Assessment for learning: putting it into practice

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Assessment for learningputting it into practice

• Spotlight presentation
• SETTThe Scottish Learning Festival Transforming
  Professional Practice
• Glasgow, UK September 2005
• Dylan WiliamEducational Testing Service,
  Princeton, NJ, USA

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Increasing achievement is a priority

• Individual benefits
• Higher lifetime salary
• Longer life
• Societal benefits
• Higher GDP
• Lower healthcare costs
• Lower criminal justice costs

3
Wheres the solution?

• Structure
• New kinds of management
• Large schools
• Small schools
• Alignment
• Curriculum reform
• Prescriptive teaching schemes
• Technology
• Governance
• New kinds of organization
• Vouchers
• Public-private partnerships

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Its the classroom

• Variability at the classroom level is up to 4
  times greater than at school level
• Its not class size
• Its not the between-class grouping strategy
• Its not the within-class grouping strategy
• Its the teacher

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Teacher quality

• A labour force issue with 2 solutions
• Replace existing teachers with better ones
• No evidence that there are better teachers out
  there
• No evidence that more pay brings in better
  teachers
• Improve quality of existing teachers
• The love the one youre with strategy
• It can be done
• We know how to do it, but
• At scale? Quickly? Sustainably? Affordably?

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What changes do we need ?

• From assessment of learning to assessment for
  learning
• From long feedback cycles to short feedback
  cycles
• From quality control to quality assurance
• From teaching to learning
• From regulating activity to regulating learning

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Classroom assessment

• Five key strategies
• Engineering effective classroom discussions
• Providing feedback that moves learners forward
• Sharing learning intentions and success criteria
  with learners
• Activating students as owners of their own
  learning
• Activating students as learning resources for one
  another
• One big idea
• Using evidence about learning to meet student
  needs

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Engineering effective classroom discussions

• Key idea questioning should
• cause thinking
• provide data that informs teaching
• Improving teacher questioning
• generating questions with colleagues
• closed v open
• low-order v high-order
• appropriate wait-time
• Getting away from I-R-E
• basketball rather than serial table-tennis
• No hands up (except to ask a question)
• class polls to review current attitudes towards
  an issue
• Hot Seat questioning
• All-student response systems
• ABCD cards, Mini white-boards, Exit passes

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Questioning in science diagnosis

• The ball sitting on the table is not moving. It
  is not moving because
• A) no forces are pushing or pulling on the ball.
  
  
• B) gravity is pulling down, but the table is in
  the way.
• C) the table pushes up with the same force that
  gravity pulls down
• D) gravity is holding it onto the table.
• E) there is a force inside the ball keeping it
  from rolling off the table

Wilson Draney, 2004
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Questioning in English diagnosis

• Which of these is a good thesis statement?
• A) There are 9 violent incidents on TV per hour
• B) There is a lot of violence on TV
• C) The amount of violence on TV should be reduced
• D) Some programs are more violent than others
• E) Violence is included in programs to boost
  ratings

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Questioning in History diagnosis

• Why are historians concerned with bias when
  analyzing sources?
• A) People can never be trusted to tell the truth
• B) People deliberately leave out important
  details
• C) People are only able to provide meaningful
  information if they experienced an event
  firsthand
• D) People interpret the same event in different
  ways, according to their experience
• E) People are unaware of the motivations for
  their actions
• F) People get confused about sequences of events

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Providing feedback that moves learners forward

• Key idea feedback should
• cause thinking
• provide guidance on how to improve
• Comment-only grading
• Focused grading
• Explicit reference to success criteria
• Suggestions on how to improve
• Not giving complete solutions
• Re-timing assessment
• (eg two-thirds-of-the-way-through-a-unit test)

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Sharing learning intentions and success criteria

• Explaining learning intentions at start of
  lesson/unit
• Learning intentions
• Success criteria
• Intentions/criteria in students language
• Posters of key words to talk about learning
• eg describe, explain, evaluate
• Planning/writing frames
• Annotated examples of different standards to
  flesh out assessment criteria (e.g. lab
  reports)
• Opportunities for students to design their own
  tests

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Activating students as owners of their
learningActivating students as learning
resources for each other

• Students assessing their own/peers work
• with scoring guides
• post-it notes
• with exemplars
• two stars and a wish
• Training students to pose questions/Identifying
  group weaknesses
• Self-assessment of understanding
• Traffic lights
• Red/green discs
• Party cups
• End-of-lesson students review

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The big idea keeping learning on track

• Teaching as engineering effective learning
  environments
• Effective learning environments
• Create high student engagement
• Keep learning on track
• Proactively
• Interactively

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Teacher learning

• Teacher professional development must be
• Consistent with what we know about adult
  learning, incorporating
• choice
• respect for prior experience
• recognition of varied learning styles and
  motivation
• Sustained
• Contextualized
• Consistent with research on expertise

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Expertise
1 Experts excel mainly in their own domain 2
Experts often develop automaticity for the
repetitive operations that are needed to
accomplish their goals 3 Experts are more
sensitive to the task demands and social
situation when solving problems. 4 Experts are
more opportunistic and flexible in their teaching
than novices 5 Experts represent problems in
qualitatively different ways than novices. 6
Experts have fast and accurate pattern
recognition capabilities. Novices cannot always
make sense of what they experience. 7 Experts
perceive meaningful patterns in the domain in
which they are experienced. 8 Experts begin to
solve problems slower, but bring richer and more
personal sources of information to bear on the
problem that they are trying to solve.
Berliner, 1994
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Countdown
3
25
1
4
9
Target number 127
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Klein Klein (1981)
Six video extracts of a person delivering
cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) 5 of the
video extracts are students1 of the video
extracts is an expert Videos shown to three
groups Students, experts, instructors Success
rate in identifying expert Experts 90 Students
50 Instructors 30
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Chess (Newell Simon, 1973)
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The synergy

• Content assessment for learning
• Process teacher learning communities
• Components of a model
• Initial workshops
• Support for TLC leaders
• Monthly TLC meetings
• Peer observations
• Drip-feed resources
• Web-site
• Writings
• New ideas