Integrating Assessment into your Teaching Practice

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Starting Out
ASSESSMENT
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Your First Task

• Design and write down the assessment criteria
  for the perfect biscuit. (7 min max.).
• Hand your criteria to the next table

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Your First Task

• Apply the criteria
• Undertake assessment and provide your own
  grading scale
• Feedback

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ASSESSMENT Some important issues

• Validity
• Reliability
• Fairness
• Alignment
• Relevance and Transferability
• Criterion v. Norm referenced assessment
• Writing and using assessment criteria
• Formative and/or Summative assessment
• Type, Number and Range of Assessments
• Innovative assessment
• Assessing Performance

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"You've got to involve students actively, not
just view them as objects of assessment, but as
agents of assessment. This can be done in many
ways. One is that you ask students systematically
what they have learned. It's a simple idea it's
rarely done.....You find that students say some
remarkable things. Often what they perceive as
most important is not the academic learning, but
social skills, attitudes, and how to learn
where to find what they want to know. Walt
Haney, Professor of Education, Center for the
Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational
Policy, Boston, USA.
Ad Sedere
To sit down together
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• ASSESSMENT QAA 18 precepts
• General principles
• 1 As bodies responsible for academic
  standards, institutions should have effective
  procedures for
• designing, approving, supervising and reviewing
  the assessment strategies for programmes and
  awards
• the consistent implementation of rigorous
  assessment practices which ensure that the
  academic/professional standard for each award and
  award element is set and maintained at the
  appropriate level and that student performance is
  properly judged against this.
• The principles, procedures and processes of all
  assessment should be explicit, valid, and
  reliable.

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ASSESSMENT QAA 18 precepts Feedback to
students on performance 12 Institutions should
ensure that appropriate feedback is provided to
students on assessed work in a way that promotes
learning and facilitates improvement. Staff
development and training 13 Institutions should
ensure that all staff involved in the assessment
of students are competent to undertake their
roles and responsibilities.
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SOME PRINCIPLES
9 Principles of Good Practice for Assessing
Student Learning (American Association for
Higher Education)

• The assessment of student learning begins with
  educational values
• Assessment is most effective when it reflects an
  understanding of learning as multidimensional,
  integrated, and revealed in performance over time
  
• Assessment works best when the programs it seeks
  to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes
  
• Assessment requires attention to outcomes but
  also and equally to the experiences that lead to
  those outcomes
• Assessment works best when it is ongoing not
  episodic

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9 Principles cont.

• Assessment fosters wider improvement when
  representatives from across the educational
  community are involved.
• Assessment makes a difference when it begins with
  issues of use and illuminates questions that
  people really care about.
• Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement
  when it is part of a larger set of conditions
  that promote change.
• Through assessment, educators meet
  responsibilities to students and to the public.

Re-printed with permission Authors Alexander
W. Astin Trudy W. Banta K. Patricia Cross
Elaine El-Khawas Peter T. Ewell Pat Hutchings
Theodore J. Marchese Kay M. McClenney Marcia
Mentkowski Margaret A. Miller E. Thomas Moran
Barbara D. Wright.
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• Every assessment
• Is based in a theory of how people learn, what
  they know and how knowledge and skill progresses
  over time
• Embodies assumptions about which tasks are most
  likely to elicit demonstrations of what students
  know and can do.
• Is based on assumptions about how best to
  interpret the outcomes to draw meaningful
  inferences about what students know and can do.

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What does assessment have to do with learning?

• Good assessments provide opportunities for
  students to both learn and reveal their learning.
  
• Grades or scores help teachers and students
  monitor learning, but they do little to promote
  learning.
• All learning requires feedback but the feedback
  must be informative.
• - Feedback must provide guidance to the student
  and the teacher on what to do to improve
  performance.
• Learners must learn how to use feedback to
  improve performance.
• Teachers must learn how to give feedback that
  will lead to improved performance.

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Another short task Whose Line Is It Anyway?

• Write down and share 3 feedback statements that a
  teacher should never use. (Use your own
  experience!)
• Now make it positive!
• Now make it constructive!

