The Use of Assessment

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The use of assessment

There is a view that the assessment of students' achievements is something which happens
at the end of a process of learning. According to this view, assessment has little to do
with fostering or enabling learning, it is a means of verifying that learning has taken
place.

Exams and essays still form a significant part of assessment and are the main methods
used in some cases, but there is now widespread use of other approaches.

There has been a perception that exams emphasize memory and working within time and
resource constraints which may limit their usefulness as tests of higher level
understanding.

http://srhe.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/
10.1080/1355800950320402#aHR0cDovL3NyaGUudGFuZGZvbmxpbmUuY29tL2RvaS
9wZGYvMTAuMTA4MC8xMzU1ODAwOTUwMzIwNDAyP25lZWRBY2Nlc3M9dHJ
1ZUBAQDA=

Benefits

Doesn’t Benefit
Research into student learning in higher education over a number of years has provided
considerable empirical evidence to suggest that student behaviour and student learning
are very much influenced by assessment.

http://srhe.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/
10.1080/1355800950320402#aHR0cDovL3NyaGUudGFuZGZvbmxpbmUuY29tL2RvaS
9wZGYvMTAuMTA4MC8xMzU1ODAwOTUwMzIwNDAyP25lZWRBY2Nlc3M9dHJ
1ZUBAQDA=

Many teachers do not plan and conduct classroom dialogue in ways that might help students to
learn. Research has shown that, after asking a question, many teachers wait less than one second
and then, if no answer is forthcoming, ask another question or answer the question themselves.4 A
consequence of such short “wait time” is that the only questions that “work” are those that can be
answered quickly, without thought — that is, questions calling for memorized facts. Consequently,
the dialogue is at a superficial level. The key to changing such a situation is to allow longer wait time.
But many teachers find it hard to do this, for it requires them to break their established habits. Once
they change, the expectations of their students are challenged.

Increasing the wait time can help more students become involved in discussions and increase the
length of their replies. Another way to broaden participation is to ask students to brainstorm ideas,
perhaps in pairs, for two to three minutes before the teacher asks for contributions. Overall, a
consequence of such changes is that teachers learn more about the students’ prior knowledge and
about any gaps and misconceptions in that knowledge, so that teachers’ next moves can better
address the learners’ real needs. To exploit such changes means moving away from the routine of
limited factual questions and refocusing attention on the quality and the different functions of
classroom questions. Consider, for example, the use of a “big question”: an open question or a
problem-solving task that can set the scene for a lesson and evoke broad discussion or prompt
focused small-group discussions. However, if this strategy is to be productive, both the responses
that the task might generate and the ways of following up on these responses have to be
anticipated. Collaboration between teachers to exchange ideas and experiences about good
questions is very valuable. The questions themselves then become a more significant part of
teaching, with attention focused on how they can be constructed and used to explore and then
develop students’ learning.

Overall, the main suggestions for action that have emerged from the teachers’ experience are:

• More effort has to be spent in framing questions that are worth asking, that is, questions that
explore issues that are critical to the development of students’ understanding.

• Wait time has to be increased to several seconds in order to give students time to think, and
everyone should be expected to have an answer and to contribute to the discussion. Then all
answers, right or wrong, can be used to develop understanding. The aim is thoughtful improvement
rather than getting it right the first time.

• Follow-up activities have to be rich, in that they create opportunities to extend students’
understanding. Put simply, the only point of asking questions is to raise issues about which a teacher
needs information or about which the students need to think. When such changes have been made,
experience demonstrates that students become more active participants and come to realize that
learning may depend less on their capacity to spot the right answer and more on their readiness to
express and discuss their own understanding. The teachers also shift in their role, from presenters of
content to leaders of an exploration and development of ideas in which all students are involved.

Research experiments have established that, while student learning can be advanced by feedback
through comments, the giving of numerical scores or grades has a negative effect, in that students
ignore comments when marks are also given.

A numerical score or a grade does not tell students how to improve their work, so an opportunity to
enhance their learning is lost.

the assessment of students’ work will be seen less as a competitive and summative judgment and
more as a distinctive step in the process of learning

Peer assessment is uniquely valuable because students may accept criticisms of their work from one
another that they would not take seriously if the remarks were offered by a teacher.

peer assessment is also valuable in placing the work in the hands of the students. The teacher can be
free to observe and reflect on what is happening and to frame helpful interventions

One simple and effective idea is for students to use “traffic light” icons, labeling their work green,
yellow, or red according to whether they think they have good, partial, or little understanding. These
labels serve as a simple means of communicating students’ self-assessments
Our experience leads us to offer the following recommendations for improving classroom practice: •
The criteria for evaluating any learning achievements must be made transparent to students to
enable them to have a clear overview both of the aims of their work and of what it means to
complete it successfully. Such criteria may well be abstract, but concrete examples should be used in
modeling exercises to develop understanding. • Students should be taught the habits and skills of
collaboration in peer assessment, both because these are of intrinsic value and because peer
assessment can help develop the objectivity required for effective self-assessment. • Students
should be encouraged to keep in mind the aims of their work and to assess their own progress
toward meeting these aims as they proceed. Then they will be able to guide their own work and so
become independent learners. The main point here is that peer assessment and self-assessment
make distinct contributions to the development of students’ learning. Indeed, they secure aims that
cannot be achieved in any other way.

