












































 
 

ISSN #2331-6845 

 
Rethinking Metaphors of Classroom 

Assessment 
By Dennis Odo 

International Language Institute of Hanyang University 
Seoul, South Korea 

dmurphyodo@yahoo.ca 
 

The lenses and metaphors we use to describe the world around us affect the 
way we view and interact with the world.  Bearing this truism in mind, this 
essay urges educators to revisit the popular assessment as puzzle metaphor. 
I contend that while this metaphor has served scholars and practitioners well 
in the past our current understandings of the assessment process point to a 
need to upgrade this image. While the puzzle metaphor allowed an expanded 
conception of assessment it also obscured the static view of assessment that 
it promoted. The organism within an ecosystem metaphor proposed here 
may help policymakers understand that the larger purpose of assessment is 
not solely about collecting and evaluating artifacts but it is rather about 
making well informed decisions that support the learning needs of students. 
This perspective shift may help us better appreciate the complexity of 
effective assessment as well as the need for ongoing professional 
development that supports teachers’ assessment literacy growth. 
 
Keywords:  assessment, assessment literacy 

 
A number of factors over the past several decades have contributed to a 

proliferation of assessments in schools. These factors include public and 

policymaker demands for school accountability and school administrator 

convenience leading to increasing use of high-stakes standardized tests 

1                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 

mailto:dmurphyodo@yahoo.ca


(Stiggins, 2004). Additional audiences for assessment results have also 

necessitated the creation of newer assessments. These audiences include the 

public, administrators, parents, teachers and students who often want access 

to different kinds of assessment information (Farr, 1992; Valencia, 2002) and 

whose wants and needs are frequently in conflict (Farr, 1992). Proliferating 

assessment purposes also fuel this trend with various reasons including 

evaluating learning objectives, reporting student progress, counselling, 

motivating and recognizing students, selecting students for special programs 

and holding schools accountable (Coil & Merritt, 2011). Consequently, 

students are being assessed much more than being assessed historically 

(Pandya, 2011) with a much more varied and disparate collection of 

assessment tools and procedures.   

As assessments have continued to multiply and we have continued to 

refine our understanding of them, one metaphor has gained popularity in 

helping scholars and practitioners to frame their expanded conception of the 

assessment process. This metaphor imagines assessment as being the 

assembling of pieces of a puzzle (Farr, 1992; Valencia 2002; Edwards, Turner 

& Mokhtari 2008). Each type of assessment or component of the process is 

often likened to a piece in the puzzle. This metaphor has been valuable in 

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many ways because it has allowed educators to re-imagine the assessment 

process as a somewhat more eclectic collection of evidence to provide a more 

complete model of learners’ abilities and limitations than a single one-off high 

stakes test. It is a popular metaphor that has been drawn on by a number of 

scholars and commentators over time and it has been particularly prevalent 

among those who talk about the value of alternative and formative 

assessments. 

 While acknowledging its usefulness over the past few years, given our 

continually expanding understanding of the assessment process, it may be 

time to rethink and update this puzzle metaphor. Considerable benefit derives 

from updating our metaphors. For example, the metaphor of the mind as a 

serial processing computer has given us valuable insights into a print-based 

approach to perceiving and comprehending written words on a page (Gough, 

1972). However, a parallel processing metaphor adapted from developments 

in computer technology allowed scholars to better understand how both 

perception of print and drawing on background knowledge contribute to the 

reading comprehension process (Rummelhardt, 1985). This example 

demonstrates that we have to be thoughtful about the metaphors that we use 

to explain the phenomena in our world because they shape our perception of 

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those phenomena and may cause us to be blind to important aspects of those 

phenomena (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008). Bearing this in mind, I contend that it is 

time to revisit and update our metaphor of assessment as a puzzle because it 

may be causing us to overlook some crucial aspects of the assessment process. 

I also propose that likening assessment to the feedback processes that take 

place within an organism can help draw our attention to some important 

features of that process that assessment stakeholders can benefit from 

understanding better.  

