Evidence-based decision making: ‘Micro’ issues

1. Evidence-based decision making: ‘Micro’ issues Rama Mathew Delhi University, Delhi

2. Micro issues in evaluation Evaluation in education functions at two levels: • Macro level: decisions about pass/fail, attendance, teacher-pupil ratio, mid-day meals, teacher qualifications etc. Product oriented, high-stakes, summative • Micro level: how are students progressing in the classroom? The kind of support needed based on feedback Process oriented, low stakes, formative Rama Mathew

3. Why we need to do FA • FA supports and assists learning: it provides feedback and correctives at each stage in the teaching-learning process • FA can tell what students know and can do, and can do with some difficulty and therefore instruction can be modified accordingly Rama Mathew

4. Who is involved in FA? • The teacher and students Because both are part of the teaching-learning process • If students are to develop into lifelong, independent, self-directed learners, and take ownership of their learning, they need to be included. This way they will be motivated to learn. Rama Mathew

5. FA is assessment for learning • Assessment for learning (AfL) • Assessment of learning (AL) • Monitoring learner progress is AfL Rama Mathew

6. What AfL is not • More frequent summative assessments • All testing a teacher does in the classroom • Filling up forms on how ‘good’ each student is on various dimensions • Labelling certain students or excluding them from future learning experiences • A test. FA produces not a score but an insight into student understanding • Something that interferes with students’ learning Rama Mathew

7. What is learning? • Learning occurs when students are ‘thinking, problem solving, constructing, transforming, investigating, creating, analyzing, making choices, organizing, deciding, explaining, talking and communicating, sharing, representing, predicting, interpreting, assessing, reflecting, taking responsibility, exploring, asking, answering, recording, gaining new knowledge, and applying that new knowledge to new situations.’ Cameron, Tate, Macnaughton and Politano 1998, p.6) Rama Mathew

8. Definition of AfL • Assessment for Learning is part of everyday practice by students, teachers and peers that seeks, reflects upon and responds to information from dialogue, demonstration and observation in ways that enhance ongoing learning. (AfL experts, Dunedin New Zealand, 2009) Rama Mathew

9. Keeping Learning on Track (ETS 2010) • The idea is of students and teachers to use evidence ….to adapt teaching and learning to meet immediate learning needs minute-by-minute and day-by-day Rama Mathew

10. Any assessment involves four activities • Designing opportunities to gather evidence • Collecting evidence • Interpreting it • Acting on interpretations Rama Mathew

11. Key strategies for doing AfL • Sharing learning expectations (clarifying intentions, and criteria for success) • Questioning (to engineer effective classroom discussions, questions that elicit evidence of learning and making inferences from that evidence) • Feedback • Self-and peer-assessment Rama Mathew

12. Processes involved in FA self-/peer and teacher assmnt through spontaneous and planned obsrvn of individual students/pairs/ groups, asking questions, maintaining records of how students progress from one activity to another Assess status of goals Present state of learners’ ability Action taken by teacher/ learner to bridge the gap Set new goals by negotiating Rama Mathew

13. Rama Mathew

14. Monitoring progress is research-based teaching (Stenhouse 1975:141) and is the business of the teacher. Rama Mathew

15. Challenges and issues • Assessment reforms would have to address all three components simultaneously, i.e. teaching, learning and assessment. A ‘vision’ of a whole-curriculum reform should be conceptualised, concretised and supported. • Physical and infrastructural facilities Rama Mathew

16. Challenges and issues • Need for orientation in pre-service and in-service teacher workshops to the characteristics of FA and how it could be translated into classroom processes • Teachers need time and space to develop a sense of ownership and to articulate and critique their own implicit constructs and interpretations. Rama Mathew

17. Future directions • Case studies to be carried out that look closely at what strategies teachers adopt to monitor progress, students’ language learning processes and the kind of fine-tuned support they need, especially low-achievers. Rama Mathew

18. Future directions • There are very few research-based, empirical accounts by teachers themselves of how they monitor students’ progress in their classrooms; it is usually the assessment expert who does research. Rama Mathew

19. Can all learning be evidence based? • Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein Rama Mathew

20. References • ‘Assessing ESL in South Asia’. In A. J. Kunnan (Ed.) The Companion to Language Assessment, California: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,2014, DOI: 10.1002/9781118411360. wbcla104. • ‘Monitoring progress in the classroom’. In A. J. Kunnan (Ed.) The Companion to Language Assessment, California: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2014, DOI: 10.1002/9781118411360.wbcla073 (Co-author M. Poehner). Rama Mathew

21. Thank you mathewrama@gmail.com Rama Mathew