Assessment standards & education futures: A framing of assessment as inquiry

1. Assessment standards & education futures: A framing of assessment as inquiry Professor Claire Wyatt-SmithDean, Griffith Education

2. Beyond Objectivity and Subjectivity: Assessment as decision-making • Assessment as artefact and as process • Linking artefact and process – decision-making • Artefact – fitness for purpose • Traces of decisions not readily available • How and why assessment comes to be enacted in particular ways

3. Proposition 1: • If we are serious about educational improvement, the focus needs to be on: • the quality of assessment instruments, at both classroom and system levels; • standards, teacher use of standards in teaching and in judging quality, and • moderation opportunities.

4. Proposition 2: For large-scale testing initiatives to realise their potential for improvement, the distance between teacher and tests must be reduced.

5. Proposition 3: A critical need exists at the level of policy and practice to rethink the purpose and role of standards, and how teachers work with them. The search for credible assessment evidence for reporting depends on how and how well assessment/testing links to learning and teaching.

6. Issues of quality: assessment opportunities Classroom-based decision making System data Assessment in a learning culture Assessment, quality learning and standards

7. Bringing quality to the centre: • see educational assessment in terms of its connectedness to issues of meaning – knowledge, teaching, learning, and language • inquiring into the interactivity of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment

8. Overview • Teacher assessment? • National curriculum • National achievement standards • NAPLAN: Constructs of accountability • ICTs: convergence • Purposes • Evidence • Standards • Roles of teachers/students

10. Evidence types: what, when and why Assessment purposes – fitness for purpose How much information? What modes and achievement contexts are most desirable? What checks apply to validity? reliability? Assessment practice as a series of decisions

11. Assessment Learning Teaching Discipline Knowledge Teacher Judgment: Standards & Improvement Curriculum Literacies Leveraging improvement

12. Alignment of assessment-learning-teaching involves: • Starting with curriculum intent • Assessment: front-ending assessment • Task design issues – rigour of assessment tasks • Making expectations explicit to students: • assessment criteria and standards • (curriculum and literacy demands) • Deeper learning: self- and peer-assessment • Profiling student achievement over time

13. Quality assessment & the adolescent • Resources necessary through to making a judgment: • superior knowledge about the content or substance of what is to be learned • skill in constructing and compiling assessment tasks, and generally in working out ways to elicit revealing and pertinent responses from students • deep knowledge of criteria and standards [or performance expectations] appropriate to the assessment task • evaluative skill or expertise in having made judgments about students efforts on similar tasks in the pas • a set of attitudes or dispositions towards teaching, as an activity, and towards learners • (Sadler, 1998, pp. 80-82)

14. Literacy and Numeracy in the Middle Years of Schooling Initiative Improving outcomes for educationally disadvantaged students in the middle years An intersectoral project funded by The Department of Education, Science and Training

15. Queensland Project • Part of a $4 million national initiative • Focus on ‘at risk’ students • DEST focus on assessment as it informs curriculum and pedagogy • Queensland focus – front-ending assessment + curriculum, literacy and numeracy demands

16. 15 Intersectoral clusters

17. If: “The more implicit the school’s pedagogy, which presupposes prior attainment the more locked out will be the outsider. This enables the possessor of the prerequisite cultural capital to continue to monopolize that capital.” (Walton, 1993) Then: How can assessment work to open doors for all? The value of explicit assessment

18. Educational standards What is the work of a set of education standards? The primary function of educational standards is to enablestatements about a students’ quality of performance or degree of achievement to be made without reference to the achievements of other students, which conceivably could be either all poor or all excellent. In addition, fixed standards enable long-term changes in a phenomenon to be detected. (Sadler, 1987, p.196)

19. Assessment aligned to learning & teaching Teachers shunting back and forth between: Curriculum: linking assessment to curriculum intent. Assessment: explicitly identifying in standards the curriculum knowledge and related literacy demands in tasks Pedagogy: classroom practice that explicitly scaffolds learning (knowledge + curriculum literacies)

20. Framing – assessment practice as critical enquiry Year: 6/7 KLA: Science Syllabus levels: 3-4 Task details: Students will investigate an energy type of their choice. Students will then create their own energy experiment and demonstrate this. Students must determine whether this energy is efficient in real-life situations. Assessment conditions: Individual experimentation (oral presentation) and scientific report submission. Feedback opportunities: Personal reflection, checklist (student and teacher) and draft feedback.

