ASSESSMENTASSESSMENT

Starting OutStarting Out

• Design and write down the assessment criteria for the perfect biscuit. (7 min max.).

• Hand your criteria to the next table

Your First Task

• Apply the criteria

• Undertake assessment and provide your own grading scale

• Feedback

Your First Task

•Validity

•Reliability

•Fairness

•Alignment

•Relevance and Transferability

•Criterion v. Norm referenced assessment

•Writing and using assessment criteria

•Formative and/or Summative assessment

•Type, Number and Range of Assessments

•Innovative assessment

•Assessing Performance

ASSESSMENT: Some important

issues:

To sit down together

Ad Sedere

"You've got to involve students actively, not just view them as objects of assessment, but as agents of assessment. This can be done in many ways. One is that you ask students systematically what they have learned. It's a simple idea; it's rarely done.....You find that students say some remarkable things. Often what they perceive as most important is not the academic learning, but social skills, attitudes, and how to learn where to find what they want to know.”

Walt Haney, Professor of Education, Center for the Study of Testing,

Evaluation and Educational Policy, Boston, USA.

ASSESSMENT: QAA 18 precepts

General principles

1 As bodies responsible for academic standards, institutions should have effective procedures for:

i) designing, approving, supervising and reviewing the assessment strategies for programmes and awards;

ii) the consistent implementation of rigorous assessment practices which ensure that the academic/professional standard for each award and award element is set and maintained at the appropriate level and that student performance is properly judged against this.

2 The principles, procedures and processes of all assessment should be explicit, valid, and reliable.

ASSESSMENT: QAA 18 precepts

Feedback to students on performance

12 Institutions should ensure that appropriate

feedback is provided to students on assessed work

in a way that promotes learning and

facilitates improvement.

Staff development and training

13 Institutions should ensure that all staff

involved in the assessment of students

are competent to undertake their roles

and responsibilities.

• The assessment of student learning begins with educational values

• Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time

• Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes

• Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also and equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes

• Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic

SOME PRINCIPLES 9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing Student Learning (American Association for Higher Education)

• Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved.

• Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about.

• Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change.

• Through assessment, educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public.

Re-printed with permissionAuthors: Alexander W. Astin; Trudy W. Banta; K. Patricia Cross; Elaine El-Khawas; Peter T. Ewell; Pat Hutchings; Theodore J. Marchese; Kay M. McClenney; Marcia Mentkowski; Margaret A. Miller; E. Thomas Moran; Barbara D. Wright.

9 Principles cont…….

Every assessment:

• Is based in a “theory” of how people learn, what they know and how knowledge and skill progresses over time

• Embodies assumptions about which tasks are most likely to elicit demonstrations of what students know and can do.

• Is based on assumptions about how best to interpret the outcomes to draw meaningful inferences about what students know and can do.

What does assessment have to do with learning?

Good assessments provide opportunities for students to both learn and reveal their learning.

Grades or scores help teachers and students monitor learning, but they do little to promote learning.

All learning requires feedback but the feedback must be informative. - Feedback must provide guidance to the student and

the teacher on what to do to improve performance.

Learners must learn how to use feedback to improve performance.

Teachers must learn how to give feedback that will lead to improved performance.

Another short task: Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Write down and share 3 feedback statements that a teacher should never use. (Use your own experience!)

Now make it positive!

Now make it constructive!

SOME MODELS

A good model is like a good map…..

but it doesn’t tell you how to make the journey

Teaching-Influenced Assessment

What does Assessment have to do with Teaching?

Assessment

Teaching

Objectives

Often we don’t have a clear vision of what or how we will assess until after we have designed or completed teaching.

FormativeAssessment

Assessment-influenced Teaching

AssessmentObjectives Teaching

Bloom’s Taxonomy 1956

from Atherton 2004, based on Bloom 1956

Integrating & Aligning Teaching & Assessment Bloom’s taxonomy*

Knowledge Dimension Factual - basic elements or components of domain needed

to solve problems in it Conceptual - interrelationships among elements, how

they function Procedural - how to do task, methods of domain, criteria

for using skills, techniques, methods, etc Meta-cognitive - knowledge of cognition, such as how

strategies can help, requirements of different tasks, & awareness of one’s own cognition, such as strengths, weaknesses, etc

*Anderson, L.W., & Krathwohl, D.R. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives.Longman: New York, NY.

