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When assessment fails

I wrote yesterday about the distinctions between assessment and feedback. This sparked some interesting comment which I want to explore here. I posted a diagram which Nick Rose and I designed for our forthcoming book. The original version of the figure looked like this: We decided to do away with B - 'Unreliable but valid?' in the interests of clarity and simplicity. Sadly though, the world is rarely clear or simple. Clearly D is the most desirable outcome - the assessment provides reliable measurements which result in valid inferences about what students know and can do. It's equally clear that A is [...]

2017-07-27T18:29:04+01:00July 12th, 2016|assessment|

Feedback and assessment are not the same

You don't figure out how fat a pig is by feeding it. Greg Ashman At the sharp end of education, assessment and feedback are often, unhelpfully, conflated. This has been compounded by the language we use: terms like 'assessment for learning' and 'formative assessment' are used interchangeably and for many teachers both are essentially the same thing as providing feedback. Clearly, these processes are connected - giving feedback without having made some kind of assessment is probably impossible in any meaningful sense and most assessment will result in some form of feedback being given or received - but they are not the same. [...]

2016-07-11T21:18:46+01:00July 11th, 2016|assessment|

A response to the Education Select Committee: Why Amanda Spielman should run Ofsted

So. The Education Select Committee has rejected Amanda Spielman as the next Chief Inspector. Andrew Old has already summarised why he feels Amanda would have been a terrific appointment here and I agree with him entirely. The purpose of this post is to reflect on quite serious flaws in the Select Committee's reasoning. In the document detailing their decision, they claim that they sought to "test Ms Spielman’s professional competence and personal independence" and were "left with significant concerns about her suitability for the post of HMCI." These are their particular gripes: First: Ms Spielman did not demonstrate the passion for the [...]

2016-07-08T11:58:49+01:00July 7th, 2016|Featured|

10 Misconceptions about Comparative Judgement

I've been writing enthusiastically about Comparative Judgement to assess children's performance for some months now. Some people though are understandably suspicious of the idea. That's pretty normal. As a species we tend to be suspicious of anything unfamiliar and like stuff we've seen before. When something new comes along there will always be those who get over excited and curmudgeons who suck their teeth and shake their heads. Scepticism is healthy. Here are a few of the criticisms I've seen of comparative judgement: It's not accurate. Ranking children is cruel and unfair. It produces data which says whether a child has passed or [...]

2016-07-07T17:05:02+01:00July 7th, 2016|assessment|

Proof of progress Part 3

Who's better at judging? PhDs or teachers? In Part 1 of this series I described how Comparative Judgement works and the process of designing an assessment to test Year 5 students' writing ability. Then in Part 2 I outlined the process of judging these scripts and the results they generated. In this post I'm going to draw some tentative conclusions about the differences between the ways teachers approach students' work and the way other experts might do so. After taking part in judging scripts with teachers, my suspicion was that teachers’ judgements might be warped by the long habit of relying on rubrics [...]

2016-12-06T09:34:06+00:00July 6th, 2016|assessment|

School improvement: Can you buck the trend?

In my last post I discussed the natural volatility of GCSE results and the predictably random nature of results over the long-term. I ended by saying, "The agenda for school improvement has to move away from endlessly pouring over data looking for patterns that don’t exist. We need to find new – better – ways to hold schools to account and come up with new definitions of what school improvement means." Interestingly, two readers got in touch to cite the example of Michaela School as a potential outlier. Obviously, Michaela's first cohort are still a number of years away from sitting [...]

2016-12-31T16:26:22+00:00July 4th, 2016|Featured, leadership|

Where now for school improvement?

In the past, school improvement was easy. You could push pupils into taking BTECs or Diplomas (sometimes with 100% coursework) equivalent to multiple GCSEs; you could organise your curriculum to allow for early entry and multiple resits; you could bend the rules on controlled assessment and a whole host of other little tricks and cons intended to flatter and deceive. Now what have we got? PiXL Club? As Rob Coe laid bare in Improving Education: A Triumph of Hope over Experience, school improvement has been a tawdry illusion. Evidence from international comparisons, independent studies and national exams tell a conflicting and unsavoury tale. As [...]

2016-07-04T16:04:16+01:00July 3rd, 2016|Featured|

Developing expertise #3: Circuit breakers

We've already seen how creating the right environment and seeking better feedback might help us the develop the kind of expertise required to make genuinely intuitive judgements and this post I'll discuss how imposing checks or 'circuit breakers' on our thinking might be another way to develop expertise. Many, perhaps most of the decision teachers make are made before conscious thought. As soon as we achieve a measure of familiarity with teaching the curriculum we’re responsible for covering, we move steadily from the deliberate, conscious phase of practice to the automatic, unconscious phase. Thinking about all the decisions we make is exhausting and so, to [...]

2016-07-01T22:29:31+01:00July 1st, 2016|training|

Developing expertise #2 – Seek feedback

In my previous post I suggested the first step for teachers to develop expertise was to find ways to change the environment so that the feedback we get is unbiased. In this post we will consider why much of the feedback we do get is unhelpful and how to get more of the helpful stuff. Many of the decisions we take  - in life generally and as teachers - are based not on reason and logic but on vague, nebulous feelings of 'rightness'. Why did you buy the car you drive, the toothpaste you use, the shoes you wear? Why did [...]

2016-06-30T11:09:32+01:00June 30th, 2016|training|

Developing expertise #1 Create the right environment

In this post I discussed why teachers' experience might not translate directly into expertise. This is the first of a series exploring some of the different ways we could increase the likelihood that teachers are able to develop reliably intuitive judgements about how children learn and how to help them learn better. The theory is that experience will only lead to expertise in a 'kind domain'; in 'wicked domains' experience seems more likely to lead to over-confidence. If teaching comprises some 'wicked' aspects, then what can we do to change that? The main difference between these domains is the quality of the [...]

2016-06-29T13:28:00+01:00June 29th, 2016|training|

Developing intuition: when can you trust your gut?

At the talk I gave on intuition at Wellington College's Education Festival on Thursday, I ended up not using the slides I'd prepared and wandering a bit off topic. Here follows what I'd planned to say as well as the slides. Teachers' intuition: when can you trust your gut? from David Didau Certainty and over confidence can prevent us from thinking; the more certain we are that we're right, the less we'll consider other possibilities. This tendency not to think too much about the possibility that we might be mistaken stems in part from a whole suite of well documented cognitive biases, but [...]

2017-04-14T22:44:41+01:00June 26th, 2016|training|

Telling better stories

None of us know what made us what we are, and when we have to say something, we make up a good story. Steven Pinker, My Genome, My Self Stories are one of the most important ways we have of trying to make sense of the world. We look  at all the coincidences, connections, curiosities and contradictions that surround us and weave them into a plausible narrative in which everything makes sense and inconsistencies are explained away. This incredibly useful skill enables us to interpret an otherwise incomprehensible world - without narrative there would be little way for us to make meaning of our [...]

2016-06-21T21:26:21+01:00June 21st, 2016|Featured|
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