21. Framing – assessment practice as critical enquiry

22. Criteria & standards • Provision of explicit performance expectations/ • standards • Involves: • Clarity of expectations for teachers and students • Conversations about quality in classrooms and among teachers • Agreement about where the bar is • Opportunities for teachers to share interpretations of criteria and standards (moderation) • Student knowledge and use of quality indicators/standard

23. Criteria & standards A teacher on stated criteria and standards: Most of the students didn’t “do assessment” – while they would all submit an assessment item, the majority view was that it had little relationship to the work they did in class, and was an “add-on” to units of work that signalled the end of learning.

24. Connectedness and higher order thinking We found that we were continually critiquing our working – looking at the specifics. I was more specific in my teaching. Then I looked for the student’s performance profile over time. Teacher modelling of tasks Pedagogy The place of assessment in the classroom

25. Resourcing issues: equity of opportunity – all necessary equipment provided to every student Students unwilling to attempt tasks for various reasons: embarrassment about access to the physical resources inside/outside schooling The place of assessment in the classroom

26. Assessment for learning: assumptions teacher confirmation and self-correcting Original concern – dumbing down vs. teaching for success Making assessment goals known/realistically attainable The place of assessment in the classroom

27. The place of assessment in the classroom Greater use of judgment of student learning - Based on proposition that: that teachers as professionals are able to make appropriate judgments about students’ work, and moreover, that teachers (and students) are best placed to make judgments in a range of contexts and through a range of assessment opportunities (Cumming, Wyatt-Smith, Elkins & Neville, 2006, p.16) • ↓ • What • are the system supports? • is the quality assurance?

28. Teacher experience Judgment: Teacher knowledge of context Knowledge of community context Knowledge of pedagogy Moderation practices Observations of student/s Assessment standards

29. The place of assessment in the classroom • Opportunities: • Assessment portfolios – student entries • Distinguishing assessment purposes and audiences • Building teacher confidence in judging using defined standards • Discussions about the nature of judgment: holistic and analytic approaches and ‘discipline fit’ • Students having a language to talk about quality

30. The place of assessment in the classroom Assessment Learning Teaching Discipline Knowledge/s Teacher Judgment: Standards & Improvement Curriculum Literacies Leveraging improvement

31. The place of assessment in the classroom Framing assessment as inquiry: Teachers’ claim to expertise may be tied to how we promote quality learning and qualities of learners, as well as quality outcomes.

32. The dependability challenge: What is the highest optimum reliability that can be achieved while preserving construct validity? The place of assessment in the classroom

33. The place of assessment in the classroom Way forward: recognition that improved outcomes are a direct result of teacher intervention.

34. Whatever the original justification for regular, universal, standardised testing, its ability to measure the skills and sensibilities in the 21st century is limited. (Kalantzis et al. 2003, p. 25)

35. More information Meeting in the middle - assessment, pedagogy, learning and educational disadvantage. Literacy and Numeracy in the Middle Years of Schooling - Queensland Project Report: http://education.qld.gov.au/literacy/docs/deewr-myp-final-report.pdf Wyatt-Smith, C., & Cumming, J. (in press). Educational assessment in the 21st Century (Eds.). Springer Academic Publication, Dordecht, The Netherlands.

36. Current international context England: CEO of Qualifications and Curriculum Authority suggests national tests could be replaced by standardised teacher assessment Times Educational Supplement, 12 May 2006