Assessment for learning: putting it into practice

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Assessment for learningputting it into practice

• Dylan Wiliam, Educational Testing Service
• Workshop at NSDC 37th annual conference,
  Philadelphia, PA December 2005

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Overview of presentation

• Why raising achievement is important
• Why investing in teachers is the answer
• Why assessment for learning should be the focus
• Why teacher learning communities should be the
  mechanism

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Raising achievement matters

• For individuals
• Increased lifetime salary
• Improved health
• For society
• Lower criminal justice costs
• Lower health-care costs
• Increased economic growth

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Wheres the solution?

• Structure
• Small high schools
• K-8 schools
• Alignment
• Curriculum reform
• Textbook replacement
• Governance
• Charter schools
• Vouchers
• Technology

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Its the classroom

• Variability at the classroom level is up to 4
  times greater than at school level
• Its not class size
• Its not the between-class grouping strategy
• Its not the within-class grouping strategy
• Its the teacher

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Teacher quality

• A labor force issue with 2 solutions
• Replace existing teachers with better ones?
• No evidence that more pay brings in better
  teachers
• No evidence that there are better teachers out
  there deterred by certification requirements
• Improve the effectiveness of existing teachers
• The love the one youre with strategy
• It can be done
• We know how to do it, but at scale? Quickly?
  Sustainably?

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Functions of assessment

• For evaluating institutions
• For describing individuals
• For supporting learning
• Monitoring learning
• Whether learning is taking place
• Diagnosing (informing) learning
• What is not being learnt
• Forming learning
• What to do about it

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Effects of formative assessment

• Several major reviews of the research
• Natriello (1987)
• Crooks (1988)
• Black Wiliam (1998)
• Nyquist (2003)
• All find consistent, substantial effects

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Kinds of feedback (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 (KCRe)
• Moderate formative assessment
• (KCRe) specific actions for gap reduction
• Strong formative assessment
• (KCRe) activity

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Effect of formative assessment (HE)
N Effect
Weaker feedback only 31 0.16
Feedback only 48 0.23
Weaker formative assessment 49 0.30
Moderate formative assessment 41 0.33
Strong formative assessment 16 0.51
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Effects of feedback

• Kluger DeNisi (1996)
• Review of 3000 research reports
• Excluding those
• without adequate controls
• with poor design
• with fewer than 10 participants
• where performance was not measured
• without details of effect sizes
• left 131 reports, 607 effect sizes, involving
  12652 individuals
• Average effect size 0.4, but
• Effect sizes very variable
• 40 of effect sizes were negative

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Kinds of feedback Israel

• 264 low and high ability grade 6 students in 12
  classes in 4 schools analysis of 132 students at
  top and bottom of each class
• Same teaching, same aims, same teachers, same
  classwork
• Three kinds of feedback scores, comments,
  scorescomments

Feedback Gain Attitude scores none top ve
bottom -ve
comments 30 all ve
Butler(1988) Br. J. Educ. Psychol., 58 1-14
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Responses
Feedback Gain Attitude scores none top ve
bottom -ve
comments 30 all ve
What do you think happened for the students given
both scores and comments? A Gain 30 Attitude
all ve B Gain 30 Attitude top ve, bottom
-ve C Gain 0 Attitude all ve D Gain 0
Attitude top ve, bottom -ve E Something else
Butler(1988) Br. J. Educ. Psychol., 58 1-14
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Formative assessment

• Classroom assessment is not (necessarily)
  formative assessment
• Formative assessment is not (necessarily)
  classroom assessment

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Types of formative assessment

• Long-cycle
• Focus between units
• Length four weeks to one year
• Medium-cycle
• Focus within units
• Length one day to two weeks
• Short-cycle
• Focus within lessons
• Length five seconds to one hour

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Formative assessment
Assessment for learning is any assessment for
which the first priority in its design and
practice is to serve the purpose of promoting
pupils learning. It thus differs from assessment
designed primarily to serve the purposes of
accountability, or of ranking, or of certifying
competence. An assessment activity can help
learning if it provides information to be used as
feedback, by teachers, and by their pupils, in
assessing themselves and each other, to modify
the teaching and learning activities in which
they are engaged. Such assessment becomes
formative assessment when the evidence is
actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet
learning needs. Black et al., 2002
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Feedback and formative assessment

