Your Students Struggled on an Assessment—Now What?

One of the things I struggled with early in my career was supporting students who struggled on an assessment—and I found myself repeatedly struggling with it, even after over a decade in the classroom. There was the reality of a curriculum guide and pacing requirements that made me feel like I couldn’t slow down and reteach after a test, the feeling of overwhelm in thinking about how to plan for multiple scenarios to differentiate the time well if I did reteach, and just the simple fact that I didn’t really know what to do. So much of my teacher training centered around developing good lesson plans and classroom management, and I received half of a course—literally just half a course—on assessment practices.

What this meant was that for the first few years I would give an assessment, learn what students were struggling with, and then simply move on to the next content. I would try to individually reteach with students after school or during lunch, but it felt like I wasn’t addressing the learning needs adequately while still losing so much time to this process.

After years of work, I finally got to a spot where I could give an assessment, use the results to design differentiated learning experiences to catch students up, and still manage to keep up with the pacing requirements. These are some of the most effective ways I found to do all three things at the same time.

Entry Task Reviews After an Assessment

I was often overwhelmed when it came to providing differentiation after an assessment because I thought whatever I was going to do would need a full-class period. I eventually learned that a 15-minute entry task could do wonders for addressing student misconceptions uncovered by an assessment.

I would analyze the assessment to look for three to five concepts that students could potentially struggle with. Having taught a unit a few times, I typically could anticipate what these might be, but if you are new to a unit, it can be helpful to reach out to colleagues who have taught it before so you can create this list prior to the assessment.

I would then create a digital folder with resources for each of those concepts, with space for students to write down what they were confused about before and what they understood better afterward. The activities I created could typically be done in about 15 to 20 minutes, and I was able to adjust some of my planning to fit this in without falling behind my colleagues.

If it seems like setting up the activities might be fairly time-intensive, once I got the hang of it, I could create them in about 30 minutes—and once I had them, I could reuse them in following years. And I could often work with my grade-level team to divide up the work to make it more efficient. Here’s an example of what that activity can look like.

In-Class Small Group Sessions

Using technology for reteaching in that way was just one option—I also used it to make time for in-class small group reteaching sessions. I would create an activity that all of my students could complete independently; you could set up group work, but for classroom management purposes I found that independent work allowed me to focus on the small group I was working with and avoid too much distraction.

For an English language arts (ELA) class, this independent activity could be a reading or audio version of a reading that students would do for the new unit. For a math class, this could be a practice set—digital or physical—that students would do to work on the new content in the unit. In any class, it could be a flipped lesson with a prerecorded instructional video that students would watch and answer questions about using a platform like Edpuzzle or Screencastify.

Prior to that class period, I would set up a schedule for small group tutoring sessions. For my 63-minute classes, I found that three 15-minute sessions worked well. Each session would be connected to a specific piece of content that the assessment covered, and students would choose one session that they knew they needed to work on. I never required students to sign up for a session, mostly to keep the group sizes small, but I would strongly encourage certain students to sign up.

In each session, I would reteach a five-to-10-minute mini-lesson, and then I would have some sort of alternative assessment. My favorite approach was to have students do an initial brainstorm of what they knew about the content. Then I would teach the mini-lesson, and students would do a follow-up brain dump of what they knew after the lesson that they didn’t know before. Here’s an example of that activity.

End-of-Unit Reteaching and Assessment

While the two previous examples require no change to the assessment itself, my next strategy does require adjusting how you design an assessment. Let’s say a unit covers four different concepts or skills, and over the course of the term a student has demonstrated proficiency in three of those four skills. Instead of having the student take the entire assessment, I would give them credit for the three skills they had already demonstrated that they knew, and I would have them attempt the section of the assessment only for the skill they were still struggling with.

Essentially, the assessment would be divided up into sections based on the concepts or skills each question addressed, and students would be able to skip the sections where they had already demonstrated proficiency, freeing time up to dive deeper into the content they were struggling with.

This worked well if the summative assessment was a test—I could have each student answer specific questions—but what if it was a piece of writing or a project? There are a couple of ways to approach this. Let’s say in an ELA class the unit is argumentative writing. That would include a variety of skills, but what if a student was only struggling with their introductions? I could require them to only revise the introduction from their rough draft instead of revising the entire piece of writing, freeing up time for them to learn more about introductions. Or I would often have an exemplar essay prepared with a missing introduction, and the student could focus on only writing the introduction. Here’s an example of what this can look like.

If the summative is a project, you can break it down into components for each skill or concept covered in the unit. For example, if a science class is in a unit about ecosystems—covering predator and prey relationships, the impact of humans on the ecosystem, and the impact of weather on ecosystems—the teacher could provide directions for each component and how students could demonstrate their understanding. The student could choose only the elements they needed to demonstrate, allowing them to better target the learning they needed to engage in to be successful.

The idea here is that if a student has already demonstrated proficiency in a skill and we don’t need more evidence to verify that, we can free up time the student would spend demonstrating that understanding again so they could instead learn about the concept they’re struggling with. Here’s an example of how I used this approach with a debate unit.

Prior to developing these approaches, I felt like I was getting information about what my students needed and then simply ignoring it as I forged ahead with the curriculum. These approaches made it much more realistic for me to address my students’ needs in an efficient and effective way to increase overall student learning in the classroom.