Transcript Document

Assessment standards
&
education futures:
A framing of assessment as inquiry
Professor Claire Wyatt-Smith
Dean, Griffith Education
Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity:
Assessment as decision-making
• Assessment as artefact and as process
• Linking artefact and process – decision-making
• Artefact – fitness for purpose
• Traces of decisions not readily available
• How and why assessment comes to be enacted in
particular ways
Proposition 1:
If we are serious about educational improvement, the
focus needs to be on:
• the quality of assessment instruments, at both
classroom and system levels;
standards, teacher use of standards in
teaching and in judging quality, and
moderation opportunities.
Proposition 2:
For large-scale testing initiatives to realise their
potential for improvement, the distance between
teacher and tests must be reduced.
Proposition 3:
A critical need exists at the level of policy and practice
to rethink the purpose and role of standards, and how
teachers work with them.
The search for credible assessment evidence for
reporting depends on how and how well
assessment/testing links to learning and teaching.
Assessment, quality learning and standards
Classroom-based
decision making
Issues
of quality:
assessment
opportunities
Assessment
in a
learning culture
System
data
Bringing quality to the centre:
• see educational assessment in terms of its
connectedness to issues of meaning – knowledge,
teaching, learning, and language
• inquiring into the interactivity of curriculum,
pedagogy and assessment
Overview
Teacher assessment?
National curriculum
National achievement standards
NAPLAN: Constructs of accountability
ICTs: convergence
Purposes
Evidence
Standards
Roles of teachers/students
Assessment practice as a series of decisions
• Evidence types: what, when and why
• Assessment purposes – fitness for purpose
• How much information?
• What modes and achievement contexts are most
desirable?
• What checks apply to validity? reliability?
Discipline
Knowledge
Teacher Judgment:
Standards &
Improvement
Assessment
Learning
Teaching
Curriculum
Literacies
Leveraging improvement
Alignment of assessment-learning-teaching involves:
•
•
•
•
Starting with curriculum intent
Assessment: front-ending assessment
Task design issues – rigour of assessment tasks
Making expectations explicit to students:
assessment criteria and standards
(curriculum and literacy demands)
• Deeper learning: self- and peer-assessment
• Profiling student achievement over time
Quality assessment & the adolescent
Resources necessary through to making a judgment:
• superior knowledge about the content or substance of what
is to be learned
• skill in constructing and compiling assessment tasks, and
generally in working out ways to elicit revealing and pertinent
responses from students
• deep knowledge of criteria and standards [or performance
expectations] appropriate to the assessment task
• evaluative skill or expertise in having made judgments about
students efforts on similar tasks in the pas
• a set of attitudes or dispositions towards teaching, as an
activity, and towards learners
(Sadler, 1998, pp. 80-82)
Literacy and Numeracy in the Middle Years
of Schooling Initiative
Improving outcomes for educationally
disadvantaged students in the middle years
An intersectoral project
funded by
The Department of Education, Science and Training
Queensland Project
• Part of a $4 million national initiative
• Focus on ‘at risk’ students
• DEST focus on assessment as it informs
curriculum and pedagogy
• Queensland focus – front-ending assessment +
curriculum, literacy and numeracy demands
15 Intersectoral
clusters
The value of explicit assessment
If:
“The more implicit the school’s pedagogy, which
presupposes prior attainment the more locked out
will be the outsider. This enables the possessor
of the prerequisite cultural capital to continue to
monopolize that capital.”
(Walton, 1993)
Then:
How can assessment work to open doors for all?
Educational standards
What is the work of a set of education standards?
The primary function of educational standards is to enable
statements about a students’ quality of performance or degree
of achievement to be made without reference to the
achievements of other students, which conceivably could be
either all poor or all excellent. In addition, fixed standards
enable long-term changes in a phenomenon to be detected.
(Sadler, 1987, p.196)
Assessment aligned to learning & teaching
Teachers shunting back and forth between:
Curriculum: linking assessment to curriculum intent.
Assessment: explicitly identifying in standards the curriculum
knowledge and related literacy demands in tasks
Pedagogy: classroom practice that explicitly scaffolds learning
(knowledge + curriculum literacies)
Year: 6/7
KLA: Science
Syllabus levels: 3-4
Framing – assessment practice
as critical enquiry
Task details:
Students will investigate an energy type of their choice.
Students will then create their own energy experiment and
demonstrate this. Students must determine whether this
energy is efficient in real-life situations.
Assessment conditions:
Individual experimentation (oral presentation) and scientific
report submission.
Feedback opportunities:
Personal reflection, checklist (student and teacher) and draft
feedback.
Framing – assessment practice as critical enquiry
Curriculum knowledge:
Energy and Change 3.2 - Students
identify forms of energy (including
electrical and sound energy) and
describe the characteristics of
those different forms.

