What kinds of assessment support learning of key competences?

1. What kinds of assessment support learning of key competences? Dylan Wiliam EC seminar on the assessment of key competences Brussels, Belgium, 15 October 2009 www.dylanwiliam.net

2. Overview of presentation • Functions of assessment • Evaluative • Summative • Formative • Validity and the consequences of assessment • Formative assessment • Designing systems for assessing key competences

3. Functions of assessment • Evaluative (E) • For evaluating institutions, curricula and organizations • Summative (S) • For describing individuals • Formative (F) • For supporting learning

4. Examples of assessment systems • E • NAEP, “No Child Left Behind” • S • Baccalaureat, Abitur, Matura • E+S • GCSE (England) • E+S+F • National Curriculum Assessment (England)

5. Validity • Validity is a property of inferences, not of assessments • “One validates, not a test, but an interpretation of data arising from a specified procedure” (Cronbach, 1971; emphasis in original) • The phrase “A valid test” is therefore a category error (like “A happy rock”) • No such thing as a valid (or indeed invalid) assessment • No such thing as a biased assessment • Reliability is a pre-requisite for validity • Talking about “reliability and validity” is like talking about “swallows and birds” • Validity includes reliability

6. Modern conceptions of validity “Validity is an integrative evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of inferences and actions based on test scores or other modes of assessment” (Messick, 1989 p. 13) • Validity subsumes all aspects of assessment quality • Reliability • Representativeness (content coverage) • Relevance • Predictiveness • But not impact (Popham: right concern, wrong concept)

7. Threats to validity • Inadequate reliability • Construct-irrelevant variance • Differences in scores are caused, in part, by differences not relevant to the construct of interest • The assessment assesses things it shouldn’t • The assessment is “too big” • Construct under-representation • Differences in the construct are not reflected in scores • The assessment doesn’t assess things it should • The assessment is “too small” • With clear construct definition all of these are technical—not value—issues

8. Be careful what you wish for… • Campbell’s law (US) | Goodhart’s law (UK) • “All performance indicators lose their usefulness when used as objects of policy” • The clearer you are about what you want, the more likely you are to get it, but the less likely it is to mean anything • Where the evaluative function is paramount, the challenge is to find “tests worth teaching to”.

9. The Lake Wobegon effect revisited “All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Garrison Keillor

10. Achievement of English 16-year-olds

11. Consequential validity? No such thing! • As has been stressed several times already, it is not that adverse social consequences of test use render the use invalid, but, rather, that adverse social consequences should not be attributable to any source of test invalidity such as construct-irrelevant variance. If the adverse social consequences are empirically traceable to sources of test invalidity, then the validity of the test use is jeopardized. If the social consequences cannot be so traced—or if the validation process can discount sources of test invalidity as the likely determinants, or at least render them less plausible—then the validity of the test use is not overturned. Adverse social consequences associated with valid test interpretation and use may implicate the attributes validly assessed, to be sure, as they function under the existing social conditions of the applied setting, but they are not in themselves indicative of invalidity.(Messick, 1989, p. 88-89)

12. Centrality of construct definition • Construct definition is essential to effective assessment • Allows clear distinction between adverse impact and bias • (and anyway, bias is a property of inferences, not of instruments • Examples of how construct definition distinguishes impact and bias • Mental rotation of three-dimensional solids • Testing for admission to higher education • Testing of English language learners

13. A brief history of formative assessment • “Formative assessment” has been used to describe: • The time at which the assessment is scheduled • Any assessment taken before the last one • A purpose for assessing • “Assessment for learning” • A function that the assessment outcomes serve • Assessments that change teaching • Formative use of assessments

14. Feedback metaphor • Feedback in engineering • Positive feedback • Leads to explosive increase or collapse (bad!) • Negative feedback • Leads to asymptotic convergence to, or damped oscillation about, a stable equilibrium • Components of a feedback system • data on the actual level of some measurable attribute; • data on the reference level of that attribute; • a mechanism for comparing the two levels and generating information about the ‘gap’ between the two levels; • a mechanism by which the information can be used to alter the gap. • To an engineer, information is therefore feedback only if the information fed back is used in reducing the gap between actual and desired states.

