Global Education sTudent Assessment Tools Inventory
Assessing student development of global competencies is a crucial step in a global classroom. The following are useful steps and resources to guide student assessment.
Step 1: Complete Fred Czarra's Global Education Checklist. This a self-assessment tool to takes you through a series of questions evaluating the degree to which your students, classroom, school and district practice global education knowledge, skills and participation. The following are examples of questions from the student section:
Are students aware that global issues exist and affect their lives?
Do students have the ability to suspend judgment when confronted with new information about an issue when that information is in conflict with their own understandings and values?
Do students know and understand that cultures cross national boundaries?
Do students seek to communicate with people from other cultures?
Can students generate alternative projections for the future and weigh potential future scenarios?
The checklist is very thorough, the student section alone has 41 questions. After completing the student section and assessing your strengths and areas for improvement, you can create an action plan for the development of a few key goals. This would allow you to start thinking about what assessment would look like in you content area. For example, how could I assess if students are aware that global issues exists and affect their lives? Perhaps student could create an infographic about how global issues such as climate change, human trafficking or hunger impact their local community. By understanding the knowledge, skills and dispositions of global competence, you can begin to understand how to assess it in your classroom. This checklist helps you ask the right questions so you can imagine and plan for meaningful assessment.
Step 2: Read, "Global Thinking Routines: Foundations for our work" by the Harvard Project Zero Team. The Harvard Project Zero Team advocates for global competence that goes beyond having information or skill but has become the, "habits of mind with which students come to understand the world and live and work in it successfully." This article helps teachers develop global thinking routines, "carefully designed patterns of reflection geared to preparing students to understand and act on matters of local and global significance." These routines include strategies such as the "3Ys" routine which challenges learners to think across personal, local and global spheres. Why might this (topic, question) matter to me? Why might it matter to people around me (family, friends, city, nation)? Why might it matter to the world? The global thinking routines discussed in the article can serve as formative assessments to measure integration and habit formation of global competencies.
Step 3: For larger summative assessments of global competence, utilize Asia Society's pivotal how to book, " Educating for Global Competence:Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World." This book does an amazing job defining the four areas of global competence, providing cross curricular, k-12, examples of incorporating global competencies in to your curriculum and finally detailed table of performance outcomes for each competence.