Group items tagged

Assessment as learning: where students develop an awareness of how they learn and use that awareness to adjust and advance their learning, taking an increased responsibility for their learning.

"Most of us recognize that more of our students need to be doing deeper, more complex thinking work more often. But if we want students to be critical thinkers and problem solvers and effective communicators and collaborators, that cognitively-complex work is usually more divergent rather than convergent. It is more amorphous and fuzzy and personal. It is often multi-stage and multimodal. It is not easily reduced to a number or rating or score. However, this does NOT mean that kind of work is incapable of being assessed. "

What I'm not sure people realise is that at some point reliability and validity can become mutually exclusive. The author describes a situation where reliability has triumphed over validity, which is very wrong, as any psychometrician can tell you.

'In the analysis presented in this article, it has been argued that the problem lies less with the quality of feedback than with the fundamental assumption that telling, even detailed telling, is an effective approach to complex learning. Because feedback is commonly expressed in verbal form, learning from being told is flawed as a general strategy because the conditions for the statements to make intimate connection with the student work (with a view to future work) are frequently not satisfied. Assuming that low student dispositions to learn is not the reason for their failure to capitalise on learning opportunities, the issue is how to create a different learning environment that works effectively. A proposed alternative to the usual sequence of [task - response - appraisal - feedback] is to make intensive use of purposeful peer assessment as a pedagogical strategy, not just for assessment but for substantive aspects of the course as well. Students need to grasp three groups of concepts in particular - response genre, quality, and criteria - if interactions between teachers and learners are to be formatively effective, and capability in complex appraisal is to be developed. These assessment concepts must be understood not as abstractions but as core concepts that are internalised, operationalised and applied to concrete productions. Unless this occurs, the key assessment concepts are likely to remain submerged and invisible.'

Slavin, Hurley, and Chamberlain (2003) have shown that activating students as learning resources for one another produces some of the largest gains seen in any educational interventions, provided two conditions are met. The first is that the learning environment must provide for group goals, so that students are working as a group instead of just working in a group. The second condition is individual accountability, so that each student is responsible for his or her contribution to the group, so there can be no "passengers."

"The teams meet regularly and each team member is on the "hot seat" - no one is immune from the clinical exercise."

"I agree that a checklist approach, based on steps and acquisition of factual knowledge can inhibit intuition and creative expression of learning.  Yet rubrics that focus on depth of skills to build critical thinking can allow the flexibility necessary to create indwelling.  Admittedly, I've used both.  And I do think that a scaffold approach, one which guides students from a prescriptive structure to one that engenders more internally driven analysis can work.  The key, as we discussed in our twitter discussion, is to design the rubric to guide rather than prescribe and use it to have conversations with students about their process.  Because I value experiential learning, I also value rubric-revision.  A good rubric is one that changes each and every time it is used-- possibly during the process.  It both encourages and responds to student inquiry.  It points in a direction, not to a path.  And it allows the student to develop thinking and produce work that surpass expectations."

In this two-part series, theory and practice meet head on as education expert Professor Dylan Wiliam sets up an experimental school classroom. For one term, he takes over a Year 8 class at a secondary comprehensive to test simple ideas that he believes could improve the quality of our children's education

In this two-part series, theory and practice meet head on as education expert Professor Dylan Wiliam sets up an experimental school classroom. For one term, he takes over a Year 8 class at a secondary comprehensive to test simple ideas that he believes could improve the quality of our children's education.