Expanding Notions of Assessment for Learning

Expanding Notions of Assessment for Learning

Inside Science and Technology Primary Classrooms

Bronwen CowieWilf Malcolm Institute of Educational ResearchFaculty of EducationUniversity of Waikato, NZ

Judy MorelandWilf Malcolm Institute of Educational ResearchFaculty of EducationUniversity of Waikato, NZ

Kathrin Otrel-CassDepartment for Learning and PhilosophyAalborg University, Denmark

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vCONTENTS

Acknowledgement xi

Preface xiii

Chapter 1: Our Aspirations 1Why a Focus on Assessment for Learning Interactions? 2The Promise 2The Challenges 4What this Book Seeks to Accomplish 5How this Book Tells Our Story 7

Chapter 2: Assessment for Learning Interactions: Setting Out Our Thinking 9Our Understanding of Assessment for Learning 9Taking a Sociocultural View to Assessment for Learning Interactions 11Teacher Repertoires of Assessment Practice Play a Role in Assessment for Learning Action 12Assessment for Learning is Dynamic and Distributed Over Ideas, People, Actions and Resources 13Dialogue and Scaffolding are Central to Assessment for Learning 14Assessment for Learning Needs to Occur on Multiple Temporal Levels Simultaneously 16Assessment for Learning is an Influence on Student Experience of Themselves as Learners 17Concluding Comments 19

Chapter 3: Elaborating Our Context 21The New Zealand Assessment Context 21Science and Technology Education in New Zealand 22The InSiTE Project 23Working in Partnership 23The InSiTE Students and Teachers 25Teachers Existing Ideas about Teaching Science and Technolgoy 26The InSiTE Units 27

Chapter 4: Strengthening Teacher Planning and Preparation 29Why a Focus on Planning and Preparation? 30The InSiTE SubjectSpecific Planning Frameworks 30The Technology Learning Intentions Planning Layer 31

CONTENTS

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The Science Learning Intentions Planning Layer 32Looking Across both Learning Intentions Layer 36The Second Teaching Outline Layer 36What was the Benefit of Careful Planning? 41The Planning Framework as a Mediational Tool in Our Community of Practice 41The Planning Framework as a Mediational Tool in Classroom Practice 45Concluding Comments 48

Chapter 5: Assessment for Learning Interactions as Multimodal 51Moving into the Multimodal Classroom 51Extended Example 1: Its a Kiwi 54Whole Lesson Comment 57Extended Example 2: Making Percussion Instruments 62Augmenting Talk and Writing with Modelling, Demonstrative Action and RolePlay 71Challenges in the Use of Multiple Modes 73Concluding Comments 74

Chapter 6: Material Artefacts as Scenarios and Resources for Ideas and Interaction 77Why a Focus on Material Artefacts? 77The Value of Concrete Examples: Interacting with Real Artefacts 78The Use of Real Artefacts in Science 78The Use of Real Artefacts in Technology 82TeacherDesigned Artefacts Augment Talk 86Artefacts to Activate and Problematise Student Knowledge and Experiences 88TeacherDesigned Artefacts to Introduce Ideas 91Challenges in the Use of Artefacts 93Concluding Comments 94

Chapter 7: Pursuing Learning as Coherent, Connected and Cumulative 97Why a Focus on Time? 97Planning for and Responding to Student Learning as Connected and Cumulative 99Talk to Develop Continuity, Connections and Coherence Over Time 102Success Criteria as Source and Means for Developing Continuity, Connections and Coherence Over Time 104Artefacts to Develop Continuity and Connection 106Responding to Student Learning Over Time 109Concluding Comments 111

CONTENTS

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Chapter 8: Fostering Student Learning Agency and Autonomy 113What is Involved with Student Learning Agency and Autonomy? 113Patterns of Participation for Learning as a Social and Shared Responsibility 116Routines and Frequently Used Task Structures Constructing Learning as a Social Process 116Recognising and Crediting Student Ideas and Suggestions 118Patterns Associated with Freedom to Move and Seek out Support and Resources 119The Distribution of Authority and Sources of Knowledge and Feedback 120Fading Scaffolding to Support Agency and to Share Authority 121Creating Opportunities to Experience and Understand how Quality is Judged 122Activating Peers and Others as Sources of Information and Feedback 126Seeding the Environment with Material Resources to Support Student Agency 131Fostering Student Affiliation with Science and Technology 133Attributing Value to Student out of School Experiences 134Attributing Students with the Identity of Scientist/Technologist 135Students Talking about Science and Technology 136Concluding Comments 137

Chapter 9: Concluding Thoughts 139Some Concluding Comments on Assessment for Learning in Practice 139Some Implications for Further Research 142Some Implications for Policy 145Affirming our Definition of Assessment for Learning 147

References 149Subject Index 159

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank our teachers and their students who were part of the Classroom Interactions in Science and Technology Education (InSiTE) project. This book would not have happened without them and we are grateful for their involvement, co-operation and contributions.

Our InSiTE project team consisted of the authors, Professor Alister Jones and four project officers. We especially recognize the support of Alister Jones of the Univer-sity of Waikato who was a Co-Director of the InSiTE project. We valued his assist-ance throughout the project, as well as his insightful contributions to our developing ideas around teaching, learning and assessment in primary science and technology education. We also appreciate the input from Christine Deeley, Marianne Robertson, Barbara Ryan and Paula Wine, who were our InSiTE project research officers at various times during the research.

We also acknowledge the contribution made by Donn Ratana of the University of Waikato. His beautiful book cover in black, white and ochre depicting various pat-terns in many spaces evocatively captures our idea that assessment for learning inter-actions are multifaceted, multimodal, and take place over multiple timescales.

We are appreciative of the backing we received from our University of Waikato colleagues in the Centre for Science and Technology Education Research (CSTER) and in the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research (WMIER). The lively debates we had around the ideas presented in this book kept us on our toes

We are indebted to The Teaching and Learning Research Initiative and the Minis-try of Education, New Zealand, for their financial support in the form of a three-year grant for the InSiTE research project.

Finally, we would like to thank our families for their backing and patience. Writing this book has taken a while.

xi

PREFACE

This book emerged from an ongoing interest by the authors in teaching and learning science and technology in Years 1 to 8 classrooms. The assessment for learning ideas evolved from our research in New Zealand classrooms over the past 15 years, and the Classroom Interactions in Science and Technology Education (InSiTE) project in particular. The InSiTE project was a three-year project funded by the New Zealand Government, as part of the Teaching Learning Research Initiative (TLRI). TLRI aims to enhance links between educational research and teaching practices to improve outcomes for learners. The InSiTE project had its origins in our earlier work in science and technology classrooms (Bell & Cowie, 2001; Cowie, 2000; Moreland, 2003), where we investigated formative assessment interactions and the role of teacher knowledge in these interactions. The InSiTE project aimed to examine more explicitly the development of teacher knowledge and practices for assessment for learning (AfL), the nature of AfL interactions, and student outcomes.

Many of the ideas for the book are drawn from the report written at the conclusion of the InSiTE project (Cowie, Moreland, Jones & Otrel-Cass, 2008). Throughout the project we developed ideas that have been published and we acknowledge these publications here. In particular, two papers, one focused on multimodal approaches to exploring and extending students science ideas (Cowie & Moreland, 2007), and the other focused on creating and maintaining connections and coherence in teaching and learning (Moreland & Cowie, 2007), were launching pads for our ideas and the subsequent refinement of our research direction.

In the book we focus on AfL inside the classroom where the priority was to help student learning. It is assessment that involves mutually interactive participation between teachers and students. Summative assessment is the term usually given to the kinds of assessments that sum up learning where a summary judgment is made about the learning achieved after some period of time. Summative assessments are not something to be ignored; however, they are not the focus of this book. Our focus is on developing understandings of how AfL interactions can contribute to classroom cultures for learning and also positively shape how students see themselves as learners and knowers.

