Transcript MINDS Mentoring in Delhi Schools

Evidence-based decision
making: ‘Micro’ issues
Rama Mathew
Delhi University, Delhi
Micro issues in evaluation
Evaluation in education functions at two levels:
• Macro level: decisions about pass/fail, attendance,
teacher-pupil ratio, mid-day meals, teacher
qualifications etc.
Product oriented, high-stakes, summative
• Micro level: how are students progressing in the
classroom? The kind of support needed based on
feedback
Process oriented, low stakes, formative
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Why we need to do FA
• FA supports and assists learning: it
provides feedback and correctives at
each stage in the teaching-learning
process
• FA can tell what students know and
can do, and can do with some
difficulty and therefore instruction can
be modified accordingly
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Who is involved in FA?
• The teacher and students
Because both are part of the teachinglearning process
• If students are to develop into lifelong,
independent, self-directed learners, and
take ownership of their learning, they need
to be included. This way they will be
motivated to learn.
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FA is assessment for learning
•
•
Assessment for learning (AfL)
Assessment of learning (AL)
• Monitoring learner progress is AfL
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What AfL is not
• More frequent summative assessments
• All testing a teacher does in the classroom
• Filling up forms on how ‘good’ each student is
on various dimensions
• Labelling certain students or excluding them
from future learning experiences
• A test. FA produces not a score but an insight
into student understanding
• Something that interferes with students’ learning
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What is learning?
• Learning occurs when students are ‘thinking, problem
solving, constructing, transforming, investigating,
creating, analyzing, making choices, organizing,
deciding, explaining, talking and communicating,
sharing, representing, predicting, interpreting, assessing,
reflecting, taking responsibility, exploring, asking,
answering, recording, gaining new knowledge, and
applying that new knowledge to new situations.’
Cameron, Tate, Macnaughton and Politano 1998, p.6)
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Definition of AfL
• Assessment for Learning is part of
everyday practice by students, teachers
and peers that seeks, reflects upon and
responds to information from dialogue,
demonstration and observation in ways
that enhance ongoing learning
(AfL experts, Dunedin New Zealand, 2009)
.
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Keeping Learning on Track (ETS 2010)
• The idea is of students and
teachers to use evidence ….to
adapt teaching and learning to
meet immediate learning needs
minute-by-minute and day-by-day
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Any assessment involves four
activities
1. Designing opportunities to
gather evidence
2. Collecting evidence
3. Interpreting it
4. Acting on interpretations
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Key strategies for doing AfL
• Sharing learning expectations (clarifying
intentions, and criteria for success)
• Questioning (to engineer effective classroom
discussions, questions that elicit evidence of
learning and making inferences from that
evidence)
• Feedback
• Self-and peer-assessment
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Processes involved in FA
Present
state of
learners’
ability
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self-/peer and
teacher assmnt
through
spontaneous and
planned obsrvn of
individual
students/pairs/
groups, asking
questions,
maintaining
records of how
students progress
from one activity
to another
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Action
taken by
teacher/
learner to
bridge the
gap
Assess
status
of goals
Set new
goals by
negotiating
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• Monitoring progress is researchbased teaching (Stenhouse
1975:141) and is the business of
the teacher.
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Challenges and issues
• Assessment reforms would have to
address all three components
simultaneously, i.e. teaching, learning and
assessment. A ‘vision’ of a wholecurriculum reform should be
conceptualised, concretised and
supported.
• Physical and infrastructural facilities
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Challenges and issues
• Need for orientation in pre-service and inservice teacher workshops to the
characteristics of FA and how it could be
translated into classroom processes
• Teachers need time and space to develop
a sense of ownership and to articulate and
critique their own implicit constructs and
interpretations.
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Future directions
• Case studies to be carried out that look
closely at what strategies teachers adopt
to monitor progress, students’ language
learning processes and the kind of finetuned support they need, especially lowachievers.
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Future directions
• There are very few research-based,
empirical accounts by teachers
themselves of how they monitor students’
progress in their classrooms; it is usually
the assessment expert who does
research.
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Can all learning be evidence
based?
• Not everything that can be
counted counts, and not
everything that counts can be
counted.
Albert Einstein
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References
• ‘Assessing ESL in South Asia’. In A. J. Kunnan (Ed.) The
Companion to Language Assessment, California: John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.,2014, DOI: 10.1002/9781118411360.
wbcla104.
• ‘Monitoring progress in the classroom’. In A. J. Kunnan
(Ed.) The Companion to Language Assessment,
California: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014, DOI:
10.1002/9781118411360.wbcla073 (Co-author M.
Poehner).
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Thank you
[email protected]
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