The Role of Assessment in Promoting Learning

1. The Role of Assessment in Promoting Learning New Faculty Institute September 2010 William S. Moore, Ph.D. Policy Associate, Assessment, Teaching & Learning WA State Board for Community & Technical Colleges bmoore@sbctc.edu 360-704-4346

2. 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

3. Or Is This More Like It…??? …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… Paul Ramsden

4. “What is Assessment?”

5. Assessment: “the zipper between teaching and learning” (Pat Cross)

6. Assessment and Learning • Assessment OF Learning • Assessment FOR Learning Prove Improve

7. 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” Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “is life a multiple choice test or is it a true or false test?” Adapted from Peanuts, by Charles Schulz

8. “Assessment of Learning” Strategies • Essay tests • Performance tasks (e.g., cases, problems, projects, field work, etc.) • Multiple-choice tests • Peer- and self-evaluations • Portfolio collections of work • Research papers

9. Authentic Performance Test? Instructions: Read each question carefully. Answer all questions. Time limit: 4 hours. Begin immediately. I don’t remember the teacher covering any of this!! 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.

10. Strategies Techniques “Assessment for Learning” Strategies Dylan Wiliam, Institute of Education, University of London

11. 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?

12. Good assessment tasks are interchangeable with good instructional tasks.

13. Closing Reflections Teachers do not create learning, learners create learning; teachers create the conditions in which students learn. Dylan Wiliam

14. 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

15. Postscript What understandings & abilities do I want to assess? What performances or work will allow students to demonstrate these understandings & abilities? What activities do students have to do to learn how to generate these performances? What evidence in the performance or work tells me to what extent the students have these understandings & abilities? Designing Course-Embedded Assessment Tasks (aka “Assignments”) Karen Sheingold, Joan Heller, & Susan Paulukonis, “Actively Seeking Evidence…,” ETS, 1994