• Feedback is information about the gap between
  the actual level and the reference level of a
  system parameter which is used to alter the gap
  in some way (Ramaprasad, 1983 p. 4)
• Three key instructional processes
• Establishing where learners are in their learning
• Establishing where they are going
• Establishing how to get there

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Five key strategies

• Clarifying and understanding learning intentions
  and criteria for success
• Engineering effective classroom discussions that
  elicit evidence of learning
• Providing feedback that moves learners forward
• Activating students as instructional resources
  for each other
• Activating students as the owners of their own
  learning

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and one big idea

• Use evidence about learning to adapt instruction
  to meet student needs

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Keeping Learning on Track (KLT)

• A pilot guides a plane or boat toward its
  destination by taking constant readings and
  making careful adjustments in response to wind,
  currents, weather, etc.
• A KLT teacher does the same
• Plans a carefully chosen route ahead of time (in
  essence building the track)
• Takes readings along the way
• Changes course as conditions dictate

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Keeping learning on track

• Teaching as engineering learning environments
• Key features
• Create student engagement
• Well-regulated
• Long feedback cycles vs. variable feedback cycles
• Quality control vs. quality assurance in learning
• Teaching vs. learning
• Regulation of activity vs. regulation of learning

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KLT processes

• Before the lesson
• Planning regulation into the learning environment
• Planning for evoking information
• During the lesson
• Negotiating the swiftly-flowing river
• Moments of contingency
• Tightness of regulation (goals vs. horizons)
• After the lesson
• Structured reflection (e.g., lesson study)

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Practical techniques Questioning

• Improving teacher questioning
• Generating questions with colleagues
• Closed v open
• Low-order v high-order
• Appropriate wait-time
• Getting away from I-R-E
• Basketball rather than serial table-tennis
• No hands up (except to ask a question)
• Class polls to review current attitudes towards
  an issue
• Hot Seat questioning
• All-student response systems
• ABCD cards
• Mini white-boards
• Exit passes

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Kinds of questions Israel
Which fraction is the smallest?
Success rate 88
Which fraction is the largest?
Success rate 46 39 chose (b)
Vinner, PME conference, Lahti, Finland, 1997
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Questioning in math discussion

• Look at the following sequence
• 3, 7, 11, 15, 19, .
• Which is the best rule to describe the sequence?
• n 4
• 3 n
• 4n - 1
• 4n 3

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Questioning in math diagnosis

• In which of these triangles is a2 b2 c2 ?

b
c
A
B
a
a
c
b
a
c
C
D
b
b
c
a
a
b
E
F
c
c
b
a
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Questioning in science discussion

• Ice-cubes are added to a glass of water. What
  happens to the level of the water as the
  ice-cubes melt?
• The level of the water drops
• The level of the water stays the same
• The level of the water increases
• You need more information to be sure

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Questioning in science diagnosis

• The ball sitting on the table is not moving.It
  is not moving because
• no forces are pushing or pulling on the ball.
  
• gravity is pulling down, but the table is in the
  way.
• the table pushes up with the same force that
  gravity pulls down
• gravity is holding it onto the table.
• there is a force inside the ball keeping it from
  rolling off the table

Wilson Draney, 2004
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Questioning in English discussion

• Macbeth mad or bad?

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Questioning in English diagnosis

• Where is the verb in this sentence?
• The dog ran across the road

A
B
C
D
A
B
C
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Questioning in English diagnosis

• Where does the subject end and the predicate
  begin in this sentence?
• The dog ran across the road

D
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Questioning in English diagnosis

• Which of these is a good thesis statement?
• The typical TV show has 9 violent incidents
• There is a lot of violence on TV
• The amount of violence on TV should be reduced
• Some programs are more violent than others
• Violence is included in programs to boost ratings
• Violence on TV is interesting
• I dont like the violence on TV
• The essay I am going to write is about violence
  on TV

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Questioning in history discussion

