Assessment
Pedagogy
and
the Teachers’ Role
Paul Black
Department of Education
King’s College London
1
Validity in the future?
… the teacher is increasingly being seen as the
primary assessor in the most important aspects of
assessment. The broadening of assessment is based
on a view that there are aspects of learning that are
important but cannot be adequately assessed by formal
external tests. These aspects require human judgment
to integrate the many elements of performance
behaviours that are required in dealing with authentic
assessment tasks.
• p.31 in Stanley, G., MacCann, R., Gardner, J., Reynolds, L. & Wild, I. (2009). Review
of teacher assessment: what works best and issues for development. Oxford University
2
Centre for Educational Development; Report commissioned by the QCA.
Thomas Groome
Educating for Life
(Children) . . have a right to a curriculum that
convinces them of their inherent goodness, that
convinces them of their dignity and self-worth,
that treats them with respect, that helps to
develop their every good gift and talent
3
Hargreaves
The Knowledge Creating School
. . . .. . schools must prepare students to increasingly
higher levels of knowledge and skill, not just in the
conventional curriculum or even in ICT, important as
these are, but also in the personal qualities that matter in
the transformed work place – how to be autonomous,
self-organising, networking, entrepreneurial, innovative,
with ‘the capability constantly to redefine the necessary
skills for a given task, and to access the sources for
learning these skills’
.
4
Hargreaves
The Knowledge Creating School
It is plain that if teachers do not acquire and
display this capacity to re-define their skills for
the task of teaching, and if they do not model in
their own conduct the very qualities – flexibility,
networking, creativity – that are now key
outcomes for students, then the challenge of
schooling in the next millennium will not be met.
(p.123)
5
Can Summative Assessment be
Improved?
Where summative becomes the hand-maiden of
accountability matters can get even worse, for
accountability is always in danger of ignoring its
effects on learning and thereby of undermining the
very aim of improving schooling that it claims to
serve. Accountability can only avoid shooting itself in
the foot if, in the priorities of assessment design, it
comes after learning
6
Black & Wiliam 2007
Integrating Assessment Within
Pedagogy
•1
Deep Contradictions
•2
AiFL – the promise of harmony
•3
Summative:
Redemption via Teacher Ownership
•4
Systems, Support and Development
7
1
Dialogic Teaching
Children, we now know, need to talk, and to
experience a rich diet of spoken language, in
order to think and to learn. Reading, writing
and number may be acknowledged curriculum
‘basics’, but talk is arguably the true
foundation of learning.
(Robin Alexander, 2004)
8
Pupil involvement
•When a question is asked or a problem posed
who is thinking of the answer? Is anybody
thinking about the problem apart from the
teacher? How many pupils are actively engaged
in thinking about the problem? Is it just a few well
motivated pupils, or worse is it just the one the
teacher picks out to answer the question? The
pupil whose initial reaction is like that of a
startled rabbit ‘Who me sir?’
(Teacher in King’s Project)
9
Poverty of Classroom Dialogue
• Average ‘wait time’ 0.9 seconds (Rowe, 1974, USA)
• Open questions – 10% only. 15% of teachers did not
use any. Follow-up questions only 4%of the time;
43% of teachers did not use any. Pupil contributions –
3 words or fewer for 70% of the time
(Smith et al. 2004, U.K.)
• Teacher Qn - Pupil answer – Teacher Qn and so on.
“Recitation” dominates (Applebee et al. 2003, USA) 10
Dialogic Teaching
Talk vitally mediates the cognitive and cultural
spaces between adult and child, among children
themselves, between teacher and learner,
between society and the individual, between
what the child knows and understands and what
he or she has yet to know and understand.
(Alexander, 2008, p.92) 11
The school and society
Once children move from the intimacies of family life
into the impersonality and organization associated
with life in classrooms, they cannot help becoming
subject to the prevailing ideology, to socialization in
its varying forms. The norms communicated by the
hidden curriculum – because unacknowledged, often
more powerful than what is explicitly taught – are in
conflict with the values publicly affirmed.
(Greene, 1983)
12
2
Do we need to have marks on
everything ?
