Posts Tagged ‘Assessment’

Providing Feedback that Moves Learning on

Interesting that through his research Wiliam has found that students respond more positively to feedback when comments are given rather than grades or grades and comments.

Teacher praise is far more effective if it is infrequent, credible,contingent, specific and genuine (Brophy, 1981).

“…feedback is rather like the scene in the rear view mirror rather than through the windshield.” Feedback functions formatively only if the information fed back to the learner is used by the learner in improving performance.

Comparison with sports coaching is illuminating and something I relate strongly with. Feedback on the “how” is important.

“The secret of effective feedback is that saying what’s wrong isn’t enough; to be effective, feedback must provide a recipe for future action.”

“The skill of being able to break down a long learning journey – from where the student is rit now to where she needs to be – into a series of small steps takes years for even the most capable coaches to develop.”

Alfie Kohn (1994): “Never grade students while they are still learning”. As soon as students get a grade the learning stops.

“We need classroom assessment systems that are designed primarily to support learning and deal in data that are recorded at a level that is useful for teachers, students, and parents in determining where students are in their learning. Such fine-scale evidence can always be aggregated for summative reporting. It is not possible to go the other way: from aggregate reports of achievement to learning needs.”

“Feedback should cause thinking.”
…don’t provide feedback unless you allow time, in class, to work on using the feedback to improve their work.
… Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor.

Needs to cause thinking rather than an emotional response.
Should relate to learning goals that have been shared with the students .
Should increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning.

Formative Assessment, Dylan Wiliam : Eliciting Evidence ofLearners’ Achievement

Every teacher has had the experience of writing the same thing on fifteen or twenty students’ notebooks because the students were allowed to leave the classroom before the teacher discovered that the students hasfailedtounderstand some crucial point.

…teachers work in groups to devise questions to find out whether their teaching has been successful. …questions that give us this window into students’ thinking are hardto generate, and teacher collaboration will help to build a stock of good questions.

Questions
Mainly managerial
A third required only recall
Only 8% required students to analyse, make inferences or to generalise
Less than 10% of questions caused any new learning
Addressing this seems like an obvious way to improve student learning.

Formative Assessment

Teaching and Learning
Two extremes-
Teacher working harder than the students
Teacher as ‘facilitator’
Ideal teaching- the engineering of the learning environment
Sometimes a teacher does her best work before students come into the class.

The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students.the key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learns, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.

Teaching is a contingent activity. We cannot predict what students will learn as a result of any particular sequence of instruction. Formative assessment involves getting the best possible evidence about what students have learned and then using this information to decide what to do next.

Strategy 1
Clarifying, Shaeing, and Understanding Learning Intentions and Success Criteria

Royce Sadler (1989) wrote:
The indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is continuously able to monitor the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point.

Rubrics cab be useful in this process.
“It is often valuable to develop the learning intentions jointly with the students – a process that is sometimes called “co-construction”. It is important to note that developing learning intentions or success criteria with students is most definitely not a democratic process. The teacher is in a privileged position with respect to the subject being taught and knows more about the subject than the students do, and it would be an abdication of the teacher’s responsibilities to let whatever the students feel should be valued be adopted as the learning intentions. The advantage of developing the learning intentions with the students is that doing so creates a mechanism whereby students can discuss and come to own the learning intentions and success criteria, making it more likely that they will be able to apply the learning intentions and success criteria in the context of their own work.”

As teachers, we are not interested in our students’ ability to do what we have taught them to do. We are only interested in their ability to apply their newly acquired knowledge to a similar but different context.

…good teaching is extraordinarily difficult. It is relatively easy to think up cool stuff for students to do in the classrooms, but the problem with such an activity-based approach is that too often, it is not clear what the students are going to learn. It is also relatively easy, on the other hand, to approach students directly about what you want them to learn, but this often results in unimaginative teaching.
Teaching is hard, because as Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2000) have pointed out, it has. To be designed backwards.

In designing rubrics consider:
1. Task-specific versus generic scoring rubrics
2. Product-focused versus process-focused criteria
3. Official versus student-friendly language

Using students work from previous years
Getting students to design questions for tests
Marking student work and then providing students with a copy of 3 works at a good standard, and asking them to identify what makes them good
Teacher highlighting some good examples in the class and getting students to identify what features make it good
Choose-swap-choose
Student chooses examples of. Their best work eg the best handwritten ‘d’s, then swaps and neighbours also chooses, justifying differences.