• In which year did World War II begin?
• 1919
• 1937
• 1938
• 1939
• 1941

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Questioning in History

• Why are historians concerned with bias when
  analyzing sources?
• People can never be trusted to tell the truth
• People deliberately leave out important details
• People are only able to provide meaningful
  information if they experienced an event
  firsthand
• People interpret the same event in different
  ways, according to their experience
• People are unaware of the motivations for their
  actions
• People get confused about sequences of events

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Hinge Questions

• A hinge question is based on the important
  concept in a lesson that is critical for students
  to understand before you move on in the lesson.
• The question should fall about midway during the
  lesson.
• Every student must respond to the question within
  two minutes.
• You must be able to collect and interpret the
  responses from all students in 30 seconds

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Practical techniques feedback

• Comment-only grading
• Focused grading
• Explicit reference to rubrics
• Suggestions on how to improve
• Strategy cards ideas for improvement
• Not giving complete solutions
• Re-timing assessment
• (eg two-thirds-of-the-way-through-a-unit test)

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Practical techniques sharing learning
expectations

• Explaining learning objectives at start of
  lesson/unit
• Criteria in students language
• Posters of key words to talk about learning
• eg describe, explain, evaluate
• Planning/writing frames
• Annotated examples of different standards to
  flesh out assessment rubrics (e.g. lab reports)
• Opportunities for students to design their own
  tests

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Practical techniquespeer and self-assessment

• Students assessing their own/peers work
• with scoring guides, rubrics or exemplars
• two stars and a wish
• Training students to pose questions
• Identifying group weaknesses
• Self-assessment of understanding
• Red/green discs
• Traffic lights
• Smiley faces
• Post-it notes
• End-of-lesson students review

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Concept cards

• On the colored index cards, write a sentence or
  two or give an example to explain each of the
  following five ideas (if youre not sure, ask a
  question instead)
• Questioning yellow
• Feedback orange
• Sharing criteria green
• Self-assessment red
• Peer-assessment blue

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Professional development must be

• Consistent with what we know about adult
  learning, incorporating
• choice
• respect for prior experience
• recognition of varied learning styles and
  motivation
• Sustained
• Contextualized
• Consistent with research on expertise

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Expertise (Berliner, 1994)
1 Experts excel mainly in their own domain 2
Experts often develop automaticity for the
repetitive operations that are needed to
accomplish their goals 3 Experts are more
sensitive to the task demands and social
situation when solving problems. 4 Experts are
more opportunistic and flexible in their teaching
than novices 5 Experts represent problems in
qualitatively different ways than novices. 6
Experts have fast and accurate pattern
recognition capabilities. Novices cannot always
make sense of what they experience. 7 Experts
perceive meaningful patterns in the domain in
which they are experienced. 8 Experts begin to
solve problems slower, but bring richer and more
personal sources of information to bear on the
problem that they are trying to solve.
Berliner, 1994
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Countdown
3
25
1
4
9
Target number 127
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Klein Klein (1981)
Six video extracts of a person delivering
cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR) 5 of the
video extracts are students1 of the video
extracts is an expert Videos shown to three
groups Students, experts, instructors Success
rate in identifying expert Experts 90 Students
50 Instructors 30
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Chess (Newell Simon, 1973)
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A model for teacher learning

• Ideas
• Evidence
• Small steps
• Flexibility
• Choice
• Accountability
• Support

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Why Teacher Learning Communities?

• Teacher as local expert
• Sustained over time
• Supportive forum for learning
• Embedded in day-to-day reality
• Domain-specific

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A four-part model

• Initial workshops
• TLC meetings
• Peer observations
• Training for leaders

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Learning Log
Please use at least three of the following
sentences to share your thoughts on todays
sessions. Please write your responses on the
lined NCR paper.

• Today I learned
• I was surprised by
• The most useful thing I will take from these
  sessions is
• I was interested in
• What I liked most about today was
• One thing Im not sure about is
• The main thing I want to find out more about is
• After these sessions, I feel
• I might have got more from today if

Please feel free to add any additional comments
that you think we should know.
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NSDC Evaluation