Students are not good at knowing how much
they are learning, often because we as teachers
do not tell them in an appropriate way
...........................................................
When asked by a visitor how well she was
doing in science, the student clearly stated that
the comments in her exercise book and those
given verbally provide her with the information
she needs.
Teacher in King’s project
13
Feedback on Written Work
Comment-only marking
Previously I would have marked the work and
graded it and made a comment. The pupils
only saw the mark and/or credit. After a credit
they lost the motive to improve. Now they get
a credit after we have gone over the work so
they have an incentive to understand the work
Teacher in King’s project.
14
3 Advantages of Peer Assessment
All pupils can be involved
They use pupil language - and start to talk the language of
the subject
They are more honest and challenging with one another than
with their teacher
Seeing your work through the eyes of your peers helps you to
be more objective
Teachers can spot where they might best spend their time
BUT
Pupils need to be trained to work effectively in groups
15
Rules for Effective Group Work
• All students must contribute:
no one member say too much or too little
• Every contribution treated with respect:
listen thoughtfully
• Group must achieve consensus:
work at resolving differences
• Every suggestion/assertion has to be justified:
arguments must include reasons
Mercer, N., Dawes, L., Wegerif, R. and Sams, C. (2004) British Educational Research Journal,
16
30(3), 359-377.
Pupils’ Perspective
After each end of term test, the class is grouped now to learn
from each other. [The researcher] has interviewed them on
this experience and they are very positive about the effects.
Some of their comments show that they are starting to value
the learning process more highly and they appreciate the fact
that misunderstandings are given time to be resolved, either in
groups or by me. They feel that the pressure to succeed in
tests is being replaced by the need to understand the work that
has been covered and the test is just an assessment along the
way of what needs more work and what seems to be fine
Teacher in King’s project
17
Carol Dweck
Mindset
I’ve seen so many people with one consuming goal of proving
themselves – in the classroom, in their careers, and in their
relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their
intelligence, personality or character. Every situation is
evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb?
Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a
loser?
There’s another mindset . . . . . . This growth mindset is
based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you
can cultivate through your own efforts.
18
Integrating Assessment Within
Pedagogy
•1
Deep Contradictions
•2
AiFL – the promise of harmony
•3
Summative:
Redemption via Teacher Ownership
•4
Systems, Support and Development
19
Assessment in Pedagogy
•A Decide learning aims
•B Select and plan activities
•C Implement in classroom
•D Review: informal summative assessment
•E Formal summative assessment
20
Developing teachers’ summative
assessments
Decisions about teaching sets
Information for the next teacher
Reporting to Senior Management Team
Reporting to Parents
Guiding the pupil
Black, P., Harrison, C., Hodgen, J., Marshall, M. & Serret, N. (2010) Validity in teachers’ summative
assessments. Assessment in Education 17(2) 215-232
21
Present Practice
Unfortunately, teachers often develop a set of
classroom routines with little opportunity to
examine and reflect on their concepts of classroom
assessment and how this informs their decisions
about the selection and design of questions and
tasks, how they interpret student responses, and
how to respond to students through instruction and
feedback.
Webb (2009) p.11 – USA
22
Validity
What does it mean to be good
at - - The project made me think more critically about
what exactly I was assessing. The first question I
remember being asked (‘what does it mean to be
good at English?’) gave me a different
perspective on assessment. I find myself
continually returning to this question.
Teacher in King’s project
23
How valid is this evidence ?
What do formal tests tell us?
•The ability to produce from memory, without access
to any resources.
• Within a few hours in the exam. room.
• Written accounts of a few topics.
• Selected from up to 5 years of study.
• In a high-stress situation.
• When one’s future opportunities depend on the
outcome.
24
Evidence
Classroom Tasks
• Compare different newspapers (e.g., tabloid, broadsheet,
local) by generating and investigating a hypothesis using
simple descriptive statistics.
• “Falling” : after reading the story of Icarus, produce a
spectator’s description of the event.
• Dissolving: Devise and use a method to find out whether
more salt will dissolve in vinegar than in water
25
Evidence
Teachers’ Design of Tasks
Implementation of tasks – staff were a bit
reluctant to do the projects, . . . but post
projects their views changed and this year
development of investigation based tasks has
become an issue that the KS3 staff have been
keen to do and is being done as part of
performance management.