Throughout the book, we meet the teachers and students who participated in the InSiTE project. They are: Jane and her New Entrant to Year 1 students; Lois and her New Entrant to Year 4 students; Ellie and Gail and their Year 3 and 4 students; Jenny and her Year 4 and 5 students; Brenda and Martha and their Year 5 and 6 students; Grant and his Year 5 to 8 students; Carol and her Year 7 students; and, Tayla and her Year 7 and 8 students. The schools they taught in were of mixed ethnicity, situated in rural and urban locations, ranged from small (36 students) to large (578 students), and were either full primary (Year 1 to 8), contributing (Year 1 to 6) or restricted composite (Year 7 to 10).

xii

For the three years of the InSiTE project, we observed, videoed, tape-recorded, made field notes, photographed, collected teacher and student work, and interviewed teachers and students both formally and informally. This meant that our data set was extensive. For the purposes of this book, and following a thorough analysis of the data set, we identified a range of telling examples (Mitchell, 1984) to ground and illustrate our discussion. These were selected to bring our ideas to life with the inten-tion of provoking reflection on the ideas at hand. Consequently, we make no claim that the classroom events we describe are necessarily typical of all classrooms; rather they provide insight regarding possibilities for AfL interactions within the classroom. They zoom in on episodes of five minutes or so, and zoom out to consider sequences of tasks and lessons to help make sense of the practice and impacts of AfL.

Nine chapters form the book. Each chapter seeks to highlight the theory- practice interface, pointing the way towards practical means of enhancing student and teacher participation and outcomes from AfL, whilst at the same time contributing to theoretical understandings. While we acknowledge the complex relationship the ideas across all the chapters have with each other what we endeavoured to do is to foreground different aspects across the chapters to better understand each aspect on its own as well as in combination.

In chapter 1 we set out our aspirations for our book. In chapter 2 we build on these and outline our understanding of AfL. Then in chapter 3 we describe in more detail the InSiTE study and the way we

worked with our teachers. Each chapter from chapter 4 to 8 begins with a snapshot of the relevant research

and the theme is then illustrated with examples from the InSiTE study. In chapter 4 we detail the ways the InSiTE teachers prepared for teaching and assessing science and technology to encompass the learning intentions currently understood as important for full participation in these subjects.

In chapters 5, 6 and 7 we make a case for, and illustrate, the multimodal, artefactual and temporal aspects of interactions that enable teachers and students to recognise and respond to the ideas and practices students are developing.

Chapter 8 describes AfL practices that contribute to student learning autonomy and agency in a manner consistent with the spirit of AfL.

In chapter 9 we set out our concluding comments and some broader implications for policy and research.

Our aim is to illustrate how students can be supported to take up AfL to enhance their participation in disciplinary practices (the what, how and why of a discipline) and their development as autonomous learners. We have not attempted to cover the field in depth, but focus on aspects of AfL that resonated with our InSiTE teach-ers. We present ideas that we considered interesting and hope that readers will find compelling.

PREFACE

1CHAPTER 1

OUR ASPIRATIONS

This book is about developing teacher and researcher understandings of, and ways to enhance, assessment for learning (AfL) interactions in science and technology classrooms. We illustrate that used wisely and with sensitivity to student needs, concerns and strengths, AfL interactions can contribute to classroom cultures for learning and also positively shape how students see themselves as learners and knowers. AfL interactions can promote profound learning experiences and contribute to student identities as competent people and learners. We often use the phrase assessment for learning interactions throughout this book. This is deliberate. We want to emphasise that AfL is embedded in and accomplished through particular kinds of teacherstudent and studentstudent classroom exchanges. These exchanges involve teachers and students noticing, recognising and responding to student learning, throughout the learning process, in ways that move learning forward.

Our book hinges on examples from real classrooms and so we begin with a conversation between Jenny and her Year 5 and 6 students. We use this snippet to illustrate that AfL interactions impact directly on what and how we learn, and can undermine or encourage effective learning: in this case we showcase an example encouraging learning. The extract is from the beginning of the first lesson in a series of science lessons investigating flight.

When Jennys 25 students were seated together on the mat, she asked them to Find a space, flap your arms up and down and fly for me. Go. All students [laughing] stood up and tried, but no one flew! Still chuckling they sat down again.

Jenny instructed: Put your hand up if you could fly. No hands were raised. Laughter subsided and all eyes were now concentrated on Jenny.

Jenny asked: Why couldnt you fly? Sheree replied: Because of our weight. Renata said: Cos our arms arent very fast. Chris suggested: Our shape and Kylee: Our gravity.

Jenny then asked the general question: So how does that [gravity] affect us? Kylee responded by elaborating on her own suggestion: It pulls us down. Jenny continued: So, how come planes can fly and theyre heavier than us? Kamo: Cos theyve got wings. Sashi: Its the shape of the wings. Maiko: Its the shape of the plane. The students were now entirely focused on Jenny and her next move.

In examining this excerpt we see that Jenny opened the lesson with the staging of a memorable event, Fly for me. This provoked a positive response from her students.

2CHAPTER 1

They were totally engaged in the activity, personally, emotionally and intellectually, realising that this opening event was a prelude to something interesting happening in their classroom. Jenny deftly captured her students attention and encouraged their active participation with her questions. She expected that they would openly share ideas, no matter their credibility. She provided students with feedback on their ideas and at the same time empowered them as learners with respect to their own learning. The learning opportunities set up for Jennys students relied on a classroom culture of mutual support, trust and valuing of shared meaning making. Students were prepared to share publicly their tentative ideas and build knowledge together. We view this sequence as an instance of AfL in action, illustrating the social nature of AfL, the way AfL is both shaped by, and shapes, opportunities to learn, and how Jenny and her students positioned themselves as agentic learners together.

Throughout this book we will use examples such as this to illustrate how AfL can constructively support student learning and students sense of themselves as capable and competent learners. By positioning AfL as embedded in and integral to the regular flow of classroom interaction, we acknowledge the crucial role classroom assessment plays in shaping student opportunities to learn and what it means to know and learn in a given setting. Classroom assessment shapes how students see themselves, how others see them, and the opportunities they have to learn. It influences their learning capacity and the kind of learner they become. We take the view that, ultimately, AfL is about learners having control over and developing the resources needed to take responsibility for and make informed decisions about their own learning. This view of AfL as the promotion of student learning autonomy is congruent with current aspira-tions that 21st century education support students to become lifelong learners who are able and willing to be active participants in a democratic society. Our book will, we hope, make a contribution to understanding how this might be achieved.

WHY A FOCUS ON ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING INTERACTIONS?

The Promise

Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (1998), on the basis of an extensive review of research, established that formative assessment methods and techniques produce significant learning gains. According to their analysis, these learning gains are among the largest ever identified for educational interventions. Moreover, a few of the reviewed studies indicated that the largest gains were for students who had previously been classified as low achievers, thus reducing inequity of student outcomes whilst raising overall achievement. Assessment is formative when:

evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited. (Black & Wiliam, 2009, p. 9)

3OUR ASPIRATIONS

Formative assessment involves feedback to students on their ideas and informs the differentiated teaching responses that are at the heart of effective teaching and learning.

Black and Wiliams conclusion that assessment for formative purposes can enhance the learning of all, and not just some, students, identified it as a high leverage practice for the wider and sustained promotion of learning as well as learning to learn. In drawing out implications for the policy and practice of formative assessment, they concluded:

There does not emerge, from this present review, any one optimum model on which policy might be based. What does emerge is a set of guiding principles, with the general caveat that the changes in classroom practice that are needed are central rather than marginal, and have to be incorporated by each teacher into his or her practice in his or her own way. . . . That is to say, reform in this dimension will inevitably take a long time and need continuing support from both practitioners and researchers. (p. 62)

Subsequently the potential for assessment to support learning has been a focus for research, policy and practice worldwide. The policy value currently accorded to formative assessment as assessment for learning is reflected in the 2005 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) endorsement of formative assessment as a powerful tool in learning and learning how to learn:

Teachers using formative assessment approaches guide students toward development of their own learning to learn skills that are increasingly necessary as knowledge is quickly outdated in the information society. (OECD, 2005, p. 22)

It is not often that the OECD expresses support for what seems to be a micro educational process such as formative assessment/assessment for learning. The OECD has recognised that AfL plays a role in the development and support of student lifelong learning capacity and therefore is a priority in 21st century curricula and society (Black, McCormick, James & Pedder, 2006; Rotherham & Willingham, 2009; Shepard, 2000; Stiggins, 2007). The demands of the knowledge society mean that all and not just some citizens need to be able to take an active part in a countrys social, economic and political life. Several OECD countries now promote formative assessment as a key strategy for meeting goals for quality and lifelong learning. From a policy point of view, it is this promise that AfL can enhance the learning and learning capacity of all students that is of critical importance.

In thinking about the implications of our orientation to AfL, we want to add a caveat. We acknowledge that while the teachers intention may be that their assessment practices foster learning, this may not always happen. In our view, by acknowledging the gap between intention and realisation, we allow for the complex-ity of the learning and teaching process and avoid placing full responsibility for the impact of assessment actions on the teacher. When the aim is to develop student autonomy and agency it is important to acknowledge that students have and pursue their own agendas. Students do not always understand or value their teachers goals

4CHAPTER 1

for their classroom learning. They may not understand and/or may misconstrue their teachers feedback. When we are concerned with developing student learning autonomy and agency, teaching, learning and assessing become a joint and shared responsibility: it is teachers and students together who need to create a classroom culture that focuses on fostering learning.

The Challenges

The notion that assessment can and should support learning resonates with teachers, but nevertheless its introduction and integration into classroom life has proved problematic. First, teachers can struggle with the knowledge demands of responding to a diversity of individual student needs and interests in ways that move student learning forward. Af L relies on teachers being able to develop and deploy a range of pedagogical strategies to elicit and advance student learning To respond productively, teachers need a deep and flexible understanding of the topic being studied, they need a detailed understanding of possible learning pathways, and they need to know how to bring this knowledge together to provide or coconstruct feedback for a particular student/group of students. In the case of science and technology, the disciplines that are the focus for this book, primary and elementary school teachers have expressed a lack of confidence in their knowledge and ability to plan for and meet the needs of their students in these subjects. And yet, the increasingly prominent roles science and technology are playing in our lives today, and will into the future, make the consideration of how to address the challenges of AfL in science and technology education particularly crucial. Adding complexity, Dylan Wiliam (2003) reminds us that teachers need both knowhow (craft knowledge, or technique) and knowwhy (knowledge of universal truths), with one in support of the other, if they are to imple-ment AfL in ways that support student learning and learning autonomy. Wiliam points out that knowwhy empowers a teacher to make implementation decisions that enhance, rather than detract, from the fundamental principle of AfL in fostering student learning agency. However exclusive attention to knowwhy does not meet teachers need for practical action in the classroom.

Second, teachers can struggle to enact AfL in ways that meet the goal of promoting student learning autonomy (James & Pedder, 2006). A number of scholars have emphasised that implementing AfL in ways that empower students and develop their learning autonomy relies on teacher understanding, and valuing this as the underly-ing imperative of AfL (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Black, et. al., 2006; Gardner, 2006; Thompson & Wiliam, 2008; Webb & Jones, 2009). AfL that moves beyond the implementation of recommended strategies requires careful attention to, and often the renegotiation of, teacher and student roles and responsibilities. This process is one some teachers find exciting while others find threatening (Black & Wiliam, 2006). In thinking about this we have found useful the distinction Bethan Marshall and Mary James Drummond (2006) make between teaching practice that meets with the spirit of AfL and practice that follows the letter of AfL. They identified

5OUR ASPIRATIONS

lessons that embodied the spirit of AfL as those characterised by a high organisation based on ideas. Teachers who enacted the spirit of AfL had a progressive or growth view of their students (Dweck, 2006) and a real sense of their own agency. They saw learning as a social activity and a joint teacherstudent responsibility. They were comfortable with sharing control of the learning with their students and were prepared to learn alongside them.

Third, teacher and student understandings and experience of assessment can limit their appreciation of the formative role assessment can play. Summative assessment has tended to dominate policy and practice, with a number of scholars providing evidence that external testing influences curriculum and assessment in the classroom with these influences being mostly detrimental (Nichols & Berliner, 2007). The general question of whether or not summative tasks can serve a formative role and vice versa is the subject of ongoing debate which, for our purposes, also serves to highlight that teachers are not completely free to change their assessment practicesthe school and wider societal and education policy context enables and constrains their practice (Stobart, 2008), all the more so at a time when external testing for accountability purposes is being used as a policy lever to drive school change and improvement. So too do students, who may need help to appreciate that assessment can be of benefit to them and their learning.

WHAT THIS BOOK SEEKS TO ACCOMPLISH

In this book we take up the challenge of contributing to practical and theoretical understandings of AfL. Across the chapters we address how assessment can con-structively shape learning and students identities as active and informed learners. One of our central arguments is that AfL is embedded in interactions that build on and from what students know and can do. We propose and illustrate the following:

Productive AfL is embedded in interactions that are multifaceted, multimodal and take place over multiple time scales.

Student learning autonomy is promoted when teachers deliberately provide opportunities for students to exercise agency within a system of accountabilities to people and the discipline.

Productive AfL interactions are shaped by and are reflective of the way a particular discipline generates and warrants knowledge.

Though these ideas are illustrated through interactions from science and technology lessons, we believe the ideas developed throughout this book are applicable to other subjects. However, as these points make clear, we do not subscribe to the view that teacher and/or student AfL practices can be disciplineindependent. Generic strategies provide a necessary but still insufficient framework for guiding teacher and student practices. While a range of strategies can be used to help students make their learning public, teachers suggesting and/or coconstructing ways forward with students requires a broad, deep and flexibly connected understanding of the

6CHAPTER 1

disciplinary landscape. Account needs to be taken of the way the subject domain of relevance is structured, the key concepts or big ideas associated with it, and the methods and processes that characterise practice in the field (James, 2006, p. 48). As Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (2006) noted, the learning and AfL demands of personal writing in English and learning about force in science are very different. In writing there is little by way of explicit subject matter to deliver and so feedback tends to focus on how each student might improve their writing. In science, there is a body of subject matter that teachers tend to regard as giving the subject unique and objectively defined aims (p. 85) and so feedback is more directly focused towards helping all students achieve the same conceptual goal. For students to take informed actions to progress their own learning over time and contexts they need to know what knowledge is important and how and why this knowledge is generated, legitimated, and communicated (James & Pedder, 2006). Relevant to this book, studies in science and technology have highlighted the social and material nature of knowledge development and legitimation, including the extent that knowledge in science and technology depends on the tools and resources that are available and the importance of collaboration and critique. We pay explicit attention to these aspects as something students should experience (Ford & Forman, 2006) in anticipation that this will help readers make informed use of our ideas in other disciplines.

At this point we also point out that this book is informed by a sociocultural view of what learning is and how it happens. All assessment is underpinned by a view of learning and the learner and in our case the idea that learning and any assessment of it are more than a cognitive rational matter resonated strongly with our own experience of classroom research, particularly when we focused in on students experiences (Cowie, 2000, 2005; Moreland, 2003; 2004). Throughout the book we take learning to be a situated, social and cultural process within which an individual constructs local meaning for what is important to learn, what it means to know and learn, and also, who they are and might become as a learner and knower. This sociocultural orientation is congruent with current research and theory in assessment that recognises that assessment shapes what we learn and how we learn, as well as how we see ourselves. Within this sociocultural perspective, learning is accomplished through interaction between learners, teachers and tools (routines and material and conceptual resources) in a particular setting. Assessment relationships between the teacher, the task and peers are recognised as impacting on a students sense of identity and learning capacity. In a practical sense, a sociocultural view allows us to look beyond the individual student and their teacher to consider more broadly how the classroom as a setting might enable (and constrain), opportunities for learning. It focuses us on student agency and resourcefulness they ways students take up and use the ideas, tools, artefacts and people in their environment to understand and progress their own and each others learning (Carr, 2008; Newfield, Andrew, Stein & Maungedzo, 2003). In our case, adopting a sociocultural stance helped us to make the familiar strange when considering how and why assessment could support learning as part of everyday classroom life.

7OUR ASPIRATIONS

HOW THIS BOOK TELLS OUR STORY

There are ten chapters in the book. Each chapter addresses AfL theory and practice. The chapters are set out in a cumulative sequence, although the chapters also standalone. So while there is a sense of the development of ideas over the whole book, each chapter foregrounds and focuses on a particular aspect of AfL. To help familiarise the reader with how our book tells our story we next provide a fuller outline of each chapter.

This first chapter has laid out our aspirations for our book including the potential benefits and challenges of AfL.

In chapter 2 we outline in more depth and detail our understanding of AfL. We set out our working definition of AfL, detail our understanding of the key elements of AfL, elaborate on what sociocultural views of learning have to offer, and highlight that it is the spirit of AfL that matters and matters to us.

Then in chapter 3 we describe the InSiTE study and the ways we worked with our teachers. We outline the New Zealand assessment context and science and technology education in New Zealand. We introduce our students and teachers.

Each chapter from 4 to 8 sets out the AfL ideas that resonated with us, our teach-ers and students in the InSiTE science and technology classrooms. Relevant research is presented and actual examples from classrooms are used to illustrate our ideas.

In chapter 4 we describe the ways the InSiTE teachers planned and prepared for their teaching and assessment of primary science and technology and we focus on how we used a subjectspecific planning framework to strengthen teacher planning and preparation for teaching science and technology. We also report teacher percep-tions of the impact of using the planner on their confidence and ability to create and capitalise on teachable moments as part of AfL in their classrooms.

In chapter 5 we make a case for, and illustrate, multimodal interactions as integral to the learning and expression of science and technology ideas and practices. This chapter focuses on our argument that AfL interactions need to be cognisant of more than merely talk; that AfL interactions are multimodal and that for AfL interactions to be optimally engaging and responsive, they need to be planned for and engaged in as such. We show that multimodal AfL broadens students opportunities to represent their ideas in a way that facilitates student agency, accommodates difference and supports the development of creativity and critical thinking.

In chapter 6 we direct our attention to the implications of the material dimension of science and technology and explore further the affordances of the material dimension of teaching and learning. We show that when selected, designed and intro-duced with science and technology learning in mind, material artefacts can afford and subsequently become embedded in social knowledgemaking processes. They can form part of the meaning systems teachers and students develop and use and , conse-quently, play a role in supporting AfL. Artefacts can anchor, bridge, mediate and coordinate activities across settings and time, leading to a sense of continuity. Longerterm processes and shorterterm events can be linked through material artefacts.

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In chapter 7 our specific aim is to show how the time teachers and students spend together can be constructed and used as a resource within and for AfL in science and technology. We illustrate some of the positive ways our teachers used time as a resource to help students appreciate the overtime and over space and contexts dimensions of learning thus experiencing learning as cumulative, connected and coherent. This is important in science and technology because, typically, there is a main idea or task that is multifaceted and takes time to accomplish.

Chapter 8 describes AfL practices that contribute to student learning autonomy and agency in a manner consistent with the spirit of AfL. We show how the InSiTE teachers cultivated a classroom community that focused on and fostered student learning and learning autonomy through patterns of participation that construed learning as a social practice and shared responsibility, through the distribution of authority and agency, and by encouraging and supporting student affiliation with subject disciplines.

In chapter 9, our final chapter, we provide some concluding thoughts about AfL in practice and consider implications related to research and policy.

The ideas presented in our book are intended to support teachers in their everyday work in their classrooms. The book is written for primary teachers and educational researchers who want to examine AfL from a theoretical and a practical perspective. We think that the AfL interactions we examine will help teachers understand the what, how and why of AfL. Nevertheless, we do not claim to have all the answers; rather we present AfL as a messy business, both conceptually and practically. We see AfL as a workinprogress, but one worth pursuing because of the considerable benefits it promises.

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ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING INTERACTIONS : SETTING OUT OUR THINKING

Before we meet the InSiTE teachers and students, we want to deepen our discussion about AfL. We begin by setting out our working definition of AfL and then we detail our understanding of the key elements of AfL as it plays out as part of classroom practice. Next, we elaborate on what sociocultural views of learning have to offer in terms of observing, understanding and developing classroom practice. We highlight that AfL cannot simply be added to a teachers pedagogical repertoire, and though this is not a new argument, this point serves to foreground that AfL is more than a technical activityit is the spirit of AfL that is important and important to us.

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING

It is important to be clear about our meaning for and understandings of the elements of effective AfL. The definition of AfL that we begin with builds on our earlier work (Bell & Cowie, 2001; Cowie & Bell, 1999; Moreland, 2003) and incorporates recent thinking in the field (Black & Wiliam, 2009; Crooks, 2011; RuizPrimo, 2011; Wiliam, 2011). It is as follows:

Assessment for learning encompasses those everyday classroom practices through which teachers, peers and learners seek/notice, recognise and respond to student learning, throughout the learning, in ways that aim to enhance student learning and student learning capacity and autonomy.

This definition reflects our view that AfL is integral to teaching and learning. It makes clear that AfL is a process, and not a task, and that this process is centred on teachers and students using information on students learning to, in Royce Sadlers (1989) terms, close the gap between students current level of performance and a desired level of performance (see also Black & Wiliam, 2009; Shepard, 2009; Wiliam & Thompson, 2007). Sadler offered the following questions as explicating this process: Where is the learner going? Where is the learner right now? How can the learner get there? (see also Atkin, Black & Coffey, 2001). Consideration of where a learner is going requires clarification of the intended learning goals and of what will count as the evidence and the success criteria that demonstrate these goals have been achieved. Where a learner is now involves the generation and interpretation of evidence about the impact of teaching tasks and what students do, and do not know and what they can and cannot do and why. The final question relates to actions that might be taken to move learning forward.

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Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson (2007) explicated the implications of the processes embedded in Sadlers questions by crossing them with the people who might take action (teacher, peer, learner). They developed five key strategies as central to teacher and student use of evidence to adapt and guide teaching and learning: clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success; engineering effective classroom discussions, questions, and tasks that elicit evidence of learning; providing feedback that moves learners forward; activating students as instructional resources for one another; and, activating students as the owners of their own learning. These strategies capture the essence of AfL, positioning it as an interac-tive and responsive process which teachers and students engage in together to guide and scaffold learning. Wiliam and Thompsons classroom work indicated these strate-gies could be instantiated through a variety of techniques. Indeed, the techniques teachers used varied substantially from class to class, topic to topic, and teacher to teacher, as teachers customised their AfL practices to meet the needs of their students, the particular subject matter, and their own teaching style. This suggests the strategies strike a useful balance between providing a solid basis for informed action and space for teachers to take advantage of local opportunities. In various forms the strategies appear throughout the illustrative examples in this book.

The definition set out above explicitly construes AfL as a process that contributes to student learning in the present, and to their ability to meet their own learning needs into the future (Boud, 2000). It makes clear that we are concerned with developing students learning autonomy and capacity. What is less explicit in the definition as it stands is our understanding of what is to be learned: What goals ought learners be pursuing, and what is it that teachers, peers and learners need to notice, recognise and respond to for learning to progress? The answer to these questions depends on what it is considered important to learn and how we think learning occurs. We are interested in supporting students to develop subject specific expertise where this includes their knowing about and appreciating what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is generated and legitimated in science/technology. We are interested in students developing an interest in and affiliation with these subjects in both the short term and longer term (Kelly, Luke & Green, 2008) and so we add a statement to the original definition to better reflect our understanding of AfL as having a discipline specific aspect:

Assessment for learning encompasses those everyday classroom practices through which teachers, peers and learners seek/notice, recognise and respond to student learning, throughout the learning, in ways that aim to enhance student learning and student learning capacity and autonomy. Assessment for learning also needs to reflect, be responsive to, and build on from how particular disciplines generate and legitimize meaning.

Throughout the book we provide examples to illustrate our definition. We show teach-ers using AfL to help students develop their learning capabilities and autonomy as well as examples of teachers using AfL to help students learn science and technology.

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TAKING A SOCIOCULTURAL VIEW TO ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING INTERACTIONS

In this book we join with others in turning to sociocultural theories of learning to describe and explain the dynamics of assessment in classrooms (e.g. Black & Wiliam, 2006; Elwood, 2006; James, 2006; Moss, Pullin, Gee, Haertel & Young, 2008; Pryor & Crossouard, 2008; Stobart, 2008; Willis, 2011). The shift to value AfL may be traced to a shift towards more constructivist views of learning (Gipps, 1999; Shepard, 2000). In this view students are positioned as active meaning makers building new understandings on the basis of their prior knowledge and experience. It is not possible to assume a direct link between teaching and learning and so teachers need to monitor the sense students are making during, and not just at the end, of an activity. However, a sole focus on individual student conceptual change has proved to have a variable and somewhat limited impact. John Pryor and Harry Torrance (1996) persuasively illustrate that a purely conceptual focus underplays the complexity of classrooms because it overlooks social and cultural aspects of learning.

From within a sociocultural perspective learning, its motivations, expression and development, are understood as mediated by the social, material, temporal, historical and cultural setting in which it is taking place (Wertsch, 1991). The implication of this is that learning and any evidence of learning cannot be separated from the setting where the learning is occurring. Just as importantly learning, from a sociocultural perspective involves the transformation of identity: learning involves becoming more proficient in the valued activities of a community (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Thus, learning science/technology involves students in developing an appreciation of how scientists and technologists see, value and act to generate, authenticate and use knowledge. As James Gee (2008) explains:

Any actual domain of knowledge, academic or not, is first and foremost a set of activities (special ways of acting and interacting so as to produce and use knowledge) and experiences (special ways of seeing, valuing, and being in the world). Physicists do physics. They talk physics. And when they are being physicists, they see and value the world in a different way than do non physicists. (p. 200, italics in the original)

A sociocultural orientation to assessment therefore directs attention to the interac-tion between teachers, students and tasks in a particular setting as these evolve over time. Classroom assessment practices are understood as playing an important role in shaping individual and collective understandings about what it is important to learn, what learning is and who learners are (Haertel, Moss, Pullin & Gee, 2008, p. 9). This stance requires us to consider carefully what opportunities and resources students have to learn and demonstrate their learning for them to be considered successful.

We have found that a sociocultural orientation to AfL view offers a range of ideas and fresh insights into the implications and formative potential of commonplace

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classroom activities. For the purposes of our analysis in this book, we focus on several of these as offering ways forward for the practice of AfL interactions:

Teacher repertoires of assessment practice play a role in AfL action; AfL is dynamic and distributed over ideas, people, actions and resources; Dialogue and scaffolding are central to AfL; AfL needs to occur on multiple temporal levels simultaneously; and AfL is an influence on student experience of themselves as learners.

Following, we elaborate on these ideas.

Teacher Repertoires of Assessment Practice Play a Role in Assessment for Learning Action

Our definition of AfL relies on teachers accessing and responding to information about student learning. Being able to ask the right questions at the right time, and have at the ready a rich repertoire of tasks and strategies that will help students identify and take the next steps in their learning journey, requires knowledge of subject matter, the understandings particular students hold, and, the types of tasks likely to motivate and engage them in reviewing and revising their ideas/practices. Knowledge of the ideas, experiences and preferences students are likely to bring to a particular learning outcome and the likely pathway of progression in student learning of that outcome is also important (Heritage, 2010; Wilson, 2009). In this book we use Lee Shulmans (1987) notion of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to encap-sulate these demands on teachers. Shulman describes PCK as the blending of content knowledge with pedagogical knowledge. It encompasses knowledge of how to teach specific disciplinary ideas and skills to particular students, both individually and in groups. Shulman explains the intellectual shift involved for teachers in the development of PCK as follows:

from being able to comprehend subject matter for themselves to becoming able to elucidate subject matter in new ways, reorganise and partition it, clothe it in activities and emotions, in metaphors and exercises, and in examples and demonstrations, so that it can be grasped by students (p. 13). They need to select appropriate analogies, examples, demonstrations, simulations, and the like to build a bridge between the teachers comprehension and that desired for the students. (p. 16)

This definition resonates with Sadlers (1989) description of formative assessment as requiring the exercise and development of connoisseurship, by teachers and also by students. PCK is not a fixed and static body of knowledge; rather teachers need to deploy and/or build it on the fly if they are to respond productively in the moment. PCK is not inthehead knowledge but rather a complex set of interactions involv-ing action, and analysis and affect (Shulman, 2003, cited in Boaler, 2003, p. 12). Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (2009) provide a useful description of this dynamic

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when they explain, it is clear that formative assessment is concerned with the creation of, and capitalization upon, moments of contingency in instruction for the purpose of the regulation of learning processes (p. 10). It is this combination of creating and capitalising on moments for interaction around ideas that is required for teachers to realise the full promise of AfL.

Across a number of studies, Judy Moreland and her colleagues found that teacher PCK, as the repertories of understanding and practice teachers had, could constrain and or enable their AfL practices (Jones & Moreland, 2004, 2005; Moreland & Cowie, 2009; Moreland, Cowie & Jones, 2007). PCK was not however a fixed or static quality. To respond productively in the moment teachers often needed to build and deploy it spontaneously. Working with their primary technology teachers, Alister Jones and Judy Moreland found teacher PCK could be enhanced by the use of a plan-ning framework. The planner helped the teachers articulate and develop the content knowledge and the PCK they needed to design instructional tasks that would engage students in learning activities that were, as directly as possible, instantiations of their goals for student learning (see also Shepard, 2006). With a clearer understanding of what they wanted their students to learn, the teachers were better able to access and build upon student thinking in ways that developed it from nave to more sophisti-cated. With this preparation they were better able to make sense of, guide and respond to student learning (Jones & Moreland, 2003).

In chapter 4 we examine the use of a twopart planning framework to develop teachers PCK in more detail. During the InSiTE project we observed the difference a teachers command of transforming subject matter makes in promoting student learning. Teachers perceptions on the impact of using a subjectspecific planning framework and gaining more from teachable moments as part of AfL interactions in their classrooms are reported.

Assessment for Learning is Dynamic and Distributed Over Ideas, People, Actions and Resources

For teachers and researchers working within a sociocultural stance the challenge is one of fostering productive interactions among learners and the learning environment when the learner and the environment are considered to be mutually influential, constitutive and evolving (Elwood, 2006). Caroline Gipps (1999) confirms that a dynamic and distributed view of assessment is congruent with a sociocultural view of learning:

Put most simply, the requirement is to assess process as well as product; the conception must be dynamic rather than static (Lunt, 1994), and attention must be paid to the social and cultural context of both learning and assessment. (p. 375)

Through this description Gipps acknowledges that learning, its motivation, development and expression are shaped, framed and resourced by the teacher student tasksetting relationships and interactions and points out that assessment needs to take these into account.

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Classroom studies have identified that in practice teacher AfL ranges along a continuum of planned and more formal to contingent, opportunistic and more informal teacher interactions and actions. Based on their classroom observations and discussions with teachers, Bronwen Cowie and Beverley Bell (1999) distinguish between planned and interactive (formative) assessment. The teachers used planned tasks to generate information on the classs learning in relation to what they had planned for their students to learn. Interactive assessment happened as part of learning activities and usually involved teachers interacting with individuals or small groups of students about what they were doing/thinking at the particular time. In this case, AfL was embedded in everyday classroom interactions and the distinction between teaching, assessment and learning blurred. Any and all activities had the potential to provide information that a teacher, or a student, could use to guide decisionmaking about the next steps for teaching and learning. Throughout the chapters we describe and illustrate the dynamics of AfL interactions as a meld of planned and contingent teacher actions.

David Perkins (1993) coined the phrase personplus as a way of keeping connected all the variables associated with the complexity of this view of learning as distributed. He argues that it is the person and the surround (the immediate physical and social resources outside the person) that constitutes the unit of analysis, explaining his idea with an example of a learner as a student plus a book of carefully organised and detailed notes. The implication of this is that we need to consider what students can do with scaffolding and support from others rather than by themselves. How students take up and make use of resources in their environment is also of interest (McGinnis, 2005). Indeed, the way that students identify, take up and use the resources in their environment provides a meaningful way of accessing what students know and can do through their exercise of agency and learning autonomy (Carr, 2008; Newfield, Andrew, Stein & Maungedzo, 2003). This means we need to consider carefully how the learning environment is resourced with knowledgeable people, material and conceptual tools, norms and routines, and evolving information about learning (Moss, 2006, p. 366) because this shapes and frames students opportunities to learn and to demonstrate what they are learning.

These ideas are illustrated and play out through chapters 5 to 8.

Dialogue and Scaffolding are Central to Assessment for Learning

Feedback is often described as central to AfL. A sociocultural perspective enables teachers to regard feedback as more than a strategy, instead regarding it as a practice that is embodied within the social practices and culture of the classroom. Within this view feedback involves more than the gifting of information from the teacher to students (Askew & Lodge, 2000), instead it is a dialogic process within which teachers and students learn about and from each other. The notion that teachers might respond in different ways with different students at different times with the aim of enhancing student learning in the moment is central to this understanding of feedback. Feedback suggestions focus on the learning process rather than just the

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final product because they aim to help students understand and guide their own learning progress over time. They focus on helping students making sense of criteria. Because learning involves identity work feedback as dialogue also invokes learners identification and affiliation with learning and being a particular sort of (science or technology) person (Pryor & Crossouard, 2008).

Feedback as dialogue is iterative in that it affords students with multiple opportu-nities to learn and demonstrate learning (TrauthNare & Buck, 2011). While onetoone discussion is valuable, whole class and group discussion can be used as opportunities for teachers and for students to develop shared understandings and negotiate next steps. Next steps and ways forward can be negotiated both between teachers and students and amongst students. Peers are an important source of timely feedback. Often peers have a deep knowledge of student prior ideas and experiences and the contexts that are providing the ground for the emergence of student current ideas and actions. Peers can provide suggestions to fellow students in language that is familiar and understandable. Dialogue around studentproduced artefacts can be an important and relevant source of feedback and insight, especially when teachers encourage students to examine, compare and contrast student work.

Lorrie Shepard (2005, 2006) points out that the complete cycle of AfL can be seen to be broadly synonymous with scaffolding (see also Harlen, 2006). Scaffolding involves the provision of support and guidance by an expert other to help a person achieve what they could not alone (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976). Important to us, scaffolding encompasses the notions of contingency and fading, whereby the knowledgeable other gradually withdraws their support as the learner gains in confidence and competency making space for the learner to take charge of their own learning (van de Pol, Volman & Beishuizen, 2010). Thus, scaffolding is a form of feedback that supports the gradual transfer of responsibility to the student. Feedback as scaffolding provides students with information about their learning and learning potential in a way that opens up opportunities for them to take better informed actions to progress their learning, which then enhances learning autonomy.

Roy Pea (2004) reminds us that scaffolding has both a social and a material or technological aspect. Social scaffolding encompasses support for collaboration and the collective development of ideas. Material scaffolds feature the use of technology or designed artefacts, which contribute to achieving an activitys purpose. Haim Eshach, Yair Zeiderman and Yael Arbel (2011) note that for young children scaffolding also has an affective aspect. It needs to support student commitment to and confidence in their learning and learning progress. Sadhana Puntambekar and Janet Kolodner (2005) found that supporting the learning of diverse students required teachers to provide multiple forms of scaffolding over a number of occasions. Building on this, Iris Tabak (2004) presented the idea of synergistic scaffolds as a form of distributed scaffolding. According to Tabak, synergistic scaffolds are different supports that augment each other; they interact and work in concert to guide a single performance of a task or goal (p. 318) thereby increasing the chances a student will get the support they need.

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In chapters 5 and 6 we illustrate some of the dialogue, feedback and scaffolding we observed in the InSiTE classrooms. The extended examples in chapter 5 of Lois and kiwi and Tayla and percussion instruments provide evocative holistic accounts of AfL in action. Briefer examples are also used in both chapters to exemplify specific points.

Assessment for Learning Needs to Occur on Multiple Temporal Levels Simultaneously

Sociocultural approaches emphasise it is important to consider the development over time of the unique social relationships and cultures that characterise any particular classroom community and individual student learning pathway. Thus, there is a need to look across the scales of time (Lemke, 2001a). Neil Mercer (2008) reminds us: The process of teaching and learning in school has a natural longterm trajectory and cannot be understood only as a series of discrete educational events (p. 33). What this means is that while questions about what students are learning and where they might go next need to be asked for the short term and for the current activity, teachers also need to take into account the cumulative impacts of student classroom experiences and the overarching and longerterm goals for student learning. When we are intent on developing students as lifelong learners we need to ask these questions while students are participating in practices that have meaning to them in both the present and in the possible future.

The need to focus on learning over multiple time scales finds parallels in a number of assessment studies (see for example Pryor & Crossouard, 2010; RuizPrimo & Furtak, 2006; Wiliam & Black, 1996). In theory there is no limit on the length of a particular adaptive AfL process cycleit can be accomplished within and across tasks, lessons, units and topics. It can usefully range in duration from minutes to days, weeks and the school year, depending on the teachers focus (Cowie, 2000; Leahy, Lyon, Thompson & Wiliam, 2005; Wiliam, 2006). Short cycle assessments are important if teachers and students are to build from where teaching and learning is at in the moment in a way that takes advantage of the social, material, relational and motivational resources in the immediate setting. While teacher formative assess-ment action in the moment is usually directed towards the task or learning outcome at hand, this action is usually framed within, and gains meaning and import from, teacher longerterm learning goals for students (Moss, 2008; RuizPrimo, 2011). Drawing on a study of Madeleine Lamperts mathematics teaching, Pamela Moss (2008) provides a succinct explanation of how teacher AfL, as a futurefocused activity, can take advantage of the present at the same time as it builds on the past:

Attention to evidence was routinely situated in the ongoing interaction of which it was a part, cumulative in the sense of drawing on other available evidence (fitting this piece of evidence in her evolving understanding of student learning), and anticipatory in the sense of considering how her next move was likely to affect students learning. (Moss, 2008, pp. 251252, italics in the original)

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In this quote Moss recognises that teachers sustained contact and interaction with students can be used to an advantage because they can accumulate evidence of student responses over time and across different contexts. When this happens their feedback responses can build more fully on student ideas, interests and preferences for interaction. For the purposes of this book, we have adopted Madeleine Lamperts (2001) metaphor of a camera lens to zoom in on episodes of five minutes or so, and zoom out to consider sequences of tasks and lessons to consider how AfL supports, or not, student experience of learning as coherent and cumulative.

In chapter 7 we show how the InSiTE teachers used time as a resource within and for AfL in science and technology. Again we use telling examples to show how teachers helped their students experience their learning as cumulative, connected and coherent through teachers using talk, success criteria and artefacts.

Assessment for Learning is an Influence on Student Experience of Themselves as Learners

Terry Crooks (1988) was amongst the first to alert us to the substantial and wideranging impacts of everyday classroom assessment practices. He summed up the multiple impacts of classroom assessment as follows:

Classroom evaluation affects students in many different ways. For instance, it guides their judgement of what is important to learn, affects their motivation and selfperceptions of competence, structures their approaches to and timing of personal study (e.g. spaced practice), consolidates learning, and affects the development of enduring learning strategies and skills. It appears to be one of the most potent forces influencing education. (Crooks, 1988, p. 467)

In this very early analysis Crooks highlights that classroom assessment influences what it means to learn and know in a particular subject, exerting a powerful influence on student perceptions of the nature of important curriculum knowledge. At the same time, it structures students perceptions and experiences of themselves as capable, or not, learners and knowers in that curriculum area. As Crooks points out, this influence endures through the way it shapes student motivation and approaches to learning. What a sociocultural view adds is a more direct focus on the extent to which learning and what it means to be a learner is locally defined, a product of the relationship and interactions between the teacher, the learner(s) and the task at hand (Elwood, 2006). Writing from a sociocultural stance, Caroline Gipps (1999) explains how it is that everyday classroom assessment practices play a defining role in student identity formation.

