The Role of Assessment in Promoting Learning

William S. Moore, Ph.D.Policy Associate, Assessment, Teaching &

LearningWA State Board for Community & Technical

Colleges bmoore@sbctc.edu 360-704-4346

New Faculty InstituteSeptember 2010

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

•Things you will need to know in later life (2 hours)…

•Things you will NOT need to know in later life (1198 hours). These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in ‘-ology’, ‘-osophy’, ‘-istry’, ‘-ics’, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them you become a professor and have to stay in college the rest of your life.

Is This What We Have in Mind???

Dave Barry, 1981

…Being able to repeat facts and plug numbers into formulae to get the right answers is handy, even essential. But it is not what education is fundamentally about…

Learning should be about changing the ways in which learners understand, or experience, or conceptualize the world around them…

Or Is This More Like It…???

Paul Ramsden

“What is Assessment?”

“the zipper between

teaching and learning”

(Pat Cross)

Assessment:

Assessment and Learning

•Assessment OF Learning

•Assessment FOR Learning

Prove

Improve

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?”

Then a voice comes to me out of the dark, and says, “ we hate to tell you this, but life is a thousand word essay”

Adapted from Peanuts, by Charles Schulz

Essay tests Performance tasks (e.g., cases,

problems, projects, field work, etc.)

Multiple-choice testsPeer- and self-evaluationsPortfolio collections of workResearch papers

“Assessment of Learning” Strategies

Authentic Performance Test?Instructions: Read each question

carefully. Answer all questions. Time limit: 4 hours. Begin immediately.

MUSIC Write a piano concerto. Orchestrate and perform it with flute and drum. You will find a piano under your seat. BIOLOGY Create life. Estimate the differences in subsequent human culture if this form of life had developed 500 million years earlier, with special attention to its probable effect on the English parliamentary system. Prove your thesis. SOCIOLOGY Estimate the sociological problems that might accompany the end of the world. Construct an experiment to test your theory.

I don’t remember the teacher

covering any of this!!

“Assessment for Learning” Strategies

Eliciting evidence of learning

Classroom assessment techniques (CATs); ConcepTests; clicker technology

Feedback Comments rather than grades; “¾ unit” test

Sharing LearningExpectations

Rubrics (include annotated student work to unpack definitions); Student-created tests

Self Assessment “Red disk, green disk”

Peer Assessment Peer review of “pre-flight checklists” for assignments

Dylan Wiliam, Institute of Education, University of London

Strategies Techniques

Looking at Assignments

•What do you notice about the assignments you reviewed?

•What are the strengths of these assignments as “assessments” of student learning?

•What are the limitations of these assignments as “assessments”—what would you add/revise?

Good assessment tasks are

interchangeable with good

instructional tasks.

Teachers do not create learning, learners create

learning; teachers create the conditions in which students

learn.Dylan Wiliam

Closing Reflections

Our aim should be to change our cultural practices so that students and teachers look to

assessment as a source of insight and help instead of an

occasion for meting out rewards and punishments.

Lorrie Shepard“The Role of Assessment in a Learning Culture”, 2000

Closing Reflections

Designing Course-Embedded Assessment Tasks (aka

“Assignments”)

Karen Sheingold, Joan Heller, & Susan Paulukonis, “Actively Seeking Evidence…,” ETS, 1994

What understandings & abilities do I want to assess?

What performances or work will allow students to demonstrate these

understandings & abilities?

What evidence in the performance or work tells me to what extent the students have

these understandings & abilities?

What activities do students have to do to learn how to generate these performances?

Postscript