Cognitive Processes Dimension Remember - recall, recognize, identify Understand - interpret, exemplify, classify, infer,

summarize, explain, compare Interpret - clarify, paraphrase, translate, represent

Apply - execute, implement, use, carry out Analyze - differentiate, distinguish, organize,

attribute, select, parse Evaluate - check, critique, judge, monitor, test Create - generate, plan, produce, construct,

hypothesize

*Anderson, L.W., & Krathwohl, D.R. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives.Longman: New York, NY.

1 Pre-structural: here students are simply acquiring bits of unconnected information, which have no organisation and make no sense.

2 Unistructural: simple and obvious connections are made, but their significance is not grasped.

Biggs’ SOLO TaxonomyStructure of the Observed Learning Outcome

3 Multistructural: a number of connections may be made, but the meta-connections between them are missed, as is their significance for the whole.

4 Relational level: the student is now able to appreciate the significance of the parts in relation to the whole.

Biggs SOLO TaxonomyStructure of the Observed Learning Outcome

Biggs SOLO TaxonomyStructure of the Observed Learning Outcome

5 At the extended abstract level, the student is making connections not only within the given subject area, but also beyond it, able to generalise and transfer the principles and ideas underlying the specific instance.

Puss in Boots

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

William Blake

T. S. Eliot

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Cat’s Eyes

Cat O’Nine Tails

Nine Lives

Le Chat Noir

Cools Cat

Top Cat

Owl and the Pussycat

REPLICATION

ORIGINATION

FORMULATION

INNOVATION

T H E C R E A T I V E C O N T I N U U M

Based on Fennell, E., (1993) Categorising Creativity in Competence & Assessment No. 23, Oct. 1993, Employment Dept.

“ Assessment done properly should begin conversations about performance, not end

them.”

Wiggins (1993), p. 13

Some Practice

Presentation and Performance: Negotiated assessment

• Students engaged in creative practice work at different levels AND different ways

• The products they create will be different as will the processes and methods utilised

• That assessment should operate and be perceived as an integral part of the learning process rather than 'bolted-on' to the end of that process.

• That the form, content and implementation of the assessment process should be commensurable with the discourse and practices of the field

• ‘Assessment' derives from the Latin 'ad sedere’ which means 'to sit down together' (Ross 1993). Students became agents in their own assessment rather than objects of assessment.

Negotiated assessment

Six assessment fields:

• Presentation/Production i.e. the finished product presented to an audience

• Process i.e. the journey that led to the product

• Idea i.e. the ideas that informed both the process and the product.

• Technical i.e. the quality and utility of the technical features of the product and the skills with which they were assembled and/or operated

• Documentation i.e. research, design, planning, evaluation etc.

• Interview i.e. the student's ability to articulate their understanding, utilisation and application and use of any of the above.

engage students as agents IN their

assessment rather than treat them as

objects OF assessment

assess as little as possible, but as much

as necessary

aim for quality and impact rather than

quantity and coverage

do it once (maybe twice) and do it well

everything (ought to) connect

PK’s Rough Guide to Assessment

??

SOME QUESTIONS What is the ethos of the assessment? Are students expected to

replicate/formulate/innovate/originate?

Is the assessment task ‘fit for purpose’?   

Are students involved in setting goals and criteria for assessment?

Are the students performing, creating, producing, or doing something?

Do the assessment tasks require students to use higher-level thinking and/or problem solving skills?

Do the assessment tasks provide measures of metacognitive skills and attitudes, collaborative skills and intrapersonal skills as well as the more usual intellectual products?

Do the assessment tasks measure meaningful instructional activities?

Are the tasks contextualised in real-world applications?

Are the student responses scored according to specified criteria, known in advance, which define standards for good performance?