What Does 4QM Assessment Look Like?

We get this question a lot. Usually the people who ask it are asking about unit tests: the full class period assessment that typically comes at the end of two to four weeks of teaching about a given topic. What does a 4QM unit test look like?

A 4QM unit test looks a lot like 4QM lessons. One of the things we love about the Four Question Method is that there’s no real difference between what happens in class and what happens on the test. We have Four Questions, and four lesson types. In class our students practice narration, interpretation, explanation, and judgment for the specific content of a given unit. 4QM unit tests require students to do exactly the same thing, only without consulting their notes. The unit storyboard and unit guide define instruction during the unit, and become test review tools at the end. Can you describe the content of each storyboard box accurately? Can you answer all the questions on the unit guide and explain your thinking for each one? If so, you’re probably going to do well on the test!

It is entirely possible to create multiple choice assessments on a 4QM unit. Multiple choice is simply a question format, and is very efficient to grade. You (or your AI agent) could write multiple choice questions about a 4QM unit that ask what happened, what some key people in that unit story were thinking, why the story happened then and there, and what your students think about that. Those questions would certainly test students’ recall of the answers, but almost certainly would not test their own ability to narrate, interpret, explain, or judge. That’s why the assessments we’re currently writing for our U.S. History curriculum require students to produce written answers to questions of each type. Students writing (by hand, in the classroom) is the best way to make student thinking visible — and thus assessable.

Assessing Question One

We recommend that every unit test require students to write a unit-level narrative. A great way to do this is to provide a list of fifteen key people, events, and ideas from the unit, and require students to write the story of the unit while including at least ten items from the list. The narrative is scored on the Question One rubric, which evaluates its demonstration of change over time, its use of the active voice to show who did what in the story, its coherence between story sections, and its accuracy. The task is more difficult if the initial list is sorted alphabetically, and easier if it is sorted chronologically. No matter what, retelling the story of the unit well is the heart of 4QM unit assessment.

Assessing Question Two

We recommend that every unit test require students to interpret a short excerpt from a primary source document or an artifact of some kind. This task requires students to go through the same steps as a Question Two interpretation lesson: contextualize the document or artifact by situating it in the unit story, describe its plain meaning, then interpret the author’s purpose and assumptions. We can make the task easier by using a short excerpt of a familiar document that was already studied in the unit. Or we can make it more challenging by presenting a document that fits the content of the unit, but that students are seeing for the first time. Students are scored for their contextualization, meaning, and interpretation, and for showing how the document or artifact supports them.

Assessing Questions Three and Four

Assessing Questions Three and Four on unit tests is more difficult. These questions have both specific and general versions, they require rigorous thinking that is less familiar to students (and teachers), and each 4QM unit includes only one of each lesson type. There are two ways of dealing with these challenges. The first is to simply ask students to write a recap of the lesson from the unit: What explanation did the class arrive at for the unit Question Three? What were two of the positions taken by classmates on the unit Question Four? For the Q4 writing, we can also ask students to identify a position they agree with and say why.

The second option is to allow students to refer to the lesson templates they completed in class, and to ask them to apply their thinking to a new case. This technique echoes the ending of the Question Three and Question Four lessons, in which students are presented with a new situation and must test their explanations or apply their principles. Allowing them to refer to their lesson templates means they can be held to a high standard as they show how their explanations or principles apply, or don’t, to the new case.

A 4QM Unit Test

When I was still a classroom teacher, students often asked me, “Mr. Bassett, what’s gonna be on the unit test?” I would always respond, “There are only four questions I can ask you in this class.” Most of my unit tests included a Question One section, a Question Two section, and then either a Question Three or a Question Four section. If my students found all of that to be overwhelming, I would usually cut the Q3 or Q4 section. Sometimes I would keep it, and cut the Q2. The goal was always to have students working hard for the whole class period, and giving me enough writing so that I could honestly evaluate their knowledge of the unit and their skills of narration, interpretation, explanation, or judgment. That’s what a 4QM unit teaches, so that’s what a 4QM unit test should assess.

J.B.