Schema-building

A component of learning, as students build their schema for any given knowledge domain, is a metacognitive process that drives motivation and intentionality: a knowledge of self – what do I know? What do I need to know/do/focus my attention and effort on in order to achieve goals? Assessment needs to provide feedback to students as they engage in this process – so it has to be meaningful in terms they understand, highlighting actions they can take.

Variation

It’s an inherent feature of any group of people that their characteristics vary – and this includes their rate of progress or depth of learning in any given process. Every group is a mixed-attainment group. Comparative performance in learning informs our sense of standards but the way we give meaning to performance across the range is subjective, driven by various, often competing, values: our desire to reward excellence and to want everyone to succeed.

The Bell Curve and Grades

Scores of several thousand students taking the same maths test, scaled so the range of scores is 0-100 form a classic bell-curve: not imposed on the data; it’s an outcome of cohort performance, not dissimilar to height variation. The grades however are entirely arbitrary: the number of grades and where they are placed have no fundamental basis; we invent them as a proxy for ideas about standards spanning the range of performance. Pass/fail thresholds are similarly arbitrary – determined by policy makers; accepted conceptually by stakeholders engaged in the system. Boundaries might shift when different tests are set and then compared, in order to maintain validity in asserting that standards are common between them.

Crucially, 20% of children will always be in the bottom 20% (yup!) and so we need to find ways to give their learning value, motivating them to engage in the process of learning more – outside the framework of comparison with the cohort.

Data Delusions

Very often we make assumptions about data validity that isn’t there eg that a 6 in Geography has parity with a 6 in History – when no mechanisms exist to moderate the assessments. The flagging systems rarely tell teachers new information and, relative to the time taken to establish these data sets, the impact on learning for individual students is very low. None of these data points communicates anything actionable in curriculum terms – because the original assessment information has been distorted into proxies that don’t carry enough meaning.

Triangulation

A more complete understanding of a student’s learning and progress is formed by triangulating between data, samples of work (the organic, qualitative holistic sense of standards) and interactions in class dialogues. Sometimes these elements contradict each other.. but it’s a truer sense of how we evaluate what a student knows and what they need to do to learn more.

Difficulty

Our ideas about difficulty are located in the specifics of the questions students can answer; the problems they can solve. Often there’s a logical ladder of difficulty through a curriculum; sometimes it’s empirical. Student’s sense of success and progress is located in getting questions right. Progress means moving onto more difficult questions up the ladder.

Quality

There is no correct mark for an essay or piece of writing – it’s a matter of judgement. Whilst marks and grades might give a broad sense of standards as a loose proxy, students and teachers understand the actual quality of a piece of work in the detail by matching its features to the features of other exemplars . There’s a complex combination of overall quality with a sense of detailed criteria being met; repeated engagement in the evaluation process produces a schema for what ‘success’ looks like in the context of specific tasks.

Knowledge progression

Within a typical topic area -there’s a set of knowledge students typically need to gain for us and them to say ‘they know it’. However this is not an absolute measure; the is no actual limit and no real sense to ‘I know X’ or ‘I can do Y’ when there is nearly always ever more to know; ever greater depth to explore and explain. Progress manifests itself as knowing more, explaining in greater depth or with greater fluency. Again we need to compare examples to gain a sense of what level of depth constitutes success or excellence in a given context, in response to specific questions and challenges. However, whatever grade any student is given or score they gain on a test, there is always more they can know.. and that knowledge is definable and meaningful in ways that cannot be conveyed by grades and score themselves.

Exemplars

In multiple areas, exemplars serve as a powerful reference point for developing a shared understanding of what standards mean – what is mediocre; what is excellent. This can be hard to achieve through rubrics and success criteria or descriptors. Showing multiple contrasting examples brings the criteria off the page, allowing students to compare their work and see for themselves where they might improve.

Formative Assessment Tools.

Assessment obviously embraces the formative assessment that happens minute by minute during lessons through questioning, low-stakes retrieval tests and performances and dynamic, responsive feedback. The repertoire of techniques teachers can deploy is extensive. Doing these things well day in day out, matters a lot more than submitting ‘accurate data’ into the central database a few times a year.