Assessment standards &

education futures:

A framing of assessment as inquiry

Professor Claire Wyatt-SmithDean, Griffith Education

• Assessment as artefact and as process

• Linking artefact and process – decision-making

• Artefact – fitness for purpose

• Traces of decisions not readily available

• How and why assessment comes to be enacted in particular ways

Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity: Assessment as decision-making

Proposition 1:

If we are serious about educational improvement, the focus needs to be on:

• the quality of assessment instruments, at both classroom and system levels;

standards, teacher use of standards in teaching and in judging quality, and

moderation opportunities.

Proposition 2:

For large-scale testing initiatives to realise their potential for improvement, the distance between teacher and tests must be reduced.

Proposition 3:

A critical need exists at the level of policy and practice to rethink the purpose and role of standards, and how teachers work with them.

The search for credible assessment evidence for reporting depends on how and how well assessment/testing links to learning and teaching.

Issues of quality:

assessment opportunities

Classroom-based decision making

System data

Assessment in a

learning culture

Assessment, quality learning and standards

Bringing quality to the centre:

• see educational assessment in terms of its connectedness to issues of meaning – knowledge, teaching, learning, and language

• inquiring into the interactivity of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment

Teacher assessment?

National curriculum National achievement standards

NAPLAN: Constructs of accountability ICTs: convergence

Purposes Evidence Standards Roles of teachers/students

Overview

• Evidence types: what, when and why

• Assessment purposes – fitness for purpose

• How much information?

• What modes and achievement contexts are most desirable?

• What checks apply to validity? reliability?

Assessment practice as a series of decisions

Discipline Knowledge

Teacher Judgment: Standards &Improvement

Curriculum Literacies

AssessmentLearning Teaching

Leveraging improvement

Alignment of assessment-learning-teaching involves:• Starting with curriculum intent• Assessment: front-ending assessment• Task design issues – rigour of assessment tasks • Making expectations explicit to students:

assessment criteria and standards

(curriculum and literacy demands) • Deeper learning: self- and peer-assessment• Profiling student achievement over time

Resources necessary through to making a judgment:

• superior knowledge about the content or substance of what is to be learned

• skill in constructing and compiling assessment tasks, and generally in working out ways to elicit revealing and pertinent responses from students

• deep knowledge of criteria and standards [or performance expectations] appropriate to the assessment task

• evaluative skill or expertise in having made judgments about students efforts on similar tasks in the pas

• a set of attitudes or dispositions towards teaching, as an activity, and towards learners

(Sadler, 1998, pp. 80-82)

Quality assessment & the adolescent

Improving outcomes for educationally disadvantaged students in the middle years

An intersectoral project funded by

The Department of Education, Science and Training

Literacy and Numeracy in the Middle Years of Schooling Initiative

Queensland Project

• Part of a $4 million national initiative

• Focus on ‘at risk’ students

• DEST focus on assessment as it informs curriculum and pedagogy

• Queensland focus – front-ending assessment + curriculum, literacy and numeracy demands

15 Intersectoral clusters

If: “The more implicit the school’s pedagogy, which presupposes prior attainment the more locked out will be the outsider. This enables the possessor of the prerequisite cultural capital to continue to monopolize that capital.”

(Walton, 1993)

Then: How can assessment work to open doors for all?

The value of explicit assessment

Educational standards

What is the work of a set of education standards?

The primary function of educational standards is to enablestatements about a students’ quality of performance or degree of achievement to be made without reference to theachievements of other students, which conceivably could beeither all poor or all excellent. In addition, fixed standardsenable long-term changes in a phenomenon to be detected.

(Sadler, 1987, p.196)

Teachers shunting back and forth between:

Curriculum: linking assessment to curriculum intent.

Assessment: explicitly identifying in standards the curriculum knowledge and related literacy demands in tasks

Pedagogy: classroom practice that explicitly scaffolds learning (knowledge + curriculum literacies)

Assessment aligned to learning & teaching

Year: 6/7KLA: ScienceSyllabus levels: 3-4

Task details:Students will investigate an energy type of their choice. Students will then create their own energy experiment and demonstrate this. Students must determine whether this energy is efficient in real-life situations.

Assessment conditions:Individual experimentation (oral presentation) and scientific report submission.

Feedback opportunities:Personal reflection, checklist (student and teacher) and draft feedback.

