Assessment and learning - Dylan Wiliam's website
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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