RJA2 & The Impact of Assessment on Teaching and Learning in My Classroom as Informed by Theories of Assessment for Learning

Introduction

Assessment is the means to find out what a learner knows, understands and is able to do. Traditionally, this has been the only purpose of assessment reflected by the focus of educators on end of unit, end of year or end of programme tests as the primary method of assessment. Known as summative assessment, the goal of these tests is simply to evaluate student learning by comparing the results to national standards or in other words to find out where they have got to at the end of a block of learning. This is Assessment of Learning and in this form is of scant benefit to teachers and students as it does little more than grading and categorising them.

Assessment for Learning on the other hand, turns assessment into a powerful tool to:

1. Monitor student progress for the purpose of clarifying where they are in light of learning objectives

2. Establishing what they need to do to achieve those objectives

3. Help the teacher adapt their teaching methods, if necessary, to aid students in reaching their goals

With these purposes in my mind, assessment is made continually, as an informative progress check, using a diverse range of methods which will be discussed further on. This is known as Formative Assessment and is specifically designed to provide &readings & and inform &course corrections &, in the parlance of ship navigation. Assessment becomes a means to enhance student knowledge, understanding and ability. While formative assessment more clearly serves the goals of Assessment for Learning (AfL), summative assessment can also be used formatively to achieve these goals.

My school has established certain guidelines and demands in terms of assessment which are then further developed in to departmental marking policies. It is worth noting that the guideline is named a &marking & policy rather than an assessment policy implying a narrower focus on assessment. The marking policy requires that books show evidence of teachers & assessing students thoroughly. The definition of &thoroughly & being that the work is graded or levelled, with guidance on how to achieve the next grade and an opportunity for students to respond in the format of, for example, student-set targets in response to teacher comments. Furthermore, books must contain evidence of peer-assessment, where students assess each other, and self-assessment too. Finally, overall achievement records must be present in all books as should level descri ptors/trackers for each unit in order to track progress.

The purpose of the policy is apparently to establish a whole-school approach to assessment for learning in which both student and teacher are aware of where the student is in light of learning objectives and to identify and action the necessary steps needed to achieve those objectives. In reality I have learnt through my interaction with colleagues that a large segment of teachers and leaders see it as primarily an exercise in &box-ticking & i.e. simply to show to stakeholders higher up the food chain that assessment is taking place. Assessment for &show & rather than assessment for learning. Whether or not this culture of evidencing assessment to avoid censure and achieve acclaim still has a beneficial impact for students compared to a culture where educators independently buy in to the need for continual assessment to promote learning is beyond the scope of this work.

In terms of classroom practice, guidelines are not published for the entire school, however, expectations are communicated through lesson observations, learning walks, training and mentoring. Namely that students must be aware of learning intentions in every portion of a lesson and that teachers should show that they aware of how much progress is being made by each student.

Reflecting on My Practice

The weekly reflections from my journal form the basis of reflecting on my practice. To this end, I have chosen Week 9, understanding the process of embedding assessment by reflecting on Black William &s, Inside The Black Box (1998) and Week 19, focus on my assessment practice. The reason I have chosen these Weekly Reflections (WKRs) is because in the first instance, interaction with literature by experts in the area of assessment provides a deeper understanding of the rationale and purpose of Assessment for Learning providing a sharper focus for its deployment in my classroom. In the second instance, by reflecting on my own practice I can identify strengths and weaknesses in my ability to utilise AfL to improve my practice in light of the literature I have read on classroom assessment.

I will use Kolb &s Experiential Learning Cycle to critically and actively reflect on my practice. Kolb &s four-stage learning cycle &shows how experience is translated through reflection into concepts, which in turn are used as guides for active experimentation & CITATION Kol84 l 2057 (Kolb, 1984). The stages, any of which can be used to begin with, include concrete experience (CE), reflective observation (RO), abstract conceptualisation (AC) and active experimentation (AE) as described in Appendix A. This is a very apt model of reflection on my practice because the very act of good assessment, requires continual assessment of progress to be used to inform adaptation to teaching, which after application provide further assessment opportunities to once again inform any necessary changes to teaching &CITATION Wil11 l 2057 (William, 2011). Thus, reflecting on my practice through the Kolb Cycle bears stark resemblance to cycle of Assessment for Learning

Learning From My Experience

My weekly reflections provide concrete experiences in terms of the formative and summative assessment strategies I already use, as well as abstract conceptualisation in the form of ideas that have precipitated from reflecting on literatureCITATION Wil98 l 2057 (Black William, 1998) and assessment practice in my school.

Although I have used questioning and monitoring of tasks since the beginning of my teaching career in order to gauge student understanding, Black William &s Inside the Black Box, taught me that assessment should be even further in order to &give advice for improvement and learning &, &come to know pupils & individual learning needs &, &show pupils that all can achieve because progress is being assessed rather than achievement &, and to work with low-achievers to concentrate on specific problems with their work. In the last case this means providing a clear understanding of what is wrong and achievable targets to put it right. In light of reflective observation of my practice and subsequent abstract conceptualisation in conjunction with ideas from Black and William and senior colleagues, I actively experimented with new strategies. This included firstly, displaying levelled learning objectives which are referred back to throughout the lesson to reinforce that &learning has a goal and not just exercise to do well in & &CITATION Wil98 l 2057 (Black William, 1998) as well as providing pupils an opportunity to individually identify what they have learnt already and what they need to work on. Secondly, I utilised dialogic marking as standard assessment practice highlighting what a student had done to achieve a grade/level for a task, a question to enable them to reach the next level with opportunity for student feedback.

Assessment that gives advice for improvement and learning became especially urgent after a particular year 8 student achieved a relatively low level for a standard year group test, and asked me what he could do to improve. I did not have a definitive answer to hand because I did not know and the reason I did not know was because my assessment of tests and other material up until that point was not designed to inform myself or my students of achievable targets for improvement, but simply to measure how much learning had taken place.

My weekly reflection, professional development training on assessment, conversations with colleagues and perusal of resources on assessment strategies has highlighted that the range of assessment strategies I use is very narrow. Consequently, my teaching practice falls short in several areas such as sharing success criteria so pupils can provide honest assessment and providing opportunities for reflection. Beneficial assessment strategies that I could but fail to implement & at least on a regular basis - include peer-assessment, self-assessment, sharing of success criteria, student designed concept maps, hand signals to show student confidence in learning objectives, debriefing or presenting after activities and plenary tickets when leaving the class.

Reading Mary Whitehouse &s (2013) Using a backward design approach to embed assessment in teaching, SSR, I have concluded that I too need to take a backward design approach to planning a unit or scheme of work. This includes first and foremost identifying learning intentions, secondly what tasks and questions could provide evidence of said learning and finally generating the activities that will &lead as many students as possible to complete the evidence of learning tasks and questions. & &CITATION Whi13 l 2057 (Whitehouse, 2013)

This backward design approach will mean that not only will assessment for learning be placed at the forefront of all planning, but also that suitable assessment strategies can be planned and built into teaching in advance in order to deliver all the benefits of assessment for learning in as many ways as would be efficiently possible according to the needs of my students.

Bibliography

&BIBLIOGRAPHY Black, P. William, D., 1998. Inside the Black Box& Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment, London: King`s College London School of Education.

Kolb, D., 1984. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Whitehouse, M., 2013. Using a backward design approach to embed assessment in teaching, s.l.: ASE.