In today’s classrooms assessments, both formative and summative, play an important role in measuring student learning. However, traditional assessments don’t always accurately evaluate student’s understanding of course material. Traditional assessments often lack flexibility and oftentimes fail to engage students' learning preferences. An innovative approach to this problem is using choice boards to assess student learning in the classroom.Choice boards, or learning menus, are instructional tools that provide students with a variety of differentiated tasks or activities to choose from. They are typically presented in a grid format, and offer students a range of options to demonstrate their understanding of a particular topic or concept. Each cell within the grid represents a distinct activity or task that targets different learning styles, skills, or levels of difficulty. To simplify things, link instructions in the board for each of the options you give students. Additionally, it’s important to create a choice board rubric that relates to each of the options. This will make it much easier to grade and for students to identify if they are meeting all of the assignment criteria.
A few things to consider as you design your choice board:
- Identify Learning Objectives: begin by clarifying the desired learning outcomes for the choice board. Determine the key concepts, skills or standards that students should achieve through their chosen activities.
- Offer Variety: Create a range of activities that appeal to different learning styles and interests. Incorporating activities related to research, writing, presentation, artistic expression, etc.
- Clear Instructions: Clearly outline expectations and guidelines for each activity on the board. Include sufficient details of required format and specific criteria for successful completion. Remember to include a rubric with your choice board!
- Scaffold Support: think of all your learners and determine what supports might be helpful as they work through their project. Think graphic organizers, templates, links to additional information, etc.
Choice boards aren’t only for assessing student learning, they can also be used to offer choice in the way students acquire content in the classroom. For example, instead of assigning a traditional vocabulary assignment where students look up words and definitions, give them a new creative way to learn their words for a unit via a choice board. Or if students need to do research before starting a novel, curate several different items on the choice board that all meet the same criteria of giving students background knowledge.
Choice boards can be an engaging and creative assessment option that help students own their learning, allowing them to make choices and foster a sense and responsibility for their learning.
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