Revisiting the Puzzle Metaphor 

 Educators collect a variety of assessment information that includes both 

traditional “standardized” forms of assessment and other “alternative” forms 

ranging from anecdotal notes through to checklists and portfolios. Student 

self-assessment can also be considered to be a component of the broader 

category of alternative assessments (Coil & Merritt, 2011). Each assessment 

type has unique strengths and weaknesses. For instance, standardized 

assessments can provide a general sense of a student’s overall ability but their 

broad sampling of content tends to make them less informative for classroom 

instruction. In contrast, while alternative assessments offer rich information 

on ongoing progress in authentic classroom tasks they also come with the 

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drawback of being rather labor intensive and increasing the risk of teacher 

bias affecting their evaluation.  Likewise, the benefit of student self-

assessment is that it gives them a sense of responsibility and ownership (Reif, 

1990) but it needs to be carefully managed to ensure students’ thoughtful 

reflection and analysis (Valencia, 2002). If we understand what each type of 

assessment can and cannot contribute to our understanding of student 

learning, we can do a better job of teaching as well as assessing students 

(Hiebert & Calfee, 1989; Pearson & Valencia, 1987). 

 This process of assembling assessment information from a variety of 

sources has gained increasing scholarly attention in recent years. A number of 

contemporary scholars and commentators on assessment have compared the 

process to piecing a puzzle together (Farr, 1991, Coil & Merritt, 2011). 

However, several varied – and sometimes conflicting – conceptions of the 

assessment as puzzle have emerged. It appears that some of the disagreement 

relates to what the pieces of the puzzle actually are. For instance, Farr (1992) 

describes the puzzle pieces as being general orientations toward assessment 

noting “[the] pieces of the [assessment] puzzle represent many types of 

assessments, critical attitudes toward assessment, and attempts to challenge 

or improve them” (p. 26). This conception contrasts with another view of the 

pieces as being broad categories of assessments such as “standard 

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assessment, classroom based assessment, and student self-assessment” 

(Valencia 2002, p. 2). To this, Coil and Merritt (2011) add instruction, as well 

as documenting and reporting progress. Valencia (2002) also contends that 

“[the] glue that holds these assessment pieces together is content standards—

statements about what students should know and be able to do” (p. 2). A third 

conception of the puzzle sees the pieces as the actual types of assessment. For 

example, Hill, Campbell and Ruptic (1994) focus on specific and practical 

aspects of assessment and evaluation such as collecting and recording 

information from multiple sources (i.e., portfolios and student observations) 

on an ongoing basis. Applying this same perspective to second language 

reading assessment, Geva (2006) supports using a lot of the same assessment 

tools used with L1 learners if they have a basic command of the L2. To these, 

she adds several L2 specific assessments including L1 performance data (e. g., 

home country report cards), previous assessments, family cultural and 

linguistic background, and so forth. Ultimately, all of these various 

interpretations of the “puzzle” demonstrate that there are really no commonly 

agreed upon definition. 

 In essence, the puzzle metaphor likens the assessment process to 

assembling a puzzle that represents the overall ability of the student. Each 

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piece of the puzzle is some type of assessment of the student’s abilities. Thus, 

pieces of the puzzle might include test scores, anecdotal classroom 

observations and a collection of portfolio materials. This puzzle metaphor has 

been a helpful tool for scholars and educators to use when thinking about 

formative assessment. It has also provided us with a number of important 

insights.  For instance, it has allowed educators to bear in mind the reality that 

assessment is not a singular unified process and there are many pieces of 

information to be assembled to put forth a fair and accurate description of a 

learner’s strengths and limitations (Farr, 1992). Secondly, the assessment 

puzzle has allowed us to see the value of collecting an eclectic variety of types 

of assessment information such as scores on standardized tests through to 

anecdotal classroom records (Coil & Merritt, 2011). Lastly, the notion of 

“assessment as puzzle” has helped us to remember that there needs to be 

some balance among the various information sources such that assessment 

decisions are not made primarily based upon information from only one 

source (Valencia, 2002). 

