As fall arrives, students are returning to school, we hope, with a renewed enthusiasm for learning. As teachers prepare for the first day of school, they may have reviewed the class roster and conducted an initial assessment of their students to determine their learning trajectory for the year.
As classroom teachers, we know that whether students will have a successful year of learning or not depends on more than these initial assessments. In fact, as more assessments have been built for school accountability purposes, they have become less and less useful to teachers needing to make day-to-day teaching decisions about how to best educate their students. Fortunately, we have an alter-native. Classroom-based assessment is a habitual, intentional pedagogical practice that anchors all successful teaching and learning throughout the school year.
It is widely accepted that there are two main purposes for assessment: assessment of learning and assessment as learning. Unfortunately, the current school account-ability system prioritizes assessment of learning as the main evidence of growth and requires educators to administer tests as proof of their students’ achievement.
While high-stakes formal testing has its place in the school accountability system, the overuse of these assessments tends to have negative results for student learning, such as the narrowing of the curriculum and instructional options for teachers. They widen inequality and opportunity gaps for our students, in particular for multilingual learners.
With the emphasis on achievement rather than learning and the overreliance on tests, an abundance of evidence collected from daily instruction by teachers is ignored or, at best, treated merely as supportive, secondary evidence. After two and a half decades of overreliance on formal testing to drive instruction and demonstrate school accountability, the systemic use of classroom-based assessment to inform instruction is all but abandoned.
Classroom-based assessment prioritizes student learning and how teachers can improve instruction to help students be successful (Black and Williams, 1998; Arnold, 2022). The main benefits of classroom-based assessment are that 1) it empowers teachers to design or select assessment methods and tools that best demonstrate not only what students learned but also how they learn and 2) students are able to engage in assessment activities that are directly related to what they learned in their class and can use the insights from the results to aid their own learning. In the end, classroom-based assessment also helps schools establish an internal accountability system based on local achievement goals and what students need to learn.
Classroom-based assessment helps teachers meet students where they are and make appropriate decisions to help students move forward in their learning. This is especially important for multilingual learners, who have the double tasks of learning a new language and simultaneously learning new academic content through the medium of their second language in schools (Wolf et al., 2025).
In order to make appropriate instructional decisions, teachers in bilingual and multilingual classrooms need to collect and use a plethora of information about each student’s language proficiencies, their academic performances through multiple languages, and how they use their linguistic repertoires to learn. Current test-driven assessment methods are completely divorced from providing teachers with useful information to make day-to-day instructional decisions for students. A balanced classroom-based assessment practice that includes multiple sources of formative, diagnostic, and summative data will yield more useful information to teachers than occasional test scores. It is time to recenter, reclaim, and reimagine how we, as classroom teachers, might redesign and implement classroom-based assessment as a part of our daily instructional routine to collect a richer body of evidence to support our student learning.
As a bilingual educator and school administrator, I have implemented such a balanced assessment framework to help classroom teachers in my school district make appropriate instructional and program decisions for their multilingual learners. Our portfolio-based framework was built with the primary purpose of informing teachers’ instructional decisions and encouraging learning for students in bilingual and dual language programs. Secondarily, longitudinal data collected by teachers are used to make local program and curriculum improvements.
We found that portfolio-based classroom assessment presents a richer, more equitable approach to assessment than high-stakes testing. This approach helps teachers build a collection of evidence from multiple sources to demonstrate the pivotal student learning growth and achievement throughout the year. We intentionally design the “pivotal portfolio” to selectively accumulate evidence that shows important progress and achievement each student makes throughout the year as they gain academic competency and proficiency in their second language.
Teachers relied on multiple sources of data gathered in the pivotal portfolio to collaborate and plan instruction for their multilingual students. While formal test results were included in the portfolio, the majority of the evidence collected was common, performance-based assessments that were designed by teachers. We saw that teachers were better able to diagnose student challenges, document their progress, and make instructional changes that helped students meet challenges and learn. We also found that the high level of learning students were able to achieve was largely dependent on the teachers’ ability to make accurate and reliable assessments of their students’ abilities and to change their instruction to match what the students needed to move forward. The investment we made in classroom assessments served as the primary tool to aid teachers in planning and executing instruction (Gottlieb and Nguyen, 2007).
Turning our gaze away from external school accountability demands today to refocus on student learning in the classroom is not easy. To do so, we must shift our mindset and refocus our attention to using assessment for learning in the classroom. We all know that the best type of evidence a teacher can collect about where a student is in their learning and how they learn is through a performance-based assessment that is embedded in the instructional plan and delivery.
Over time and with planning, teachers can work collaboratively to select and organize various types of evidence (both formative and summative) into a portfolio that illustrates not only what the student learned but also their learning challenges and strengths. As teachers, we can exercise our own professional judgement about which evidence best demonstrates the student’s achievements across content subjects over time. For multilingual learners, this evidence of learning can include language proficiency growth and student work in multiple languages.
Let’s make this year a year of optimal learning for every student. Let’s start by rethinking how we might use our own classroom assessment to plan better instruction and ensure learning success for our multilingual learners.
References
- Arnold, J. (2022). “Prioritizing Students in Assessment for Learning: A scoping review of research on students’ classroom experience.” Review of Education, 10(3), 668–693.
- Black, P., and Wiliam, D. (1998). “Assessment and Classroom Learning.” Assessment in Education, 5(1), 7–74.
- Gottlieb, M., and Nguyen, D. (2007). Assessment and Accountability in Language Education Programs. Caslon Publishing.
- Wolf, M. K., Sova, L., Janssen, G., López, A. A., Gooch, R. M., Pooler, E., and Lee, J. (2025). “Equity for Multilingual Learners: Leveraging formative assessment and socioculturally responsive assessment principles.” Bilingual Research Journal.
Diep Nguyen, PhD, is CEO/president of the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL).