Online Workshop

An Introduction to

Formative Assessment

For Secondary School Teachers

Who will find this workshop useful? • Teachers• Syndicates / departments• AtoL facilitators

How to use this workshop: • To update, review, and reflect on formative assessment practice for secondary schools

syndicates / departments. • As a focus for professional development in formative assessment for secondary schools.• To support AtoL in-depth programmes in schools.

Thinking about assessment

Click here to complete a quick assessment quiz – no ‘right’ answers, but plenty of food for thought!

What is assessment?

• Assessment in education is the process of gathering, interpreting, recording and using information about pupils’ responses to an educational task.

Harlen, Gipps, Broadfoot, Nuttal (1992)

Assessment

• Helps us distinguish between teaching and learning.

• The focus must be on the quality of feedback and feed-forward rather than the quantity of information gathered by the teacher.

Formative and summative assessment

• Assessment is primarily concerned with providing teachers and/or students feedback information.

• It is not the instrument that is formative or summative, it is the timing of the interpretation and thus the distinction between them is not that helpful.

John Hattie, University of Auckland (1999)

• Formative assessment takes place during the course of teaching and is used essentially to feed back into the teaching and learning process.

• Formative and summative assessment are interactive. They seldom stand alone in construction or effect.

Gipps, McCallum & Hargreaves (2000)

Formative and summative assessment, cont

• The vast majority of genuine formative assessment is informal, where feedback and response is interactive and timely.

• It is widely and empirically argued that formative assessment has the greatest impact on learning and achievement.

Formative and summative assessment, cont

Lessons from research

In 1998 Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam of Kings College London published the findings of their wide-reaching analysis of research into classroom-based assessment in the document: “Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment”

To download a full-text copy, go to:

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/education/publications/blackbox.html

For a summary of the paper and a professional reading activity click here.

Research indicates that improving learning through assessment depends of five,

deceptively simple, key factors:

1. The provision of effective feedback to the students.

2. The active involvement of students in their own learning.

3. Adjusting teaching to take account of the results of assessment.

4. A recognition of the profound influence assessment has on the motivation and self esteem of the students, both of which are crucial influences in learning.

5. The need for students to be able to assess themselves and understand how to improve.

In action this means:

• Sharing learning goals with students.

• Involving students in self assessment.

• Providing feedback which leads to students recognising and taking the next steps.

• Being confident that every student can improve.

Self-evaluation, 1

How well do you…– Share learning goals with students?

– Involve students in self assessment?

– Provide timely focused feedback?

Do you have confidence that every student in your classes can improve?

Think now about some of the things that prevent us from assessing in a formative manner.

Rate yourself from:

5 I do this consistently well

to:

0 I don’t do this at all

Inhibiting factors include:

• A tendency for teachers to assess quantity and presentation of work rather than quality of learning.

• Greater attention given to marking and grading, much of it tending to lower self esteem of students, rather than providing advice for improvement.

• A strong emphasis on comparing students with each other, which demoralises the less successful learners.

Self-evaluation, 2

Where would you place your assessment practice on the following continuum?

The main focus is on:

Quantity of work/Presentation

Marking/Grading

Comparing students

Quality of Learning

Advice for improvement

Identifying individual progress

The most powerful moderator that enhances achievement is feedback

• The simplest prescription for improving education must be “dollops of feedback”

….providing information about what a student does and does not understand, and what direction the student must take to improve.

Hattie (1999)

In summary

• Clarifying learning outcomes at the planning stage.

• Sharing learning outcomes at the beginning of the lesson.

• Involving student self assessment with the learning outcomes.

• Focusing oral and written feedback around the learning outcomes.

• Organising individual goal setting so that student achievement is based on what they already can do as well as aiming for the next level.

• Use of rich questions that both challenge and guide the next learning steps.

Practice drawn from the research base tends to consist of the following:

What makes it difficult?

Traps for formative assessment in secondary schools

• Believing that assessment is designed to ‘trick’ or ‘trap’ students and so find out what they don’t know.

• Not knowing our curriculum documents and the difference between achievement objectives and learning outcomes.

• Lack of understanding of the principles and theory of assessment makes it difficult to decide what and how to assess.

• Assessing behaviour rather than quality of work.

• Confusing student self assessment with evaluation of the student or of the teacher’s unit of work.

• Assuming students will understand how to self assess without teaching them.

Hawk and Hill (2001)

Components of effective formative assessment

Plan, in detail, for all assessment

Focus on formative assessment

Share the learning outcomes and assessment expectations with students

Use clearly defined criteria

Use examples and exemplars

Give specific feedback and feed forward

Incorporate student self assessment

Students keep a record of their progress

Teachers keep records of student progress.

Adapted from the IPDER ABeL model (2001)

This concludes the online workshop,

An Introduction to Formative Assessment For Secondary School Teachers

For a theoretical perspective on assessment, continue through the next six slides.

For an assessment reference list click here or go to slide 27.

A Theoretical Perspective on Assessment

Some food for thought!

Convergent and divergent models

Torrance and Pryor (1998) suggest a framework of convergent and divergent models for formative assessment.

Convergent assessment aims to discover whether the learner knows, understands or can do a pre-determined thing.

Divergent assessment aims to discover what the learner knows, understands or can do.

List the assessment methods used in your department/ classroom.

The two approaches

The methods of assessment will vary according to whether the teacher sees the task as convergent or divergent.

Convergent•Tick-lists, can-do statements•Closed questions•Focus on contrasting errors with correct responses

•Judgmental, quantitative evaluation

•Student as a recipient of assessments

•Precise planning and an intention to stick to it

Divergent

•Open recordings, narratives•Open-ended questions•Focus on miscues which give insights into the learner’s understanding

•Student as an initiator and recipient of assessment

•Flexible or complex planning, with alternatives

•Descriptive rather than judgmental evaluation

Match your methods with this list – which are convergent, which divergent?

Identifying the differences

Convergent assessment might be seen less as formative assessment than as repeated summative assessment, or continuous assessment.

Divergent assessment correlates more closely to contemporary theories of learning, and accommodates the complexity of formative assessment.

What they represent

• A behaviourist view of learning.

• An intention to teach or assess the next pre-determined thing in a linear progression.

• A view of assessment as accomplished by the teacher.

• A constructivist view of learning.

• A non-linear development.

• A view of assessment as accomplished jointly by the teacher and the student.

Convergent assessment represents:

Divergent assessment represents:

Torrance and Pryor suggest approaching some assessment tasks in a convergent manner, but also argue that appreciating the two assessment modes and moving from one to the other in a principled way, will enhance the formative impact of classroom assessment.

How does this mesh with your view of learning?

Torrance and Pryor (1998)

Assessment references

Abbott, J. (1999, January). Battery hens or free range chickens: What kind of education for what kind of world? Journal of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, 1–12.

Black, P. J., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5 (1), 7–74.

Clarke, S. (2001). Unlocking formative assessment: Practical strategies for enhancing pupils’ learning in the primary classroom. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Clarke, S., Timperley, H., & Hattie, J. (2003). Unlocking formative assessment: Practical strategies for enhancing pupils’ learning in the primary and intermediate classroom (New Zealand ed.). Auckland: Hodder Moa Beckett.

Gipps, C., McCallum, B., & Hargreaves, E. (2000). What makes a good primary school teacher? London: Routledge Falmer.

more…

Assessment references, cont.

Green, J. M. (1998, February). Constructing the way forward for all students. A speech delivered at “Innovations for Effective Schools” OECD/New Zealand joint follow-up conference, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Harlen, W. (1998) Classroom assessment: A dimension of purposes and procedures. In K. Carr (Ed.), SAMEpapers (pp. 75–87). Hamilton, New Zealand: Centre for Science, Mathematics and Technology Educational Research, University of Waikato.

Harlen, W., Gipps, C., Broadfoot, P. & Nuttall, D. (1994) Assessment and the improvement of education. Chapter 34 in Moon, B. & Mayes, A.S. Teaching and Learning in the Secondary School. London: Routledge / The Open University

Hattie, J. (1999, August). Influences on student learning. Inaugural lecture: Professor of Education, University of Auckland.more…

Assessment references, cont.

Hawk, K. & Hill, J. (2001) The Challenge of Formative Assessment in Secondary Classrooms SPANZ Journal, September 2001.

Sadler, R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18, 119–44.

Torrance, H., & Pryor, J. (1998). Investigating formative assessment: Teaching and learning in the classroom. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Tunstall, P., & Gipps, C. (1996). Teacher feedback to young children in formative assessment: A typology. British Educational Research Journal, 22 (4).