Effective Assessment is Key to Student Learning

Day, July 16, 2015

Assessment FOR, AS, and OF Learning

Triangulation of Evidence

Feedback

The Brain - Jim Craigen

According to Damian Cooper (an independent education consultant, “assessment guru” to some), there are two guiding principles to assessment: Assessment must be good to students and it must be manageable and efficient for teachers.  Assessment must promote learning, and be fair and equitable, and sensitive to individual learner’s needs. 

A lot of us are confused with “for, as, and of learning” assessments.  The following is my attempt to distinguish one from the other:

	FOR	AS	OF
Purpose	Seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and teachers to decide where are they, where to go in their learning and what’s the best to get there	Fostering learners’ self –reflection, presenting and modelling external, structured opportunities	Evaluating how well the students are learning and reporting of results at the end of an assignment, lesson, unit or course
Tools	Teachers observations of  and conversation with students	Self- reflection and peer evaluation strategies	Student’s products.  Descriptive feedback
Nature and Use	Diagnostic and Formative assessment to determine learner’s prior knowledge and skills	Formative helps student monitor owns progress	Summative assessment is used by teacher to summarize learning at a given point in time
Timing	Before the instruction begins	On-going, while student is still gaining knowledge and practising skills	Towards the end of learning processes but not necessarily at the end of the unit or course
	Assessment	Assessment	Evaluation

We can use the analogy of coaching a football club or game.  Assessment for and as learning is the practice.  Teachers gather data to tell learners what to do next. For informs teachers, as inform students.  Assessment of learning is the game itself. It is accomplished by the teacher and use it in evaluating the performance of the learners.  In this assessment, teachers gives the grade with descriptive feedback.  Assessment of learning is usually in the end, but not necessarily. Just like in a  football game, where winning is achieved by effective coaching, in education, effective assessment is key to student learning.

The following is an attempt to link or validate topics from previous class discussions to the presentation of Jim Craigen, today’s guest speaker, who talked about the Brain and Cooperative Learning. 

• ·         The brain activities discussed by Jim is parallel to our discussions on the Teenage Brain article.
• ·         Small talk greases social interaction (Carducci). à Dan Meyer urging educators to   start conversations and teach math through these conversations.
• ·         Emotion dictates how we are going to learn.  Positive emotions can facilitate learning.  à With open questions, everybody is loved in a math questions.  Open questions are multi entry and multi route.  That means everybody is welcome to answer questions in a welcoming and safe manner.
• ·         The more you laugh the better your memory.  à Sing and dance in your classroom.
• ·         There is 25% retention when student see instructions and 90% if they teach them.  à Open questions and parallel tasks allowing students to building problems taking ownership of their learning.  Injecting ambiguity to allow more questions and discussions.
• ·         Environmental complexity is stimulating to the brain.  à inject ambiguity in building math problems
• ·         Engagement is essential to [student] success.  à  Engagement is one of the purposes of open questions and rich tasks. 
• ·         Sensory Memory stays 1 to 2 seconds; working memory, 18 seconds.  They are to be “rehearsed” to extend them to long term memory.  à Our practice of writing blogs is a way to “rehearsing” our memory, and implementing and teaching what we learn from this course lead to long term memories and learning.