Transcript Assessment and learning - Dylan Wiliam's website

Assessment and learning
Dylan Wiliam
King’s College London
www.dylanwiliam.net
Why are employers unhappy?
 Things are getting better:
average IQ has increased (Flynn effect)
school achievement has increased
 But:
needs of work have increased more
link between IQ and exam results is weakening
(can’t use exam results as proxies for ‘intelligence’)
teaching to the test has narrowed the curriculum
(can’t generalise to things that weren’t tested)
Lake Wobegon
 All the women are strong, all the men are goodlooking, and all the children are above average
Scores
X
Time
Improvements are limited
Scores on national curriculum tests in
mathematics and English for 11-year
olds are increasing
Scores on other, comparable, tests
have remained constant
So, improvement is limited to those
things that are actually tested
Improvements are transient
 Proportion of 11 year olds achieving level 4 in
mathematics has increased steadily over the
last five years
 According to Ofsted, 25% of those who
achieved level 4 at the end of year 6 fail to
achieve the same level at the end of year 7.
 So, achievement has improved at age 11, but
not at age 12.
Effects on students
 High-stakes tests
increase the link between success and selfesteem
decrease motivation for low-attainers
send the message that only what is tested is
important
encourage the development of shallow learning
encourage a performance orientation rather than a
mastery orientation to learning
The only 21st century skill
...the model that says ‘learn while you are at school the
skills that you will apply during your lifetime’ is no longer
tenable. These skills will be obsolete by the time you get
into the workplace and need them, except for one skill –
the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able,
not to give the right answer to questions about what you
were taught in school, but to make the right response to
situations that are outside the scope of what you were
taught in school. We need to produce people who know
how to act when they are faced with situations for which
they were not specifically prepared.
(Papert, 1998)
Successful education
The test of successful education is not the amount of
knowledge that a pupil takes away from school, but his
appetite to know and his capacity to learn. If the school
sends out children with the desire for knowledge and some
idea how to acquire it, it will have done its work. Too many
leave school with the appetite killed and the mind loaded
with undigested lumps of information. The good schoolmaster (sic) is known by the number of valuable subjects
which he declines to teach.
Sir Richard Livingstone, President of Corpus Christi
College, Oxford, 1941
How do students make sense of this?
 Attribution (Dweck, 1986)
Personalization (internal v external)
Permanence (stable v unstable)
Essential that students attribute both failures and
success to internal, unstable causes (it’s down to
you, and you can do something about it)
 Views of ‘ability’
fixed (IQ)
incremental (untapped potential)
Essential that teachers inculcate in their students
a view that ‘ability’ is incremental rather than fixed
(by working, you’re getting smarter)
Predicting success
Source: Autumn package (2001), DfES
Target-setting in schools
 Targets
Government sets targets for LEAs
LEAs set targets for schools
Schools set targets for teachers
 But
These targets are useless for teaching
Levels are too coarse
GCSE grades are not criterion-referenced
Targets for students must be ‘bottom up’
 Schools need coherent assessment systems
that support summative and formative
functions of assessment
What do students & teachers need?
Students need to know:
where they are in their learning
where they are going
how to get there
Teachers need to know
where students are in their learning
what to do about it
When assessment supports all these, it
is formative
Formative and summative
 Fine-scaled data that supports formative uses
can be aggregated to serve a summative
function
 Aggregate summative data cannot be disaggregated to identify learning needs
 Assessment for formative purposes should be
the foundation of all assessment in schools
Classroom assessment
Rich questioning
Feedback to support learners
Sharing criteria with learners
Peer- and self-assessment
Questioning
Coherence of discourse
Hot-seat questioning
Three-part questions
‘No hands up’ (except to ask a question)
Netball rather than ping-pong
Kinds of questions
Balance of closed v open
Balance of low-order v high-order
Increased wait-time for higher-order questions
Brainstorming what students know/believe already
Training students to pose questions
Feedback
 Comment-only marking
Comments to cause thinking
What happens as a result?
 Focused marking
 Explicit reference to criteria
 Suggestions on how to improve
‘Strategy cards’ ideas for improvement
Not giving complete solutions
 Re-timing assessment
(eg two-thirds-of-the-way-through-a-topic test)
Sharing criteria with learners
 Explaining learning objectives at start of
lesson/unit
 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
 Opportunities for students to design their own
tests and marking schemes
Peer and self-assessment
 Students assessing their own/peers’ work
with marking schemes
with criteria
with exemplars
 Identifying group weaknesses
 Self-assessment of confidence and
uncertainty
Traffic lights
Smiley faces
 End-of-lesson students’ review
Formative assessment
 Assessment for learning is not the same as
formative assessment
Assessment for learning is a description of purpose
Formative assessment is a description of function
Frequent feedback is not necessarily formative
Feedback that causes improvement is not necessarily
formative
 Assessment is formative only if the information
fed back to the learner is used by the learner in
making improvements
 To be formative, assessment must include a
recipe for future action
Changing the focus
From quality control to quality assurance
Assuring the quality of learning while it is
happening, rather than after it is finished
Regulating learning, rather than regulating
activity
When this happens, attainment rises