Thoughts on Assessment and Feedback

 I think this is going to turn out to be mainly about Assessment for Learning. What other sort of assessment could there possibly be? (Yes. I know.) I imagine it will take the form of a little rant to put people off reading more, followed by an interesting look at some forms of assessment and feedback we have used in Languages, and end with a comment about the new GCSE.

Assessment for Learning does seem to have got caught up in some terrible fads. And as usual, if we had stuck to what it said on the tin we would have been fine. But it ended up being, "Assessment for Demonstrating that We are Engaging Pupils in the Process of Learning How to Improve their Work." With the emphasis skewed towards the Demonstrating We Are Doing Something.

To get the rant over with quickly:

Different coloured ink for marking and a "conversation" with pupils. Stamps to say that you've given verbal feedback. Tasks for pupils to do immediately to show an improvement based on your feedback. All of these clearly selected primarily as demonstrable ways to show that the school is doing something. Not selected because they work.

While we are at it, let's get Peer Assessment out of the way too. Pupils in school police each other's hairstyles, bags, waterbottles, friendship groups, taste in music, sportiness, names, participation in class... Let's not ask pupils to create work in French worrying about what the pupil who sits next to them is going to say about it.

OK. As promised, some examples of things we have used in languages. On a computer I think you can click to see them larger. And on a phone you can hopefully zoom in.

An example of where we went with the fashion of the moment -  a Whole Class Feedback sheet for Year 10 Spanish. The second half of the sheet picks up on some common mistakes I found when marking their work. The top half is about them engaging with the success criteria and thinking about the level of support they used to complete the task. 

Whole Class Feedback was an attempt to save workload for the teacher, and a recognition that the things you pick up on when you are marking, need sorting through teaching, not a comment in the books. We found it worked best for formal assessments, done at the end of the unit of work and for getting pupils to engage with the exam criteria. For individual feedback on exactly where the pupil is with their learning, they were less effective.

Sticky address labels with success criteria. On the right you can see an example. The label has 5 key criteria which the teacher can tick and annotate in the light of the pupils' work. If you give 2 ticks per criterion this gives a mark out of 10 tightly linked to the what you wanted to see in the piece of work. I used these mainly because my handwriting is so terrible, and also because I found I was writing the same thing on each book I marked.

We used these for work in exercise books, marked immediately before the pupils' unit assessment. So that the feedback could have an impact on their assessment piece. I like their ease of use and clarity.

Self Assessment sheets - this one is for Speaking. Self Assessment (as opposed to Peer Assessment) gives the teacher very good information about the pupil's performance and their confidence. It also is a way to start to engage the pupil with thinking about their learning and the learning process. You can find examples to download from the Association for Language Learning  London Branch website.

In a lesson, the pupils would be using their Keep Talking sheets (also available from the London Branch site) to talk with a partner. They would then practise talking with a series of partners, moving round the classroom in an organised speed dating activity. The teacher would listen in and be aware of how everyone was working. As the pupils worked with one partner, then another, the teacher would encourage them to stop using their Keep Talking sheet. At the end, the pupil would return to their original partner to do the speaking and fill in the assessment sheet.

The top part of the sheet details the kind of language and structures pupils are expected to be including. (This is from the mid 2000s, so influenced by National Curriculum Levels.) The second half of the sheet is about how the pupil did the task: fluency, variety, and use/independence of scaffolding. Pupils tick and annotate the sheet. The combination of the teacher witnessing the class doing the speaking, plus the information the pupil gives on the sheet, provides very useful information for the teacher awarding a level. And allows the pupil to engage with the process of improving what they can say in the language and understanding the process of working with less and less support.

This process is the key to Assessment for Learning. Firstly, the biggest recipient of Feedback from marking is the teacher. The teacher is best placed to evaluate pupils' work, successes, errors, misconceptions, effort, progress. And the teacher is the person to take that information forward and use it to plan subsequent lessons. The pupil first and foremost needs someone to read and appreciate their work, hold them to high standards and make them feel someone cares about their effort and progress. 

Engaging the pupil in understanding the learning process is important, but in a much wider way than through comments on their work.

You will see other aspects emerging through the Feedback examples we use. The main one is that we are looking to engage with pupils on three things: The language content of their work, the communication and organisation, and the level of independence.

A major element in this is our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). This is from a photo of a poster in a classroom. They are also in pupils' books and used to assess their Speaking and Writing.

The dartboard design is from a whole school idea from when we moved away from Levels, to avoid the format of a "ladder." Pupils make progress by moving in from the outer circles towards the centre.

In Languages, we have moved to using Exemplars instead of statements. These can be seen in the top half. They show the kind of content and level of language expected from all pupils in each unit as we move through the year.

The lower half shows the level of support / independence / spontaneity expected. Again, there is a progression model moving in towards the center.

This is how we assess. We expect the same kind of standard of work from all pupils. What is assessed (by us and by them) is how much support they needed to achieve the standard.

This is something that we can involve pupils in, and in fact we ask them to give us this information in a statement at the end of their piece of work.

Feedback, assessment, KPIs, modelling, scaffolding. All are tightly bound up in a three-fold process of: making progress in acquiring language, using it effectively, reducing the support required. It has evolved over decades, with fine tuning based on what works, surviving the end of Levels and the introduction of new GCSEs. I will skip the promised comment on the proposed new GCSE. You can work out for yourself what I might have to say on the matter. Or you can follow the link to this earlier post.