 The valuable insights this metaphor has provided for understanding the 

importance of assembling a balanced variety of evidence for learner ability 

must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, this way of seeing the assessment 

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process has also created some potentially hazardous distortions in many 

educators’ views of assessment. When stretched beyond its capacity the 

metaphor threatens to cause educators to generate a number of unproductive 

if not harmful misconceptions about what effective classroom assessment is. 

These specious conceptions of assessment may in turn cause inaccurate 

perceptions about a student’s, or group of students’, relative strengths and 

areas of need. Three particularly dangerous misapprehensions generated by 

the puzzle metaphor provide evidence that it is time to rethink and update the 

assessment as puzzle metaphor to better incorporate recent research 

discoveries and developing understandings. These problematic assumptions 

include a static image of assessment, the notion that assessment can ever be 

complete and a somewhat traditional and constrained view of what 

constitutes assessment. 

 The puzzle metaphor creates a fairly static image of assessment in the 

sense that it represents assessments as a fixed and predetermined number of 

interlocking pieces that does not necessarily leave room for the less tangible 

aspects of assessment. While the puzzle metaphor allows scholars to take a 

much broader and more holistic view of assessment, it is still problematic 

because it threatens to limit our imagination in terms of what we might accept 

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as being valid forms of student assessment. For example, while scholars who 

use the puzzle metaphor accept many alternative forms of classroom 

assessment (e. g., anecdotal records and portfolios) they ultimately still tend 

to view assessment itself as a rather static collection of artifacts in the sense 

that teachers collect data through anecdotal records or other means of 

documentation, assemble the data and present a conclusive representation of 

the student. In that sense, although this broader conception of assessment 

looks quite dynamic at first glance, it is actually still rather static. Other 

scholars (e.g., Popham, 2010; Stiggins, 2004; Pollock, 2011) would argue that 

assessment is actually still a more fluid and dynamic process than that 

conception allows. These scholars contend that classroom formative 

assessment is the deeply intertwined with the moment-by-moment decision 

making processes of the classroom teacher and, in fact, these in-the-moment 

decisions are at the heart of the classroom assessment process. The danger is 

that the puzzle metaphor may be an impediment to seeing the assessment 

process in this somewhat ethereal and dynamic way because it encourages us 

to look at assessment as an assemblage of artifacts rather than as an ongoing 

in-the-moment evaluative process. Thus, while the puzzle appears to accept all 

forms of assessment, it may actually blind teachers to the importance of 

developing their assessment intuition. This is because the moment by moment 

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decisions based on their intuition may not necessarily find their way into the 

various assessment artifacts or documents favoured by this paradigm.       

 A second and related issue with the puzzle metaphor is that it gives the 

problematic impression that there is a natural end point in the assessment 

process. That is, teachers or administrators just have to fit all of the pieces 

together to complete the picture of the student (e. g., Coil & Merritt, 2011). In 

this view, there is a predetermined outcome with a pre-set number of pieces 

and once all of the pieces are in place the puzzle is finished. Those who see 

assessment as a puzzle are in danger of making this questionable assumption. 

The reality is that there is no real end point in assessment and to believe 

otherwise risks the faulty assumption that assessment can be a “paint by 

numbers” game. That is, teachers may come to think that rather than 

assessment being a single score on one test it is simply a collection of scores 

on a number of different kinds of assessments.  The problem with this 

viewpoint is that is can cause teachers to tacitly see themselves as technicians 

whose task it is to assemble and record the results of assessments that have 

been designed by others. They may come to implicitly believe that though they 

use assessments from a wider variety of sources assessment is still ultimately 

about filling in blanks, just different kinds of blanks than in the past. The result 

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of this approach is that teacher creativity and professional judgement is left to 

atrophy. This enervation of teacher ability must be avoided because 

professional competence is a key element necessary for educators to refine the 

true art of teaching which is thought to be the source of joy and inspiration in 

teaching (Eisner, 1983). Thus, an assessment as puzzle of artifacts approach 

does not provide teachers with the opportunity to flourish as professionals.  

