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assessment

Workload Challenge: Marking

2016-11-02T18:04:15+00:00March 26th, 2016|assessment|

The three areas identified by teachers' responses to the Workload Challenge as particularly burdensome were marking, planning and data and a separate report has been prepared on each. On of the problems encountered in preparing these reports is the lack of a robust evidence base. Too often those involved in compiling the reports were forced to rely on professional judgement and 'common sense' interpretations of what little evidence there was. One of the themes which ran through all our work was the belief that marking, planning and data are proxies for teacher performance. On its own, this might be fine - proxies are often the [...]

Proof of progress Part 2

2016-07-06T22:04:47+01:00March 11th, 2016|assessment|

Back in January I described the comparative judgement trial that we were undertaking at Swindon Academy in collaboration with Chris Wheadon and his shiny, new Proof of Progress system. Today, Chris met with our KS2 team and several brave volunteers from the secondary English faculty to judge the completed scripts our Year 5 students had written. Chris began proceedings by briefly describing the process and explaining that we should aim to make a judgements every 20 seconds or so. The process really couldn't be simpler: the system displays two scripts at a time and you just have to judge which one you think is [...]

Proof of progress – Part 1

2016-03-10T23:03:10+00:00January 30th, 2016|assessment|

Measuring progress is a big deal. I've written before about the many and various ways we get assessment wrong but, increasingly, I'm becoming convinced there are some ways we might get it right. As regular readers will know, I'm interested in the potential of comparative judgement (CJ) and have written about it here and here. Greg Ashman mentions the process obliquely in his new book: When we measure on an absolute scale using a set of criteria, we introduce the possibility of all students scoring 9 or 10 out of 10, particularly if we have trained them well. However, what is really of [...]

Should students respond to feedback?

2015-11-30T12:46:27+00:00November 30th, 2015|assessment, leadership|

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. Fran Lebowitz One of the criticisms of my post about book monitoring is that I have omitted checks to see whether students have responded to feedback. This omission is entirely deliberate. Does this mean I don't care whether students respond to feedback? You might think this is a bit of a silly question - of course they should. After all, what's the point in giving feedback which will be ignored? Dylan Wiliam makes the following comment in my book: Sometimes the support we give to students may be emotional [...]

Comparison is easy

2021-08-02T16:40:12+01:00November 19th, 2015|assessment, English|

The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike. Jacob Bronowski Judging the quality of a thing in isolation is hard. Is this wine good? What about this restaurant? This cheese? This television programme? This child’s essay? But just because we’re bad at making meaningful judgements doesn’t mean we’re aware of experiencing any uncertainty. Uncertainty is uncomfortable and as cognitive psychologist and psychophysicist (who knew that was a thing?) Donald Laming puts it, "In such a state of mind people are unable to resist extraneous suggestion." The [...]

Rethinking assessment Part 2: the Einstellung effect

2015-11-16T12:53:55+00:00November 15th, 2015|assessment|

As I set out here, Dr Chris Wheadon has come up with a beautifully simple solution to assessing students' essays which requires no rubrics, very little marking time and produces extremely reliable results with no attendant loss of validity. It relies on the cumulative power of comparative judgement and represents the future of assessment for subjects which rely on essay length answers to open-ended questions. If you doubt me, the reason might be that your experience of, and sense of success with, mark schemes has blinded you to better alternatives. Imagine you have 3 water jars, each with the capacity to hold a different, fixed [...]

Rethinking assessment Part 1: How can we tell if students are making progress?

2020-06-19T19:15:58+01:00November 15th, 2015|assessment|

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? Stanislaw J. Lec For some time now I've been of the opinion that the way we normally think of progress is based on a myth. Part of the problem is that because we tend to believe that we can see learning we routinely miss the fact that what students can do here and now tells us relatively little about what they can elsewhere and later. We assume  In What If Everything We Knew About Education Was Wrong? I argue that Progress is just a metaphor. It doesn’t really describe objective reality; it provides [...]

Why teacher assessment is less fair than standardised testing

2021-08-10T12:07:55+01:00November 4th, 2015|assessment|

Tests Guns don't kill people, rappers do Goldie Lookin Chain I spent the day yesterday at the Department for Education thinking about how best to cut down on the "unnecessary workload" associated with marking. Today I spent far too much time bandying words with children's writer, Michael Rosen about the value of testing over teacher assessment. It strikes me that both experiences offer an opportunity to set out my objections to teacher assessment and my support for standardised testing. Let's start with teacher assessment. My first concern is that any expectation on teachers to assess students' work adds to their workload. If we're [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #20 Interpretation

2015-07-05T09:56:48+01:00July 5th, 2015|assessment, psychology|

This is the 20th and final post in my series on the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching and Learning and the third of three posts examining how to assess students’ progress: "Making sense of assessment data depends on clear, appropriate, and fair interpretation." "I wish we had more assessment data!" said no sane school leader ever. We're awash with data produced by oceans of assessment. As with so much else in life, the having of a thing is not its purpose. Analysing spreadsheets and graphs becomes like gazing, dumbly, into a crystal ball. We need to know how to interpret what these data [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #19 Measurement

2015-06-30T21:13:23+01:00June 30th, 2015|assessment, psychology|

This is #19 in my series on the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching and Learning and the second of three posts examining how to assess students’ progress: "Students’ skills, knowledge, and abilities are best measured with assessment processes grounded in psychological science with well-defined standards for quality and fairness." The more I read on this subject, the more it becomes clear how widely misunderstood testing and assessment are. But does this actually matter? Do teachers need to know about such issues as reliability, precision and validity? Isn't this just a matter for exam boards and Ofqual? Well, it's been designated as one [...]

Is it possible to get assessment right?

2015-05-31T11:18:35+01:00May 23rd, 2015|assessment|

No. After my last blog on how to get assessment wrong, various readers got in touch to say, OK smart arse, what should we do? Well, I'm afraid the bad news is that we'll never get assessment right. Or at least, it's impossible for assessment to give us anything like perfect information on student's progress or learning. We can design tests to give us pretty good information of students' mastery of a domain, but as Amanda Spielman, chair of Ofsted said at researchED in September, the best we can ever expect from GCSEs is to narrow student achievement down to + or [...]

How to get assessment wrong

2015-05-21T10:45:22+01:00May 20th, 2015|assessment|

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Søren Kierkegaard With the freedom to replace National Curriculum Levels with whatever we want, there's a wonderful opportunity to assess what students can actually do rather than simply slap vague, ill-defined criteria over students' work and then pluck out arbitrary numbers as a poor proxy for progress. But there's also an almost irresistible temptation to panic, follow the herd and get things badly wrong. Levels are by no means the worst we could do - in fact there was [...]

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