Because of the public nature of much questioning and feedback, and the power dynamic in the teacherstudent relationship, assessment plays a key role in identity formation. The language of assessment and evaluation is one of the defining elements through which young persons form their identity, for school purposes at least. The role of assessment as a social process has to be

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acknowledged in this sphere: Identity is socially bestowed, socially sustained, and socially transformed. (Berger, 1963, in Gipps, 1999, p. 80)

In this commentary the social and public nature of classroom assessment is highlighted and linked to its power in bestowing, sustaining and transforming student identities as learners in the classroom setting. Gordon Stobart evocatively sums up this far reaching consequence of assessment as follows: Assessment does not objectively measure what is already there, but rather creates and shapes what is measuredit is capable of making up people (Stobart, 2008, p. 1). The students interviewed by Bronwen Cowie (2005) recognised the role that classroom assess-ment played in shaping their sense of themselves as successful learners and in shaping how others saw them (see also Reay & Wiliam, 1999). All this suggests that not only does AfL need to be insightfully tied to improvement but teachers also need to consider the social meaning of assessment and the learning identities it invokes, accepts, respects or is compatible with (Archer, et. al., 2010; Lemke, 2001b). Jill Wills (2011) in her study of affiliation, autonomy and AfL found that, students needed to be able to recognise that the learning had meaning for them, and could be part of their trajectory of identity (p. 411).

A sociocultural view of learning emphasizes that what it means to be successful and to be seen as successful are context dependent. It recognizes that particular ways of acting, interacting and valuing are permitted and valued differently in different classrooms (Gee, 2004). How teachers and students are able to negotiate participa-tion within the cultural expectations of the classroom and collaboratively build identities of expertise is central (Pryor & Crossouard, 2008). Assessment underpins and contributes to a classroom culture for learning and the opportunities students have to exercise autonomy and agency. When it is effective, learning autonomy includes the capacity and inclination to monitor, plan for and take action on ones own learning progress. However, learning autonomy is not solely an individual capacity. In the classroom, assessment is central to the discourse of power that constructs what counts as knowledge, who can have and legitimate knowledge and what resources students can access (Munns & Woodward, 2006; Torrance & Pryor, 2001). As James Gee (2008) reminds, for students to exercise agency they need to have access to the opportunities and resources to do so. The agency of individual students works within, through and against (Shanahan, 2009) the routines that are established and become taken for granted in a classroom.

Given our interest in science and technology classrooms, we are concerned with what contemporary research tells us about what it means to be a scientist and a technologist. Recent studies in science and in technology have highlighted the situated social nature of knowledge generation in these disciplines, the role that con-temporary questions and problems play in framing questions worthy of investigation, and also the extent to which current technologies (in the widest sensecompare a telescope with the proposed distributed radio telescope) enable and constrain the meaningmaking process (Lemke, 2001b). What these studies bring to light is that knowledge generation in science and technology is distributed across the resources

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in the setting: people, tools and ideas. As well, science and technology communities have agreed ways of working as part of the knowledge generation and authentication processes. Gregory Kelly, Allan Luke and Judith Green (2008, p. ix) explain:

Learning disciplinary knowledge entails more than acquiring basic skills or bits of received knowledge. It also involves developing identity and affiliation, critical epistemic stance, and dispositions as learners participate in the discourse and actions of a collective social field. From this perspective, knowledge is not held in archives and texts, but is constructed through ways of speaking, writing, and acting. Thus, knowledge is continually tested, contested, and reconstructed through the emerging genres of academic knowledge in education.

Current curricula in science and technology education recognise the conceptual, epistemic and social aspects of science and technology as legitimate and important goals (de Vries, 2005; Duschl, 2008). Students not only need to learn the what (concepts) of science and technology but also they need to learn how to do the learning in that subjecthow to think, question, search for evidence, accept evidence, and put evidence together to make an argument that is acceptable in that discipline (Haggis, 2006, p. 532). In our view the integration of these aspects contributes to students ability to judge and guide their own learning in a manner congruent with AfL that develops student disciplinary learning and learning auton-omy and capacity. These ideas are embedded throughout chapters 5 to 7 and pursued in more depth in chapter 8.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS

AfL requires that teachers marry principles, strategies, and techniques with domain understandings and practices integrated into a classroom culture focused on learning. For teachers and students this will more than likely require that they think afresh about the purposes of assessment, and about their roles and responsibilities in teach-ing, learning and assessment (Hargreaves, 2004). Teachers need to believe and act in ways that suggest that all, and not only some, of their students want to and can learn (Black & Wiliam, 1998). Students need to feel safe to take risks, to explore their ideas and to make mistakes (Cowie, 2005; OECD, 2005). They need to feel safe to disclose what is on the edges of their understanding to make their ideas public and discussable. All this relies on a classroom culture where relationships are based on mutual trust and respect between and among students and teachers. Responsibility for learning and authority over what counts as legitimate knowledge needs to be shared between teachers and students (Greeno, 2006). It is in this type of setting that students, and teachers are likely to want to, and be able to, access the resources and feedback they need to help them develop new understandings of content and of themselves as learners and knowledge holders.

When thinking about the challenges to AfL, we also need to be mindful that is not a standalone construct. It is one component within the wider system of educational assessment in operation in any school and country. The policy and wider societal

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contexts impact on what happens in schools and classrooms, and subsequently on how AfL is conceptualised and practised. Despite these challenges, AfL is worth pursuing because of the potential benefits for both teachers and students. In the next chapter we introduce the New Zealand context, the InSiTE teachers and their students, and we explain how we worked together to understand and enhance the teachers AfL practices, especially in science and technology.

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ELABORATING OUR CONTEXT

In this chapter we outline the New Zealand assessment context as well as science and technology education in New Zealand in order to elaborate the context of the book. We also present the InSiTE project through detailing the research aims and the ways we worked in partnership with our teachers. Finally we introduce our students and teachers.

THE NEW ZEALAND ASSESSMENT CONTEXT

In New Zealand the formative function of classroom assessment has been a priority since the late 1980s (Department of Education, 1989; Ministry of Education, 1994, 1999, 2007). Schoolbased professional development programmes have supported this priority since 1995. These programmes have been offered throughout the country, usually involving two years of professional development support at each participating school (Crooks, 2011). Teachers also have access to a range of New Zealand developed assessment tools including Assessment Resource Bank tasks, the AsTTLe (assessment tools for teaching and learning) resource, and government published exemplars that focus on curriculum and formative assessment principles. Current curriculum and associated policy statements (Hipkins 2010; Ministry of Education, 2007) continue to reiterate that the primary purpose of assessment is to improve students learning and teachers teaching. The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) states that:

assessment for the purpose of improving student learning is best understood as an ongoing process that arises out of the interaction between teaching and learning. It involves the focused and timely gathering, analysis, interpretation, and use of information that can provide evidence of student progress. Much of the evidence is of the moment. Analysis and interpretation often takes place in the mind of the teacher, who then uses the insights gained to shape their actions as they continue to work with their students. (p. 39)

Thus, the responsibility for recognising the value of particular learning is located firmly in the hands of the teachers who are in facetoface relationships with their students (Crooks, 2002). In practice teachers and schools employ a range of assessment formats (McGee, et. al., 2003) for summative, formative and reporting purposes, some of which are of their own design. Typically New Zealand primary teachers report to parents two or three times a year through a combination of facetoface interviews and written reports that can include individual student portfolios and schooldeveloped report templates.

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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION IN NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand has had a national curriculum since the 1880s. At the time of the InSiTE project, our teachers were working with the Science in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1993) and the Technology in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1995) documents. Both documents set out learning outcomes for students for the school years 1 to 13; students begin school at age five years and must attend school until they are 16 years old. The Science in the New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1993) set out four contextual strands, viz. Making Sense of the Living World, Making Sense of the Material World, Making Sense of the Physical World and Making Sense of Planet Earth and Beyond, and two integrating strands, viz. Developing Scientific Skills and Attitudes and Making Sense of the Nature of Science and its Relationship to Technology. The document emphasised that student learning should be undertaken in context and included suggested learning and assessment activities. The preamble to this docu-ment signalled the need for curriculum implementation processes to prepare stu-dents as future citizens who would need a working knowledge of science to participate as active and responsible citizens (science for all) and to meet the needs of those who might become scientists or use science in their careers (science for future scientists). The philosophical framework of the science curriculum was underpinned by a constructivist view of learning.