 A third shortcoming of the assessment as puzzle of artifacts metaphor is 

its falsely mechanistic nature. In this construct, assessments are conceived of 

as being discrete puzzle pieces that all add up to a final overall picture of the 

student’s ability when in reality the various assessments often blend together 

in numerous shifting configurations within the overall assessment scheme. For 

instance, the “assessment picture” of a particular student might be comprised 

of data about her decoding, fluency, and comprehension that has been 

collected through miscue analysis, timed reading, and a story retell. Taken at 

face value, it appears that these data are in fact discrete pieces of a puzzle that 

add up to a final result. In this way, the metaphor helps us appreciate all of the 

various data sources that can contribute to an evaluation of a student’s ability. 

However, it also blinds us to the fact that all of these data points are 

submerged in a largely invisible ocean of decision making that has gone into 

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the choice of which assessments to administer, when to administer them, what 

to do with the results and so forth. This continuous decision making process 

must be clearly understood because the value of the whole assessment 

process hinges upon informed and competent teacher decision making in light 

of the fact that “. . . teachers, themselves, are the most important assessment 

tool” (Valencia, 2002, p. 3). 

Reconsidering the Assessment Puzzle Metaphor  

 As noted above, the assessment as puzzle of artifacts metaphor has its 

limitations in terms of being somewhat static, presenting the false impression 

of an assessment end point, and being excessively mechanistic. While this 

metaphor presents student evaluation as being a mechanistic process of 

assembling predetermined assessment artifacts together, the reality appears 

to be a much more organic process. Instead of mechanical data collection and 

evaluation, the student and teacher exchange information through both a 

variety of assessment artifacts and, equally as important, the ongoing 

interaction of student behaviour and teacher observation that occurs during 

their time together. In this way, a great deal of assessment happens “off the 

books”. However, the assessment as puzzle metaphor focuses on the artifacts 

in the form of puzzle pieces while ignoring the fact that those artifacts are 

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suspended in an ocean of classroom interaction and teacher decision making. 

Therefore, a more suitable metaphor might be that the teacher acts like the 

brain of an organism (the class) by gathering information from the other 

organs (students) and deciding what needs to be done to ensure the optimal 

functioning of the individual organs and the organism as a whole. Of course, as 

with any organism, it does not function in a vacuum but rather in an 

ecosystem of other stakeholders who have their own explicit and implicit 

guidelines and expectations that provide another layer of feedback to and 

constraint upon the organism. In this analogy, assessment is comparable to the 

nervous system of the organism serving as a conduit of information from the 

“organs” to the “brain.”   

 This organic metaphor helps to foreground the holistic nature of 

assessment in a number of ways. First of all, it reminds us that, at its most 

fundamental level, assessment is about a relationship mediated by teacher and 

student prior conceptions, artifacts, observations and other actors in the 

immediate and wider environment. In many ways it is a communicative act 

but the puzzle metaphor obscures the relational dynamics between the 

teacher and student that are nested within an arrangement of other 

relationships among educational stakeholders. Secondly, the organism 

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metaphor also characterizes assessment as being less neat and tidy and more 

accurately portrays the complex and messy process as it occurs in real 

classroom environments. Lastly, this conception has the potential to create 

space for a crucial humanistic and affective component missing in many 

contemporary discussions of assessment (McKenna & Stahl, 2012). The 

organic metaphor accomplishes this by expanding our conception of what 

assessment entails which helps us to realize that assessment has many more 

aspects that we need to explicitly consider than we had previously thought. 

Re-imagining classroom assessment as organism rather than puzzle helps us 

to foreground the fact that assessment is not a static “paint by numbers” 

process with a pre-determined outcome. It requires problem-solving, 

engineering solutions, and creativity. 

