Establishing and sustaining assessment for learning

1. Establishing and sustaining assessment for learning Presented by Rob Stones with a lot of help from Lorraine Lee Que, Sherrie Davis, Tina Barnes, Anj Dillon, Geoff Griffin and Ian Mackenzie.

2. The Phenomenon of the Black Box! Know how to play “the assessment game” Have the learning background and literacies to tease out implicit expectations ASSUMPTIONS Literacy levels Prior learning Ability to access learning dimensions Presentation skills May be transient, have a mismatch between home language and/or culture from that of the school. May have difficulties with decoding or have slower intellectual development  FAIL (again)

3. Front- End the assessment. Plan the assessment with the unit (ie: before teaching and learning begins) • Use a process or format that ensures that all the required elements of the assessment are embedded. • Clearly identify the task, the skills and processes to be demonstrated and the criteria and standards used for grading. • Explicitly teach the students what the standards mean using models.

4. One way to create a sustainable process is to develop a common task sheet, as Lorraine Lee Que has done for Southport High. • UNIT DESCRIPTION / CONTEXT) • TASK: • GENRE: • LENGTH: • CORE CURRICULUM ELEMENTS INCLUDED • CONDITIONS: • SCAFFOLDING FRAMEWORK

5. Clarify details and expectations of the task • Refer to the Literacy booklet for genre guidelines and provide directions re: • structure, • language/vocab style • grammar, • verb tense, • methods of cohesive link, • author –audience relationship, etc • Indicate requirement for referencing and/or bibliography • Include planning sheets, research sheets etc. • Write assessment criteria and standards to specifically address the set task (in accordance with syllabus/ programme requirements)

6. How to construct an assessment matrixAdapted from ideas presented by Sherrie Davis. • Begin with a thorough knowledge and understanding of the assessment criteria. These are specific to each discipline and it is crucial that students understand them. • Plan to teach these criteria explicitly so that students understand the way in which their work will be evaluated.

7. Unpack the ‘knowledges’ and ‘literacies’ in the assessment piece. • Match the ‘knowledges’ and ‘literacies’ with the assessment criteria. • Write the standards, which must be written in plain language and can be explicitly modelled.

8. Write the standards for the sub-criteria • It is really important to write them in language that the students understand – you may have to teach that language. • Identify specifically what each achievement level will look like in terms of each sub-criterion. • Stay away from using terms like “high level”, “satisfactory”, “developed”, “limited” unless you specify what that looks like. Using these vague terms makes the standards a mystery for students unless they are shown to them. (Modelled)

9. Identify, and include, all the scaffolding required to ensure that you are not assessing prior learning. Without this step indigenous students, itinerant students and those with low literacy or numeracy levels will increasingly fall behind and eventually give up. • We can scaffold by re-teaching pre-requisites, helping students with planning or time management and by making sure that the key elements of the assessment are made explicit. • Scaffolding “fills in” the missing pieces for students. With scaffolding, the marginalised students are explicitly taught what faster, more consistent learners implicitly understand. • Scaffolding helps establish effective patterns (provides strategies) for future learning behaviour.

10. Plan cooperatively and offer professional learning episodes to help everyone (especially new staff) understand and appreciate the assessment expectations. • Include a mentoring, accountability or buddy process that takes care of consistency, accessibility of language and attention to the process. This step should ensure that the range of assessment tasks is accessible and aligned with the purpose of the learning.

11. REVIEWin the light of the results The best test of an assessment piece is “did it work”? We are not simply looking at an assessment item as a discriminator but as an opportunity to demonstrate learning and a celebration of what the student knows. A wise colleague (Mark Asher) once told me “when you get an unexpected result from a test item, question the item rather than your own judgement of what the student has learned”.