Formative Assessment
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Presentation Transcript
Formative Assessment Conference Summary • More rhetoric than reality • Professor Dylan Wiliam, • Schools Network Conference 2011
Where are we now? • We have amazing data on children’s progress and very poor information • We should be making decision-driven data collection not data driven decision making • School leaders need to stop people doing good things to allow them to do even better things
Parent Teacher association? • Parents do not know anything about the school apart from trophies in the foyer, uniform and marking • So make the marking useful for all
Comments vs Grades • Grades and comments in marking leads to • No gain, high achievers positive • No gain, low achievers negative • Competition can be powerful if you believe you can close the gap • The problem of motivation is in the match between challenge and capability • If we grade children’s efforts then we find our selves saying, “Not only are you no good at maths, you’re not even good at trying!”
How to ‘do’ Feedback • What to do with feedback • One group given written praise, list of weaknesses, workplan • The other group was given oral feedback, time to respond • This latter group is the one that improved • Feedback should be more work for the recipients than the donor • Don’t give feedback unless the first 10 mins is given over to responding to the feedback • It’s like the difference between a medical and a post mortem
Leave learning with the learner • Peekability (Simmonds & Cope 1993) • Give children an opportunity to re-examine their solution, not the answer • Scaffolding • Give children scaffolded ‘nudge’ in the right direction, not the complete solution • Sometimes telling children where you’re going spoils the journey
Levelling Fallacies • TGAT report: Children would only be told their level when it had changed (i.e. Year 2 to Year 6) • Sub Levels = Assessment Illiteracy • This doesn’t allow for margins of error, two sub levels each side • Unreliability or invalidity • By having very precise targets we close down possibilities • Everything you do feeds in to where you can be
Kinds of Feedback • Nyquist, 2003 • Knowledge of results = weaker feedback • Strong formative feedback gives 4 times the improvement
Harder than rocket science • Personalisation, Dweck 2000 • internal - I did well because I worked hard • external - I did not do well because Mr Smith let me down • “Success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan” • Permanence • Boys... internal = stable (I am clever), external = unstable (my questions must come up one day) • Best learners attribute successes and failures to internal causes: • “it’s down to you and you can do something about it”
Mindset • If you believe “Ability is fixed” • It’s ok to fail if everybody fails, but disastrous if everybody else succeeds • You become ‘performance oriented’: You can’t fail on easy work • But the best learners want to be pushed and push themselves • “Ability is incremental” - by working you’re getting smarter • Being good at anything is just down to practice • Teachers have to believe children can get better and teachers have to believe that teachers can get better too
Engaging learners in feedback • Slow down the emotional reaction (it is 10 times faster than the cognitive reaction) • “Here are the comments on these essays, match the comments to the piece of work”
Providing Feedback that moves learning on • Feedback should cause thinking • Provide guidance on how to improve • Comment only marking • Focused marking • Everybody gets the same amount of work from feedback • Explicit reference to mark schemes • Feedback should be more work for the recipient than the donor • 5 of these are wrong, you find them • Response required to feedback • Re-timing assessment - decision driven data collection • How do I wrap up this topic? Find out what learning is secure and tailor the last few lessons to address the gaps
What is assessment? • An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement elicited by the assessment is interpreted and used to make decisions about the next steps in instruction (whether teacher:pupil or pupil:pupil) which is better, or better founded, than if the decisions were made without it.