(Teacher in King’s project)
26
Steps in Development of Teachers’
Summative Assessments
1
Audit
2
Validity
3
Evidence
Design of tasks
Pupil portfolios
4
Dependability and comparability
Agreed criteria
Moderation – in and between schools
27
Moderation: teaching and learning
conversations
I think its quite a healthy thing for a department to
be doing because I think it will encourage people
to have conversations and it’s about teaching and
learning. . . . it really provides a discussion
hopefully as well to talk about quality and you
know what you think of was a success in English.
Still really fundamental conversations.
Teacher in King’s project
28
Moderation: shared agreement
about standards
. . . the introduction of standards requires primary
teachers and schools to investigate the meaning of
the work that students generate. Whilst teachers
have always made judgments informally, moderation
as an organised process requires making
collaborative decisions to reach consensus
agreements, and hence has become an important
professional responsibility for all New Zealand’s
primary school teachers.
New Zealand (Hipkins and Robertson 2011 p.5) 29
Moderation: linking aims to
questions
Furthermore, as teachers adapted practices,
they began to re-think the learning objectives of
their curricula and the questions they used
during instructional activities.
USA (Webb, 2009, p.14)
30
Moderation: Aims, Questions and
Pedagogy
So basically once you have the assessment firmly in
place the pedagogy becomes really clear because
your pedagogy has to support that – that sort of
quality assessment task . . . . that was a bit of a shift
from what’s usually done, usually assessment is that
thing that you attach on the end of the unit whereas
as opposed to sort of being the driver which it has
now become.
Wyatt-Smith and Bridges (2008) p.48 – Queensland
31
Moderation:
Collaborative Professional
Development
Similarly, teachers who examined student data
together and worked out as a group what its
implications were for deciding how best to help those
under-achieving, difficult-to-move students, had
higher achieving students than those schools where
such a collective examination, diagnosis and
problem-solving cycle did not operate.
New Zealand : Parr and Timperley, 2008, p.69
32
Moderation: sharing criteria with
students
. . . . I think to a certain extent that we’ve
empowered students in the learning process
because there’s not secret teacher’s business
anymore in terms of what the expectations are,
that students are becoming very au fait with the
criterion and being able to apply them in their own
work.
Australia (Wyatt-Smith & Bridges 2008, p.61)
33
Assessment in Pedagogy
•A Decide learning aims
•B Select and plan activities
•C Implement in classroom
•D Review: informal summative assessment
•E Formal summative assessment
34
Validity in the future?
… the teacher is increasingly being seen as the
primary assessor in the most important aspects of
assessment. The broadening of assessment is based
on a view that there are aspects of learning that are
important but cannot be adequately assessed by formal
external tests. These aspects require human judgment
to integrate the many elements of performance
behaviours that are required in dealing with authentic
assessment tasks.
• p.31 in Stanley, G., MacCann, R., Gardner, J., Reynolds, L. & Wild, I. (2009). Review
of teacher assessment: what works best and issues for development. Oxford University
35
Centre for Educational Development; Report commissioned by the QCA.
Assessment in Pedagogy
• Validity – more occasions, more contexts, greater range
of types of activity
• Teachers can share criteria with pupils – who own their
individual portfolios
• Teachers develop confidence in their skills in
assessment
• Teachers learn through the need to collaborate.
• Teachers judgments become trustworthy
• Status of the profession is enhanced
• Assessment embedded within learning
36
Integrating Assessment Within
Pedagogy
•1
Deep Contradictions
•2
AiFL – the promise of harmony
•3
Summative:
Redemption via Teacher Ownership
•4
Systems, Support and Development
37
Involving Teachers
as
Agents in Development
Any change to assessment processes (or in
fact any educational reform) hinges on support
from teachers, and support for teachers, to
ensure an ability to adapt at classroom level. .
. . . . This requires theoretically-based yet
practically-situated learning rather that
decontextualised one-shot professional
development.
(Gunn 2007, p.59)
38