Framing – assessment practice

as critical enquiry

Curriculum knowledge:Energy and Change 3.2 - Students

identify forms of energy (including electrical and sound energy) and describe the characteristics of those different forms.

investigate type of energy design and perform investigation

of energy through experiment predict outcome of energy

experiment make observations and draw

conclusions use scientific report genre oral presentation – verbal

explanation using scientific language.

Curriculum literacies:Code breaker spelling scientific terminology – for example,’ energy’ and

‘hypothesis’ using conjunctions, adverbs, prepositional phrases and verbs to

express cause and effect relationships recognising reference words in a scientific report.Text participant drawing on background and prior knowledge to construct

meaning recognising and composing elements of a scientific report interpreting scientific terminology using text organisation of headings, main ideas and supporting

details to gather information selecting, summarising and organising ideas from a variety of

sources. predicting outcomes, generating hypotheses and explanations

related to phenomena both within and outside their own experiences.

Text user using appropriate punctuation proofreading and editing independently using appropriate types of texts for particular purposes.Text analyst evaluating human activities which may impact on the

environment, society and individuals.

Framing – assessment practice as critical enquiry

Provision of explicit performance expectations/standards

Involves:

• Clarity of expectations for teachers and students

• Conversations about quality in classrooms and among teachers

• Agreement about where the bar is

• Opportunities for teachers to share interpretations of criteria and standards (moderation)

• Student knowledge and use of quality indicators/standard

Criteria & standards

A teacher on stated criteria and standards:

Most of the students didn’t “do assessment” – while they would all submit an assessment item, the majority view was that it had little relationship to the work they did in class, and was an “add-on” to units of work that signalled the end of learning.

Criteria & standards

Pedagogy

• Connectedness and higher order thinking

• We found that we were continually critiquing our working – looking at the specifics.

• I was more specific in my teaching. Then I looked for the student’s performance profile over time.

• Teacher modelling of tasks

The place of assessment in the classroom

• Resourcing issues: equity of opportunity – all necessary equipment provided to every student

• Students unwilling to attempt tasks for various reasons: embarrassment about access to the physical resources inside/outside schooling

The place of assessment in the classroom

• Assessment for learning: assumptions teacher confirmation and self-correcting

• Original concern – dumbing down vs. teaching for success

• Making assessment goals known/realistically attainable

The place of assessment in the classroom

Greater use of judgment of student learning -

Based on proposition that:that teachers as professionals are able to make appropriate judgments about students’ work, and moreover, that teachers (and students) are best placed to make judgments in a range of contexts and through a range of assessment opportunities

(Cumming, Wyatt-Smith, Elkins & Neville, 2006, p.16)

↓What

• are the system supports?• is the quality assurance?

The place of assessment in the classroom

Knowledge of

community context

Moderation practices

Observations of student/s

Knowledge of pedagogy

Assessment standards

Teacher experience

Judgment:Teacher

knowledge of context

Opportunities:

• Assessment portfolios – student entries

• Distinguishing assessment purposes and audiences

• Building teacher confidence in judging using defined standards

• Discussions about the nature of judgment: holistic and analytic approaches and ‘discipline fit’

• Students having a language to talk about quality

The place of assessment in the classroom

Discipline Knowledge/s

Teacher Judgment: Standards &Improvement

Curriculum Literacies

AssessmentLearning Teaching

Leveraging improvement

The place of assessment in the classroom

Framing assessment as inquiry:

Teachers’ claim to expertise may be tied to how we promote quality learning and qualities of learners, as well as quality outcomes.

The place of assessment in the classroom

The dependability challenge:

What is the highest optimum reliability that can be achieved while preserving construct validity?

The place of assessment in the classroom

Way forward: recognition that improved outcomes are a direct result of teacher intervention.

The place of assessment in the classroom

Whatever the original justification for regular, universal, standardised testing, its ability to measure the skills and sensibilities in the 21st century is limited.

(Kalantzis et al. 2003, p. 25)

Meeting in the middle - assessment, pedagogy, learning and educational disadvantage. Literacy and Numeracy in the Middle Years of Schooling - Queensland Project Report:

http://education.qld.gov.au/literacy/docs/deewr-myp-final-report.pdf

Wyatt-Smith, C., & Cumming, J. (in press). Educational assessment in the 21st Century (Eds.). Springer Academic Publication, Dordecht, The Netherlands.

More information

Current international context

England:

CEO of Qualifications and Curriculum Authority suggests national tests could be replaced by standardised teacher assessment

Times Educational Supplement, 12 May 2006