[MUSIC] Measurement. As a teacher, do you want your, teaching to be measured? Do you want the learning of your students to be measured? It's often a thing that we kind of shy away from because it seems often, a bit threatening. And that's because often we're trying to measure the wrong things. In 1971 a conference held in the United States was entitled Education Counts, and it wasn't a reference to these indicators which are quantitative and try to measure the simple things. And the introduction to that, conference into the document that was published, went like this. We must learn to measure what we value rather than valuing what we can easily measure. We must learn to measure what we value. Now, in, assessing children's learning, there are six, at least six, possibly a lot, a lot more, six criteria which you may use to judge the value of your assessment. So you may ask, is my assessment accurate? That's quite difficult. Is it fair? Think back to when you were at school yourself and often, that wasn't fair how I was judged and how the person next door to me, was judged. Is the assessment reliable? That is if we were to do it again tomorrow, would I get the same answer? Is it useful? Why do we have assessment at all if it's not useful? Is it focused? Does it focus on the kinds of things that are really important, or another things? And, is it negotiated? Do you actually talk together with your fellow teachers or with your students, with your pupils, about the nature of assessments? Do they have a say in what they think about the kind of assessment, that should be carried out? Well there is something which is called Campbell's Law, and it looks like this. [SOUND] If we use indicators to tell us, how children are learning, how teachers are teaching. And those indicators don't follow that precept of measuring what we value. As Campbell's Law says, the more likely it is then, that the indicator will corrupt the processes it was intended to monitor, and it's accompanied, by an educational health warning. Well earlier on in the course, we talked about three types of assessment, which we called assessment of learning, assessment as learning, and assessment for learning. As a teacher you will probably use all three of these, at different times and for different purposes. Which of these do you think is really, most important? Assessment of learning is the form of assessment that most students would readily recognize. It comes at the end of a term, at the end of a year, or at the end of a key stage. It is summative, and it's primary purpose is for grading, for bench marking, and for that most dreaded part of the whole process, the report card. You might say that when we use assessment for learning, it's a formative process. We're helping young people, to think about their learning, to think about how they could be better. And when we talk about assessment as learning, we're talking about that constant process, ongoing, all the time. How many judgements in the course of a day do teachers make about children's learning? How many assessments do they make? It's often intuitive. It's often simply there and you don't recognize, you don't formalize it. But every time you ask a question, every time you listen to a discussion, you are making an implicit or intuitive assessment because learning is always about assessing how we're doing. What progress we're making. So, these three things you see in this slide. Assessment of learning, summative for grading, for benchmarking, for reporting. Assessment for learning, ongoing, diagnostic, formative. Assessment as learning, actively involving students, thinking about shaping their own learning, and involving often self and peer assessment. What are the techniques that teachers find very helpful is what's called traffic lights. Traffic lights are pretty universal between countries around the world, and I think those children understand the red, the amber, and the green. And, traffic lights can come in the form of, perhaps a card, a red card. A yellow card, and a green card, and in some schools where this is used, when children are working away, they can put a red card on the side of the desk or hold up a red card. That signals, no this is to difficult for me. I don't really understand what's going on here. Or they can hold up the amber card. I'm not sure. I think I'm doing this okay, but I'm just not sure. I'd like a little confirmation or a little feedback. And the green card, I can do this. No problem. So as a teacher, it means that you can focus where your efforts and where your interventions are going to take place. Because you will, the children who are motoring along, they can do it. They've held up the green card or put the green card on their desk. You can then pay attention to the children who are struggling, who are using the red card or the amber card. There is a process called a 60 second think, which you can use at any time in the classroom when you just say stop. Just stop for a moment. Take 60 seconds, just to reflect, just to think, these questions. How are my learnings going right now? What have I been doing? Writing? Thinking? Talking to my neighbor? Drifting away and thinking about something else? Puzzling over a problem? And what am I learning? And even more different, how am I learning it? And what do I still need to do? The 60 second think, is that useful tool for you in your classroom? And how to you give feedback, to your students? Is it helpful, or does feedback actually sometimes inhibit children, make the feel less clever? Two English researcher Kluger and DeNisi in 1996, found that in 40% of cases, feedback had a negative effect on performance. And other researchers have pointed to assessment being counterproductive, not helping at all, when it's simply general or well done or, oh good, or cheap, cheap praise. Found it was negative when it was simply a grade. Giving children a grade, 15 out of 25, 7 out of 10. How does that help them learn more effectively? And, as two English researchers Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black found, when give children a grade and a comment, they tended not to look at the comment, but to look at the grade. So their advice was to give, as far as possible, assessment for learning. Helping children to, look at the evidence of their own learning. Helping teachers to decide, where they go next, what they need to do, and how to get the best out of it. So in this, slide, there are four, sources. Four, actors if you like. The child, the teacher, the school, and the parent or the carer. And if you have a, read of this slide, it emphasizes children's knowledge, they're knowing and understanding of what they need to improve and how to do that. It emphasizes the teacher knowledge being equipped to make well founded judgements about pupils attainment, and where there are often, or perhaps sometimes going wrong. The school's role in this. Helping teachers to make regular, useful, accurate assessments. And the parent or carer, knowing how their child is doing, and what they need to do to improve and how parents can help. There are big issues in here and we will, want to go back and think again. Have a look at some of these slides again. Think about, talk about them, with others. You will find on the site, which is mentioned here, a number of videos which explore these issues. You will find examples from Professor Dylan William from the Institute of Education London. Whose done a huge amount of research into assessment, assessment for, assessment as, and assessment of learning. And as you watch those videotapes you may want to add some thoughts. Your own reflections to your portfolio and also to the kinds of discussions that you'll be having in forums with other teachers from other schools internationally. As well as prompting discussion with teachers in your own school. [MUSIC]