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SOME MODELS A good model is like a good
map.. but it doesnt tell you how to make the
journey
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Teaching-Influenced Assessment
What does Assessment have to do with Teaching?
Objectives
Assessment
Teaching
Often we dont have a clear vision of what or how
we will assess until after we have designed or
completed teaching.
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Assessment-influenced Teaching
Objectives
Teaching
Assessment
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Blooms Taxonomy 1956
from Atherton 2004, based on Bloom 1956
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Integrating Aligning Teaching Assessment
Blooms taxonomy

• Knowledge Dimension
• Factual - basic elements or components of domain
  needed to solve problems in it
• Conceptual - interrelationships among elements,
  how they function
• Procedural - how to do task, methods of domain,
  criteria for using skills, techniques, methods,
  etc
• Meta-cognitive - knowledge of cognition, such as
  how strategies can help, requirements of
  different tasks, awareness of ones own
  cognition, such as strengths, weaknesses, etc

Anderson, L.W., Krathwohl, D.R. (2001). A
taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing
A revision of Blooms taxonomy of educational
objectives.Longman New York, NY.
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• Cognitive Processes Dimension
• Remember - recall, recognize, identify
• Understand - interpret, exemplify, classify,
  infer, summarize, explain, compare
• Interpret - clarify, paraphrase, translate,
  represent
• Apply - execute, implement, use, carry out
• Analyze - differentiate, distinguish, organize,
  attribute, select, parse
• Evaluate - check, critique, judge, monitor, test
• Create - generate, plan, produce, construct,
  hypothesize

Anderson, L.W., Krathwohl, D.R. (2001). A
taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing
A revision of Blooms taxonomy of educational
objectives.Longman New York, NY.
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Biggs SOLO Taxonomy
Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome
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Biggs SOLO Taxonomy
Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome
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Biggs SOLO Taxonomy
Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome
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T H E C R E A T I V E C O N T I N U U M
Based on Fennell, E., (1993) Categorising
Creativity in Competence Assessment No. 23,
Oct. 1993, Employment Dept.
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Some Practice
Assessment done properly should begin
conversations about performance, not end
them. Wiggins (1993), p. 13
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• Presentation and Performance Negotiated
  assessment
• Students engaged in creative practice work at
  different levels AND different ways
• The products they create will be different as
  will the processes and methods utilised
• That assessment should operate and be perceived
  as an integral part of the learning process
  rather than 'bolted-on' to the end of that
  process.
• That the form, content and implementation of the
  assessment process should be commensurable with
  the discourse and practices of the field
• Assessment' derives from the Latin 'ad sedere
  which means 'to sit down together' (Ross 1993).
  Students became agents in their own assessment
  rather than objects of assessment.

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• Negotiated assessment
• Six assessment fields
• Presentation/Production i.e. the finished product
  presented to an audience
• Process i.e. the journey that led to the product
• Idea i.e. the ideas that informed both the
  process and the product.
• Technical i.e. the quality and utility of the
  technical features of the product and the skills
  with which they were assembled and/or operated
• Documentation i.e. research, design, planning,
  evaluation etc.
• Interview i.e. the student's ability to
  articulate their understanding, utilisation and
  application and use of any of the above.

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PKs Rough Guide to Assessment

• engage students as agents IN their assessment
  rather than treat them as objects OF assessment
• assess as little as possible, but as much as
  necessary
• aim for quality and impact rather than quantity
  and coverage
• do it once (maybe twice) and do it well
• everything (ought to) connect

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?
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• SOME QUESTIONS
• What is the ethos of the assessment? Are students
  expected to replicate/formulate/innovate/originate
  ?
• Is the assessment task fit for purpose?   
• Are students involved in setting goals and
  criteria for assessment?
• Are the students performing, creating, producing,
  or doing something?
• Do the assessment tasks require students to use
  higher-level thinking and/or problem solving
  skills?
• Do the assessment tasks provide measures of
  metacognitive skills and attitudes, collaborative
  skills and intrapersonal skills as well as the
  more usual intellectual products?
• Do the assessment tasks measure meaningful
  instructional activities?
• Are the tasks contextualised in real-world
  applications?
• Are the student responses scored according to
  specified criteria, known in advance, which
  define standards for good performance?