Technology in New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1995) set out three strands, viz. Technology and Society, Technological Knowledge and Techno-logical Capability. The focus was on how people use technology to expand their possibilities, to intervene in the world through the development of products, systems and environments. The aim was for students to develop a broad technological literacy including developing models, products and systems in a variety of technological areas such as structural, materials, information and communications, control, biotechnology and food. Technological learning outcomes encompass conceptual, procedural, technical and societal aspects, reflecting the multidimensional nature of technological activity. The documents preamble signalled the need to develop school programmes that would enable and empower students with the knowhow to make informed choices about technology and to become informed members of a technological society (technology for all) as well as to meet the needs of those who might become technical and technological innovators contributing to New Zealands social and economic development.

In considering how these documents set the foundation for teaching, learning and assessment it can seen that they emphasise both content and process the what and how of knowledge as well as according value to students linking what they learn to action in their lives beyond school. Since the time of our InSiTE data generation the New Zealand curriculum has been rewritten and now all learning areas are contained in one single document, The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). This document includes a stronger emphasis on student appreciation of the nature of science and technology and on the competencies needed

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to be confident connected life long learners. It is an expectation that teachers will do their own planning and prepare their own resources for teaching, with these tasks often undertaken by teams of teachers.

THE InSiTE PROJECT

This book is founded on the InSiTE project, a threeyear research study of primary teacher and student classroom interactions in the subjects of science and technology. The focus of the research was on teachers and students in Year 1 to 8 classrooms and their AfL practices. The research involved working with teachers and students to investigate and identify:

Ideas that teachers perceive as important for student learning in science and technology;

Teacher pedagogical content knowledge and the ways it was embodied in teacherstudent AfL interactions;

Interactions around science and technology ideas, the factors that afforded and constrained interactions, and the implications for what it means to know, do and understand science and technology;

Student and teacher perspectives of interactions; Temporal aspects of teaching and learning science and technology for students

and teachers; and Perceptions of the nature of science and technology and what it means to learn

and know science and technology in primary classrooms in New Zealand.

These themes framed the overall direction of the study and informed our data generation, analysis, reporting and dissemination processes.

Working in Partnership

Our teachers were very committed to the learning of all of their students. They joined the project because they believed science and technology were valuable learning areas, they were interested in enhancing their teaching of science and technology, and they wanted their students to have worthwhile learning experiences in these subjects. They were willing to learn from us and from each other. One of the aims of the InSiTE project was to engage with teachers as active participants in all aspects of the research process. This was to gain a better understanding of and to enhance teacher AfL interactions. The study was structured as a series of cycles of classroom teaching interspersed with teacher and researcher meetings. Classroom work allowed the team to test ideas and reflect on their impact on AfL interactions and student learning. Meetings allowed for collaborative planning of teaching, collaborative interpretation of data and discussion of theory.

As part of their commitment to the project, the teachers taught a science and a technology unit each year. In preparation for the teaching, the researchers and teachers met to jointly plan and develop the teaching programme. During the teaching

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two researchers were present in the classroom, each focusing on a different aspect of what was happening. One researcher followed the teacher, while the other monitored a particular student or group of students. Classroom observation data was generated in the form of researcher field notes, video recordings, digital photographs, teacher and student work, and conversations with students and teachers. Before a lesson the teachers often highlighted to the researchers ideas or activities they thought might be worthy of particular attention. After each lesson in postlesson interviews they would alert us to conversations or activities they considered particularly interesting, adding yet another perspective. We also shared observations that seemed significant to us. Our joint interpretations and reflections contributed to the development of a shared understanding of what had been observed.

Alongside the classroom observations and teacherresearcher pre and post lesson conversations, six teacher and researcher reflective meeting days were held in each of the three years of the study. The spread of meetings, and the repeat opportu-nities to get together, allowed for the introduction, testing, refinement and extension of ideas by everyone. As researchers we presented our analysis of the emerging findings as a focus for discussion at the meetings. The teachers shared and discussed student work samples and their own planning. These meetings were taperecorded and any materials generated in the meetings were collected as data. The meetings allowed us to develop and extend our shared understanding of events, to propose and test out explanations and ideas and to refine the research and teaching focus in light of evidence. Through this collaborative process we were able to tease out more fully the multimodal and temporal aspects of the AfL interactions. The teachers were keen to share insights gained from their involvement in the research and some of them presented their experiences and research findings at conferences and to their school staff. Teachers received very positive feedback from their peers, some of whom have subsequently adopted some of the practices the teachers described, thereby high-lighting the role research teachers can play in the dissemination of research findings.

The research approach we adopted when working with teachers was one of negotiated intervention (Jones & Simon, 1991). The process of negotiated intervention takes into account teachers existing beliefs and practices, and focuses on negotiating with teachers the ways in which their practice might be developed to become more effective. The research team introduced new ideas as and when they were needed. They were also generated through teacherresearcher ongoing reflection of classroom practices. Key factors of negotiated intervention include an appreciation of individual needs, suggestions and ideas appropriate to those needs, and reflection on and evaluation of the development process. The process allows for renegotiation of further development in the light of progress. Throughout this process, teacher and researcher conversations allow for the development of a language grounded in a common repertoire of examples and a shared understanding of the goals of the research project as they are evolving. Over the course of the project, we came to conceptualise our joint involvement as a partnership in which

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ELABORATING OUR CONTEXT

teachers acted in support of the research process and researchers acted in support of the teaching and learning process. As researchers we were intent on both informing practice and generating new knowledge. While the teachers participated in the analysis of the data, in the refinement of the research direction, and in the writing up and presentation of research findings to peers, they were clear that their main goal was to enhance their practice. Acknowledging different but complementary roles, expertise and purposes within the collaborative process was an effective way of meeting the needs and expectations of both teachers and researchers (Ancess, Barnett & Allen, 2007).

THE InSiTE STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

New Zealand schools are given a socioeconomic rating with 1 being the lowest rating and 10 the highest. The schools involved in the InSiTE project had socioeconomic ratings ranging from 1 to 9, a comprehensive range, with only the highest rating (10) not included. The schools were also reflective of the different types of primary schools in New Zealand. Primary school years in New Zealand range from Year 1 to Year 8. In our study we had two schools catering for students from Year 1 to Year 6, three with students from Year 1 to Year 8 and one school with students from Year 7 to Year 10. Both rural and urban schools were part of our mix. School rolls ranged from small (36 students) to large by New Zealand standards (579 students). The ethnicity of the students varied from school to school and included Pakeha (New Zealand European), M ori (the indigenous people of New Zealand), Pasifika and Asian students. All the students we were involved with in the project over the three years were a delight to work with. Though we constantly indicated to them that they did not have to be involved, no students withdrew themselves from the project. From 5 year olds to 12 year olds, they wanted to talk to us and to show us their work. They were always willing to explain what they were doing and why. In some instances the students reprimanded us for not talking to them for long enough. They particularly enjoyed being interviewed outside the classroom. They revelled in the undivided attention of two adults recording their every word and taking photographs of the work they were discussing. We were enthusiastically invited to school performances, class outings and class lunches. We accepted all invitations willingly. The students were fascinated with what we were doing especially with the equipment we used. They loved seeing themselves on video and in photographs and enjoyed listening to themselves on tape. We could not have gathered the wealth of data without the cooperation of the students and we take this opportunity to especially thank them.

Twelve teachers from six schools participated in the InSiTE research, although two, Gerald and Donna, withdrew at the end of the first year. Our teachers had a range of years of teaching and taught a variety of year levels. Table 3.1 shows the number of years our teachers had taught when they joined the project and the year levels they taught while on the project.

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Table 3.1. Years of teaching and year level taught

Name Years of teaching Year level

Jane 17 New Entrant1