investigate type of energy

design and perform investigation
of energy through experiment

predict outcome of energy
experiment

make observations and draw
conclusions

use scientific report genre

oral presentation – verbal
explanation

using scientific language.
Curriculum literacies:
Code breaker

spelling scientific terminology – for example,’ energy’ and
‘hypothesis’

using conjunctions, adverbs, prepositional phrases and verbs to
express cause and effect relationships

recognising reference words in a scientific report.
Text participant

drawing on background and prior knowledge to construct
meaning

recognising and composing elements of a scientific report

interpreting scientific terminology

using text organisation of headings, main ideas and supporting
details to gather information

selecting, summarising and organising ideas from a variety of
sources.

predicting outcomes, generating hypotheses and explanations
related to phenomena both within and outside their own
experiences.
Text user

using appropriate punctuation

proofreading and editing independently

using appropriate types of texts for particular purposes.
Text analyst

evaluating human activities which may impact on the
environment, society and individuals.
Criteria & standards
Provision of explicit performance expectations/
standards
Involves:
•
Clarity of expectations for teachers and students
•
Conversations about quality in classrooms and among
teachers
•
Agreement about where the bar is
•
Opportunities for teachers to share interpretations of
criteria and standards (moderation)
•
Student knowledge and use of quality indicators/standard
Criteria & standards
A teacher on stated criteria and standards:
Most of the students didn’t “do assessment” – while
they would all submit an assessment item, the
majority view was that it had little relationship to the
work they did in class, and was an “add-on” to units of
work that signalled the end of learning.
The place of assessment in the classroom
Pedagogy
• Connectedness and higher order thinking
• We found that we were continually critiquing our
working – looking at the specifics.
• I was more specific in my teaching. Then I
looked for the student’s performance profile over
time.
• Teacher modelling of tasks
The place of assessment in the classroom
• Resourcing issues: equity of opportunity – all
necessary equipment provided to every student
• Students unwilling to attempt tasks for various
reasons: embarrassment about access to the
physical resources inside/outside schooling
The place of assessment in the classroom
• Assessment for learning: assumptions teacher
confirmation and self-correcting
• Original concern – dumbing down vs. teaching
for success
• Making assessment goals known/realistically
attainable
The place of assessment in the classroom
Greater use of judgment of student learning Based on proposition that:
that teachers as professionals are able to make appropriate
judgments about students’ work, and moreover, that teachers
(and students) are best placed to make judgments in a range
of contexts and through a range of assessment opportunities
(Cumming, Wyatt-Smith, Elkins & Neville, 2006, p.16)
↓
What
• are the system supports?
• is the quality assurance?
Knowledge
of pedagogy
Teacher
experience
Observations
of student/s
Knowledge
of
community
context
Judgment:
Teacher
knowledge of
context
Assessment
standards
Moderation
practices
The place of assessment in the classroom
Opportunities:
•
Assessment portfolios – student entries
•
Distinguishing assessment purposes and
audiences
•
Building teacher confidence in judging using
defined standards
•
Discussions about the nature of judgment:
holistic and analytic approaches and ‘discipline fit’
•
Students having a language to talk about quality
The place of assessment in the classroom
Discipline
Knowledge/s
Assessment
Learning
Teaching
Teacher Judgment:
Standards &
Improvement
Curriculum
Literacies
Leveraging improvement
The place of assessment in the classroom
Framing assessment as inquiry:
Teachers’ claim to expertise may be tied to how we
promote quality learning and qualities of learners, as
well as quality outcomes.
The place of assessment in the classroom
The dependability challenge:
What is the highest optimum reliability that can be
achieved while preserving construct validity?
The place of assessment in the classroom
Way forward: recognition that improved outcomes
are a direct result of teacher intervention.
Whatever the original justification for regular,
universal, standardised testing, its ability to
measure the skills and sensibilities in the
21st century is limited.
(Kalantzis et al. 2003, p. 25)
More information
Meeting in the middle - assessment, pedagogy, learning
and educational disadvantage. Literacy and Numeracy in
the Middle Years of Schooling - Queensland Project
Report:
http://education.qld.gov.au/literacy/docs/deewr-myp-final-report.pdf
Wyatt-Smith, C., & Cumming, J. (in press). Educational
assessment in the 21st Century (Eds.). Springer Academic
Publication, Dordecht, The Netherlands.
Current international context
England:
CEO of Qualifications and Curriculum Authority
suggests national tests could be replaced by
standardised teacher assessment
Times Educational Supplement, 12 May 2006