15. Fuchs & Fuchs (1986) Natriello (1987) Crooks (1988) Banger-Drowns, et al. (1991) Kluger & DeNisi (1996) Black & Wiliam (1998) Nyquist (2003) Dempster (1991, 1992) Elshout-Mohr (1994) Brookhart (2004) Allal & Lopez (2005) Köller (2005) Brookhart (2007) Wiliam (2007) Hattie & Timperley (2007) Shute (2008) Relevant studies

16. Feedback • Kinds of feedback in Higher Education (Nyquist, 2003) • Weaker feedback only • Knowledge of results (KoR) • Feedback only • KoR + clear goals or knowledge of correct results (KCR) • Weak formative assessment • KCR+ explanation (KCR+e) • Moderate formative assessment • (KCR+e) + specific actions for gap reduction • Strong formative assessment • (KCR+e) + activity

17. Effect of formative assessment (HE) *corrected values

18. The formative assessment hi-jack… • Long-cycle • Span: across units, terms • Length: four weeks to one year • Impact: Student monitoring; curriculum alignment • Medium-cycle • Span: within and between teaching units • Length: one to four weeks • Impact: Improved, student-involved, assessment; teacher cognition about learning • Short-cycle • Span: within and between lessons • Length: • day-by-day: 24 to 48 hours • minute-by-minute: 5 seconds to 2 hours • Impact: classroom practice; student engagement

19. Functions of assessment • For evaluating institutions, organizations and curricula • For describing individuals • For supporting learning • Monitoring learning • Whether learning is taking place • Diagnosing (informing) learning • What is not being learnt • Instructionally tractable • What to do about it

20. Formative assessment: a new definition • “An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement elicited by the assessment is interpreted and used to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions that would have been taken in the absence of that evidence. • Formative assessment therefore involves the creation of, and capitalization upon, moments of contingency (short, medium and long cycle) in instruction with a view to regulating learning (proactive, interactive, and retroactive).” (Wiliam, 2009)

21. Some principles • A commitment to formative assessment • Does not entail any view of what is to be learned • Does not entail any view of what happens when learning takes place

22. The learning milieu • Feedback must cause a cognitive engagement in learning • Mastery orientation vs. performance orientation (Dweck) • Growth pathway vs. well-being pathway (Boekaerts)

23. Defining formative assessment • Key processes • Establishing where the learners are in their learning • Establishing where they are going • Working out how to get there • Participants • Teachers • Peers • Learners

24. Aspects of formative assessment

25. Five “key strategies”… • Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions • curriculum philosophy • Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning • classroom discourse, interactive whole-class teaching • Providing feedback that moves learners forward • feedback • Activating students as learning resources for one another • collaborative learning, reciprocal teaching, peer-assessment • Activating students as owners of their own learning • metacognition, motivation, interest, attribution, self-assessment (Wiliam & Thompson, 2007)

26. …and one big idea • Use evidence about learning to adapt instruction to meet student needs

27. Examples of techniques • Learning intentions • “sharing exemplars” • Eliciting evidence • “mini white-boards” • Providing feedback • “match the comments to the essays” • Students as owners of their learning • “coloured cups” • Students as learning resources • “pre-flight checklist”

28. So how do we design assessments? • Reliability requires random sampling from the domain of interest • Increasing reliability requires increasing the size of the sample • Using teacher assessment in certification is attractive: • Increases reliability (increased test time) • Increases validity (addresses aspects of construct under-representation) • But problematic • Lack of trust (“Fox guarding the hen house”) • Problems of biased inferences (construct-irrelevant variance) • Can introduce new kinds of construct under-representation

29. Progression in understanding light • Know that light comes from different sources • Know that light passes through some materials and not others, and that when it does not, shadows may be formed • Know that light can be made to change direction, and that shiny surfaces can form images • Know that light travels in straight lines, and this can be used to explain the formation of shadows • Understand how light is reflected • Understand how prisms and lenses refract and disperse light • Be able to describe how simple optical devices work • Understand refraction as an effect of differences of velocities in different media • [nothing new at this level] • Understand the processes of dispersion, interference, diffraction and polarisation of light.

30. The challenge • To design an assessment system that is: • Distributed • So that evidence collection is not undertaken entirely at the end • Synoptic • So that learning has to accumulate • Extensive • So that all important aspects are covered (breadth and depth) • Progressive • So that assessment outcomes relate to learning progressions • Manageable • So that costs are proportionate to benefits • Trusted • So that stakeholders have faith in the outcomes

31. The effects of context • Beliefs • about what constitutes learning; • in the value of competition between students; • in the value of competition between schools; • that test results measure school effectiveness; • about the trustworthiness in numerical data, with bias towards a single number; • that the key to schools’ effectiveness is strong top-down management; • that teachers need to be told what to do, or conversely that they have all the answers.

32. Conclusion • There is no “perfect” assessment system anywhere. Each nation’s assessment system is exquisitely tuned to local constraints and affordances. • Every country’s assessment system works in practice but not in theory. • Assessment practices have impacts on teaching and learning which may be strongly amplified or attenuated by the national context. • The overall impact of particular assessment practices and initiatives is determined at least as much by culture and politics as it is by educational evidence and values.

33. Conclusion (2) • It is probably idle to draw up maps for the ideal assessment policy for a country, even although the principles and the evidence to support such an ideal might be clearly agreed within the ‘expert’ community. • Instead, it seems likely that it will be more productive to focus on those arguments and initiatives that are least offensive to existing assumptions and beliefs, and that will nevertheless serve to catalyze a shift in those assumptions and beliefs while at the same time improving some aspects of present practice.