores are normed to some criteria—here’s an example. I would print out a few of these for the skills we were covering in the unit to have them accessible any time I needed them.

Second, think about how you can structure the classroom to free yourself up to have these important conversations. The easiest way to do this is to leverage independent work or technology. When students are engaged in reading a passage or working on practice problems independently, that’s a great time to meet with students individually. Leveraging technology through a flipped lesson or other learning-focused experience can also help create space for these conversations while still ensuring that the time is used productively by other students.

Third, oral assessment shouldn’t be used as the only form of assessment. The research on the reliability and validity of oral assessment is mixed, with some studies claiming that it is less reliable than traditional assessments unless structured a very specific way and other studies claiming that it is more accurate than written assessments.Thus it’s important to use a variety of approaches to assessment to get the most accurate data possible.

Informal Oral Assessment

An informal approach to oral assessment is best used as a sort of fill-in-the-gap approach. Let’s say that I have a student who struggled on a written assessment, but I’m pretty certain they understood the content. I can pull them aside and ask them to explain their thinking or talk them through some of the questions on the assessment. In a traditional grading system that averages points over time, this discussion could result in an addition of points on the quiz or test score to better reflect their understanding.

In a standards-based grading system, I often used these informal conversations to help clarify instances of uncertainty around a student’s current level of proficiency. For example, I had a student whose primary language was not English who struggled on a written assessment when demonstrating analyzing the development of a theme in a text. Their performance was lower than previous attempts, and I wondered if their writing ability was hindering their ability to express their thinking. I sat down with the student and gave them an oral assessment, which helped clarify that they did truly understand the concept at a level higher than their written assessment showed.

It’s important to be aware of whether you’re being equitable in providing all students this opportunity. One tool that helped me was a class roster with the learning progression at the top that I could use to see who I had talked with about a skill—and who I hadn’t. It also helped me keep track of moments where I heard a student say something that demonstrated their understanding at a certain level—instead of relying on memory, I had the receipts. 

Formal Oral Assessment

The formal approach can best be defined as a replacement for a traditional assessment, as opposed to the informal approach, which happens in addition to a traditional assessment.

The major difference in how I used this type of oral assessment is an emphasis on a specific, intentional structure to the discussion—I might write a set of questions to ask each student, for example.

For example, if I was assessing my students’ ability to analyze how a central idea is developed in a text, I would write a series of questions—the same kinds I would use on a quiz or test, aligned to a learning progression or rubric—and then sit down with each student while the others are working. I sometimes used short periods of time to meet with just a couple students a day, spread out over multiple weeks. Other times I used a more intensive approach, using a few days in a row to meet with students for almost the entire class—in a 60-minute period I could meet with seven or eight students.

This approach also worked well for make-up assessments. Instead of creating multiple different exams to give students, I could use an intentionally structured oral assessment that students could sign up to take during contract hours after school or during any built-in time during the day when the student and I were both free.

Another formal approach I found effective was using oral assessment as a portfolio tool. In my English class, I would have students identify the best examples from their writing that demonstrated specific skills and add them to a portfolio. At key intervals (mid-term, end-of-term, etc.), I would schedule time for a round of portfolio reviews, and I would sit with each student to talk about their portfolio selections. When we met for their oral assessment, they would go through a few or all of the learning outcomes identified for the unit and explain how their selected examples demonstrated proficiency in the learning outcomes. This allowed space for me to ask probing or clarifying questions to really be able to get a stronger picture of the student’s understanding.

In a traditional points-based system, these formal oral assessments can be scored using a rubric to be entered into the grade book. In a standards-based system, these assessments can be recorded as an additional attempt to demonstrate proficiency, which can then be used to determine the overall proficiency in each skill.

If you use formal oral assessments to replace a traditional assessment, be mindful that students’ level of comfort with speaking may be a limiting factor in their ability to perform well, just as students who struggle with writing will struggle on a written assessment. This means that, while oral assessment can be an incredibly valuable tool, it also is one that should be used carefully and with the student in mind. Think about pairing an oral assessment with a different type of assessment to get a more complete picture.

While some students may struggle with oral assessments, the reason I ended up using them in my own classroom was because of the students who were really able to shine in them. I found that a number of my students for whom English was not their primary language would struggle on a written exam but could demonstrate a complex, beautiful understanding of the concept when the writing barrier was removed and they could rely on their conversational English.

Additionally, for students who were on an IEP or required specific modifications to assessments, oral assessments were hugely beneficial. It was much simpler for me to modify the assessment and allow these students to demonstrate their understanding in a way they felt confident about.

Finally, in an era when screens sometimes stand between teachers and students, and when AI threatens to dehumanize key elements of the assessment process, oral assessment allows me to build connections and strengthen relationships with students and, to call back to what my colleague told me years ago, listen deeply to them.