Working Inside the Black Box Assessment for Learning

Working Inside the Black Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom Paul Black, Christine Harrison, Clare Lee, Bethan Marshall, & Dylan Williams

Strong Points! • Assessment should support learning and personal • • improvement Questioning should allow thought rather than right answers in matters of content Self/peer assessment can improve a student’s “guild knowledge” Students should assess their own progress toward the outcome at various stages throughout the process Concepts/qualities must be learned before moving on to next step

Strong Points 2 • Learning should be scaffolded but not so tightly • • • that it limits learning Feedback (without a numerical grade) fosters the idea that students can succeed Focus of the classroom environment should be “How am I allowing students to learn? ” Thinking should be made public: we are teaching students, not content

Questions • How is anecdotal feedback possible when • • teachers are constantly rushed to produce grades (mid-term, parent/teacher, finals)? When the new report card format is in place, how can anecdotal comments be made meaningful for perhaps 100 students? What are some strategies for tracking the degree to which students have addressed issues raised in feedback? Annie Davies?

Questions 2 • How do we get students to create meaningful goals • How do we monitor whether or not a peer assessor is steering the student in the wrong direction, creating confusion? • Can student conferences be incorporated into high school parent teacher meetings?

Issues • “Many teachers will be concerned about the • effect of returning students’ work with comments but no scores or grades…Initial fears about how students might react turned out to be unjustified, and neither parents nor school inspectors have reacted adversely. Indeed, the provision of comments to students help parents to focus on learning issues rather than on trying to interpret a score or grade. ” (13) Is this true here?

Issues 2 “We have encountered a variety of ways of accommodating the new emphasis on comments. Some teachers have ceased assigning grades at all, some teachers enter scores in their own record books but do not write them in the students’ books…(13) • Won’t work • Unfair

Issues 3 • “The criteria for evaluating any learning • • achievements must be made transparent to students to enable them to have a clear overview both of the aims of their work and of what it means to complete it successfully” Are rubrics sometimes too prescriptive? Can they limit the students’ independent thinking?