 This organic metaphor calls for those who assess to be much more 

knowledgeable about how to assemble and create assessment tools that 

collect and record rich data from multiple sources on an ongoing basis (Hill, 

Campbell & Ruptic, 1994). They must also be able to accurately interpret that 

data and explain their interpretations to a variety of audiences. This ability 

demands an extensive educator professional knowledge base. The fact is that 

regardless of what metaphor we decide to use, be it puzzle or organism, 

14                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 



teachers need to be assessment literate. Otherwise we risk 

deprofessionalizing teachers by failing to provide them with sufficient 

education to make them knowledgeable about effective classroom assessment 

practice. Despite her reliance on the assessment puzzle metaphor, Valencia 

(2002) balances her discussion of the need for standardized tests with an 

emphasis on the value of classroom assessment based on teacher observation. 

She likewise acknowledges the importance of training teachers to collect rich 

assessment data and then trusting them as experts in classroom assessment. 

Farr (1992) agrees noting that authentic assessment is helpful (e. g., 

observations) if teachers are properly trained in procedures for how to do it.  

That is, teachers need additional training on using various informal 

assessments. 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

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Teacher Assessment Literacy 

 Coil and Merritt (2011) point out that “as educators, we also assess 

without measuring.” This kind of assessment is usually based more on teacher 

observations and interactions and “With these assessments, we often rely on 

anecdotal records or verbal descriptions as alternatives to specific numeric 

measurements” (p. 7). We also need to realize that, in actuality, we assess 

without measuring a lot more than we assess with measuring. This continuous 

observational assessment requires solid understanding of correct 

performance of a variety of academic tasks as well as how and when to give 

clear feedback that the student can use to improve future performance. A 

significant component of the switch from a puzzle to organism metaphor is an 

increased reliance of teacher assessment literacy. That is, teachers would be 

expected to be much more competent at collecting and keeping systematic and 

informative formal and informal data on their students and well as 

interpreting that data for various audiences and using results to improve 

future student performance. As Valencia (2002) notes, “teachers must be able 

to develop assessment strategies, gather evidence, analyze what they see, and 

ultimately, make instructional adjustments to respond to student needs. This 

is precisely why classroom assessment is so powerful” (p. 4). A clear and 

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useful conception of the assessment process coupled with strong assessment 

literacy will enable them to give the immediate and detailed feedback 

necessary to ensure improved student performance. In order to do this, they 

need knowledge of a wide variety of types of assessments as well as how to 

use them.  

 In addition to administering assessments, assessment literacy is also 

crucial to enable teachers to defend their students from improper use of 

assessments. For instance, in the case of English language teachers, a variety 

of problematic assessment practices have arisen such as use of inappropriate 

accommodations (Menken, 2008), frequent testing that impedes sufficient 

coverage of curriculum (Pandya, 2010) and even serious questions about the 

validity of the assessments themselves for English language learners (Almeida, 

2007). Therefore, the teachers who work with these populations of learners 

have to be sufficiently knowledgeable about these issues in order to protect 

their learners from inappropriate and potentially abusive testing practices. 

 Lastly, taking a somewhat wider perspective on the issue, another key 

reason for the need to promote assessment literacy is that all teachers need it. 

As Valencia (2002) points out,  

17                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 



.  .  .  as educators, we need to counter the illusion of a simple score 
and the almost exclusive confidence those outside education 
ascribe to standard assessments. On the other hand, we must 
learn to deal with multiple indicators (i.e. indicators from 
standard, classroom-based, and student self-assessment as well as 
multiple indicators within each type of assessment). Sometimes 
information from multiple sources will converge, providing a 
consistent evaluation of student performance; other times the 
information may be discrepant because of differences in 
assessment formats, the skills and strategies tested, or simply 
inconsistencies in student learning. But, it is important to value all 
the information and to remember that the more samples of 
student learning we collect, the more trustworthy and informative 
our results (p. 8). 

In other words, assessment is a very complex process and teachers need to be 

well prepared in order to be able to do it effectively. Consequently, a significant 

component of teacher preparation and professional development should be 

devoted to the development of teacher assessment literacy. This assessment 

literacy allows teachers to guide their instruction or defend their students 

speak from a position of strength when they join other stakeholders in 

assessment discussions in their own respective systems (Farr, 1992). 