Students will invest effort in a task only if they believe that they can achieve something. If a learning
exercise is seen as a competition, then everyone is aware that there will be losers as well as winners,
and those who have a track record as losers will see little point in trying.

Students given feedback as marks are likely to see it as a way to compare themselves with others
(ego involvement); those given only comments see it as helping them to improve (task involvement).
The latter group outperforms the former.

In general, feedback given as rewards or grades enhances ego involvement rather than task
involvement. It can focus students’ attention on their “ability” rather than on the importance of
effort, thus damaging the self-esteem of low achievers and leading to problems of “learned
helplessness.”15 Feedback that focuses on what needs to be done can encourage all to believe that
they can improve. Such feedback can enhance learning, both directly through the effort that can
ensue and indirectly by supporting the motivation to invest such effort.

Collaboration between teachers and students and between students and their peers can produce a
supportive environment in which students can explore their own ideas, hear alternative ideas in the
language of their peers, and evaluate them.

Inside the Black Box was clear in stating that the effective development of formative assessment
would come about only if “each teacher finds his or her own ways of incorporating the lessons and
ideas that are set out above into her or his own patterns of classroom work.”

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003172170408600105

Government Document

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/304602/
Assessment_Principles.pdf

School
Teachers’ feedback to pupils seems to serve social and managerial functions, often at the expense of
the learning function. Teachers are often able to predict pupils’ results on external tests because
their own tests imitate them, but at the same time teachers know too little about their pupils’
learning needs. The collection of marks to fill in records is given higher priority than the analysis of
pupils’ work to discern learning needs; furthermore, some teachers pay no attention to the
assessment records of their pupils’ previous teachers.

The negative aspect is illustrated by the preceding quotation. When the classroom culture focuses
on rewards, “gold stars,” grades, or class ranking, then pupils look for ways to obtain the best marks
rather than to improve their learning. One reported consequence is that, when they have any
choice, pupils avoid difficult tasks. They also spend time and energy looking for clues to the “right
answer.” Indeed, many become reluctant to ask questions out of a fear of failure. Pupils who
encounter difficulties are led to believe that they lack ability, and this belief leads them to attribute
their difficulties to a defect in themselves about which they cannot do a great deal. Thus they avoid
investing effort in learning that can lead only to disappointment, and they try to build up their self-
esteem in other ways.

If formative assessment is to be productive, pupils should be trained in self-assessment so that they


can understand the main purposes of their learning and thereby grasp what they need to do to
achieve.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003172171009200119

Schools

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20141107020823/http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/sites/
default/files/documents/surveys-and-good-practice/a/Assessment%20for%20learning%20-%20the
%20impact%20of%20National%20Strategy%20support.pdf

GOVERNMENT

Out current educational assessments are not just ineffective—they are preventing us from providing
highquality education for school students, and preventing schools from producing young people with
the flexible skills that will be needed in the 21st century. This is because our assessments started
from the idea that the primary purpose of educational assessment is selecting and certifying the
achievement of individuals (ie summative assessment)—and have tried to make assessments
originally designed for this purpose also provide information with which educational institutions can
be made accountable (evaluative assessment). Educational assessment has thus become divorced
from learning, and the huge contribution that assessment can make to learning (ie formative
assessment) has been largely lost. Furthermore, as a result of this separation, formal assessment has
focused just on the outcomes of learning, and because of the limited amount of time that can be
justified for assessments that do not contribute to learning, has assessed only a narrow part of those
outcomes. The predictability of these assessments allows teachers and learners to focus on only
what is assessed, and the high stakes attached to the results create an incentive to do so. This
creates a vicious spiral in which only those aspects of learning that are easily measured are regarded
as important, and even these narrow outcomes are not achieved as easily as they could be, or by as
many learners, were assessment regarded as an integral part of teaching. In place of this vicious
spiral, I propose that developing a system of summative assessment based on moderated teacher
assessment. A separate system, relying on ‘light sampling’ of the performance of schools would
provide stable and robust information for the purposes of accountability and policyformation.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.130.3354&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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