Transcript Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in

Working Inside the Black
Box:
Assessment for Learning in the
Classroom
Paul Black, Christine Harrison, Clare Lee, Bethan Marshall, & Dylan Williams
Strong Points!
• Assessment should support learning and personal
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improvement
Questioning should allow thought rather than right
answers in matters of content
Self/peer assessment can improve a student’s “guild
knowledge”
Students should assess their own progress toward the
outcome at various stages throughout the process
Concepts/qualities must be learned before moving on to
next step
Strong Points 2
• Learning should be scaffolded but not so tightly
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that it limits learning
Feedback (without a numerical grade) fosters
the idea that students can succeed
Focus of the classroom environment should be
“How am I allowing students to learn?”
Thinking should be made public: we are
teaching students, not content
Questions
• How is anecdotal feedback possible when
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teachers are constantly rushed to produce
grades (mid-term, parent/teacher, finals)?
When the new report card format is in place,
how can anecdotal comments be made
meaningful for perhaps 100 students?
What are some strategies for tracking the
degree to which students have addressed issues
raised in feedback? Annie Davies?
Questions 2
• How do we get students to create
meaningful goals
• How do we monitor whether or not a peer
assessor is steering the student in the
wrong direction, creating confusion?
• Can student conferences be incorporated
into high school parent teacher meetings?
Issues
• “Many teachers will be concerned about the
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effect of returning students’ work with
comments but no scores or grades…Initial fears
about how students might react turned out to be
unjustified, and neither parents nor school
inspectors have reacted adversely. Indeed, the
provision of comments to students help parents
to focus on learning issues rather than on trying
to interpret a score or grade.” (13)
Is this true here?
Issues 2
“We have encountered a variety of ways of
accommodating the new emphasis on
comments. Some teachers have ceased
assigning grades at all, some teachers enter
scores in their own record books but do not
write them in the students’ books…(13)
• Won’t work
• Unfair
Issues 3
• “The criteria for evaluating any learning
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achievements must be made transparent to
students to enable them to have a clear
overview both of the aims of their work and of
what it means to complete it successfully”
Are rubrics sometimes too prescriptive?
Can they limit the students’ independent
thinking?