Conclusion 

This essay presented the argument that scholars and practitioners need 

to update the metaphor of assessment as a puzzle and instead begin to think 

of it as analogous to the feedback processes that take place within an 

organism. Granted, the puzzle metaphor offered several benefits such as an 

18                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 



expanded conception of the assessment process which allows us to see the 

value in accumulating a variety of artifacts that serve as valid indicators of 

student ability.  However, it has also maintained somewhat of a static view in 

the sense that assessment generally continues to be seen as a collection or 

artifacts that overlooks the importance of the immense amount of ongoing “off 

the books” evaluation and decision making around these artifacts. The 

adoption of an organism within an ecosystem metaphor was proposed that 

sees the students as the body, the teacher as the brain and the assessment 

process as the nervous system. This metaphor helps educators to keep in mind 

the embedded, rich and continual nature of assessment. 

 Additionally, a switch to this “organic” lens may help policymakers 

understand that the larger purpose of assessment is not solely about 

collecting and evaluating artifacts but it is rather about making well informed 

and conscientious decisions that support the learning needs of students on a 

continual basis. This shift in perspective may also help them to more fully 

appreciate the complexity of effective assessment “for” and “of” learning and 

thus the need for ongoing professional development that supports teachers’ 

assessment literacy growth. Secondly, the organic metaphor of assessment has 

the potential to open up teachers’ imagination to tap into other previously 

19                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 



overlooked ways of assessment. For example, thinking of assessment as 

feedback within an organism nested in an ecosystem may enable teachers to 

more fully appreciate the richness and complexity of the assessment process 

and consequently the level of knowledge and assessment literacy they will 

need to have to ensure they can gather and interpret all of the rich formal and 

informal data necessary for fair and valid assessment of their students. Lastly, 

this lens may help teachers and administrators to more clearly convey the 

inevitable richness and complexity of valid and fair assessment to other 

stakeholders (e. g., parents and the public). This awareness will help 

stakeholders realize the insufficiency of a single standardized test score for 

evaluating a child’s ability as well the centrality of ongoing assessment and 

feedback to the activity of teaching and learning as well as maintaining an 

appropriate balance of use of the various assessment tools available to serve 

all of the relevant assessment purposes for the various audiences (Coil & 

Merritt, 2011). 

 As educators, we must remember that the metaphors we choose to think 

about the world shape the way we act in the world and the impact of our 

actions on others (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008). This is why it is important to give 

careful consideration to the images that we use to conceptualize the 

20                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 



assessment process. If we fail to periodically update our schema of the 

assessment process we may overlook or misunderstand new insights we have 

gained from research and practice that may stand to benefit our students 

greatly. 

Summary of Implications for Practice 

There are a number of clear implications of an organic view of assessment for 

teachers and teacher educators. Several of these are predicated on the idea that 

teachers need to engage in ongoing professional development to increase their 

assessment literacy.  

• Assuming an “organic” perspective helps us realize that assessment is not 

administering a set of artifacts but is rather cultivating an ability to observe 

and assimilate rich information about their learners that will help them to 

better differentiate instruction to meet all of their learners’ needs. 

• We can then move away from thinking of assessment as the simple 

collection and evaluation of an assortment of artifacts like cloze tests or 

portfolio materials and begin to think of it as a constant interactive process 

of observing learners and communicating with them about their 

performance. This perspective sees assessment as a frame of mind that 

21                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 



eschews following others’ recipes and encourages the exercise of greater 

professional autonomy. 

• Recognizing the importance of ongoing assessment and feedback is for 

learning, teachers must find ways to develop their powers of observation and 

keeping anecdotal records that help them to collect the rich qualitative data 

needed to provide the specific feedback required to ensure effective 

instruction. 

• Remember that as teachers and teacher educators we have to pay more 

careful attention to the metaphors that guide our thinking because these 

metaphors affect our actions and thus have real consequences for our 

learners. 

22                                                                      GATESOL in Action, Vol. 2, Fall 2014 



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