Assessment for Learning

Mary James

Cambridge University

Assessment for Learning: in the spotlight

•DfES Personalised Learning – first of 5 components

•KS3 Strategy

•QCA - website

Assessment for Learning...

…is a process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go, and how best to get there.

(Assessment Reform Group, 2002)

What research says aboutAfL

A review of research showed:• raises standards (1 to 2 grades in GCSE)• there is room for improvement in our

current practice• how to improve Assessment for Learning

Four key aspects of AfL

•Eliciting information•Appropriate feedback•Ensuring learners understand quality•Peer and self-assessment

Practical strategies: questioning

• Improving teacher questioning– closed v open– low-order v high-order– Generating questions with colleagues

• ‘Hot Seat’ questioning– extended interaction with one student to scaffold learning– other students learn vicariously

• ‘No hands up’ (except to ask a question)

• Brainstorming what students know already

• Increased wait time

• Training students to pose questions

• Class polls to review current attitudes towards an issue

Practical strategies: feedback

• Comment-only marking• 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)

Feedback and AfL

Feedback contributes to Assessment for Learning only if the information fed back to the learner is actually used by the learner in making improvements.

Practical strategies: 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

Practical strategies: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• End-of-lesson students’ review

What do teachers need to do?

• Seek & interpret evidence of existing learning & performance (especially through questioning)

• Provide feedback to help learners understand the strengths and weaknesses in their current performance, the standards aimed for, and how they might improve

• Provide opportunities for learners to improve their work• Develop learners’ own capacity to understand

standards and to self-assess using criteria and exemplars

• These elements need to be planned as part of teaching

Challenges

•Convincing staff: teachers and support staff

•Convincing pupils

•Convincing parents

What we still don’t know

• What implications implementation of AfL has for teachers’ professional development

• How knowledge that teachers create about what works can be disseminated to others

• What conditions in schools enable this to happen

The ESRC TLRP Learning How to Learn Project is researching these questions

Scale XThis school now

About you

Teachers’ Assessment Practices

Scale YHow important are these assessment practices for

creating opportunities for students to learn?

Never true

Rarely true

Often true

Mostly true

Not important

Limited importance

Important Crucial Bad practice

I provide guidance to help my students assess their own work

Factors for [reported] classroom assessment practices

• Making learning explicit• Promoting learning autonomy• Performance orientation

Cluster % N

1 17% 93

2 16% 87

3 20% 110

4 21% 115

5 19% 108

n = 558

Is teacher learning a key for change?

• How are classroom AfL practices influenced by teacher learning practices?

• Which teacher learning practices are most strongly related to AfL practices?

• How do teachers and managers construe the relationship between teacher learning and the promotion of AfL?

Dimensions of teacher learning

• Inquiry: using and responding to different sources of evidence; carrying out joint research and evaluation with colleagues

• Building social capital: learning, working, supporting and talking with one another

• Critical and responsive learning: through reflection, self-evaluation, experimentation and responding to feedback.

Multiple regression analyses

• Dependent variables: classroom assessment practice factors

• Independent variables: teachers’ learning practice factors.

• Separate models were tested for teachers(n.558) and managers (n.480)

• We wanted to find out how much variance in each of the classroom assessment practices were accounted for by teacher learning variables.

Results for managers

• All teacher learning variables are significantly related to ‘Making learning explicit

• ‘Inquiry’ is the only teacher learning variable related to ‘Promoting learning autonomy’.

• ‘Building social capital’ and ‘Critical and responsive learning’ have weak but significant negative relationships to ‘performance orientation’

Tentative conclusions

• AfL practices are underpinned most strongly by teachers learning in the context of their classrooms.

• Emphasis on building social capital without a clear classroom focus does not appear to be strongly related to change in classroom practice.

• Both individual and social processes of teacher learning are important conditions for the promotion of AfL in classrooms.

A deputy head explains:

“Well it won’t just happen. … some of these questions imply that it’s a sort of finished business. ‘We know about that now. You just do rich questioning, do the self and peer-assessment, do whatever it might be, feedback without marks and that’s all sorted.’ Well it isn’t, and that’s actually at the heart of it. It’s a development of permanent reflection and refinement and there’s no end if you like. You can’t reach the stage where you can say ‘Ok, done that, got there, sorted, I’ve done my learning and now I’m teaching ok’, the profession should never be like that anyway and no profession should actually. For one thing the external circumstances are changing, but also, what we understand about learning is changing all the time. It’s what we understand professionally: we as a collective profession of teachers; or what we as individuals understand; or what we with that particular group of students understand. It keeps changing, it’s quite a dynamic process. And I know that approaches which work with one class may need to be subtly changed in order to work with another class. So if you like, what you’re learning is judgement and you’re learning more about how to judge within a set of principles – what works and what doesn’t work.”

Information and support at web site: www.learntolearn.ac.uk

• An Introduction to the Work of the Learning how to Learn Project

• Workshop Materials for Schools

• Assessment for Learning in Action

• The Level 2 Toolbox