Make assessment concrete

Visual Assessment

Using Active Learning techniques benefit students greatly as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, and creating opportunities for using this method with assessment really does produce excellent results. Students who work with assessments on this level eventually gain a concrete understanding about:
•    the various components of an answer;
•    how to build an ideal solution to a problem/question;
•    how/where they ‘hit’ each Level;
•    different versions of an answer to the same question;
•    exploring links/categorisations, themes and trends.

Build the Answer

Type up an answer in your favourite word processor and place each paragraph on a separate page with the size big enough to be able to read from a few meters away. You could also use sentences in the same way of course. You could use an ideal answer but another way of getting them to really see how they could improve we use a ‘C’ or ‘D’ grade. Discuss the question with the class and what they think they ought to include in an ideal answer; note ideas down on the board.

Split the class into groups of three and give them the (laminated) jumbled answer. Now inform them that they are to construct or piece together an answer using the available material. Students place the answer on the floor and move the various components around until they have reached a possible answer. Discuss students’ ideas and, this is crucial, ask them what they could do to improve it. Allow them a few minutes to return to their answer and give them a few sheets of paper to add details to. Finally get one group to show the rest of the class their example. Discuss.

Activate them!

An alternative to the example above is to involve the whole class (depending on size – max 20 works well). ‘Extras’ can play ‘examiners’. Give each student a piece of the answer (about 12-15 students need to be involved here), give others possible headings or factor/theme cards (4-5 students) and another bunch ‘GCSE Level’ or A-Level criteria cards. Get them to construct the answer together as a group. This generally creates a lot of discussion and it might be easier if the teacher leads this together with the students. When the answer has been laid down on the floor, or students are holding them up, ask the ‘factors/heading’ students to decide which factor is discussed in which paragraph. The final step is for the last group to level the piece.
It is important at this stage to ensure that the class is familiar with peer-marking and comfortable with GCSE Levels or A-Level criteria. Get them to decide as a group where each Level ought to be placed. When they have completed their marking ask them to justify their decisions and then get feedback from the rest of the class. Some students may disagree with the judgments of the marking group so allow the changes to be made if necessary.

Great challenges

Assessment for Learning made Easy

Students become very nervous and frightened by the mere term ‘assessment’. Although some students will rise to the pressure, a large number may actually under perform because it is deemed an assessment.
- Tom, NQT
This example shows how simple Assessment for Learning (AFL) techniques can make students more focused and confident about how to improve. This approach will enable the class to see concrete progress within the lesson as well as across lessons. This is a History example but can easily be modified for any subject.

I taught a mixed-ability year 10 class about protest through history and this particular lesson investigated the key question: What impact did [different protests]…have on law-making and law enforcement in England?1 Some of these protests included Poll tax riots and Conscientious Objecting during WWII.

The Starter:

The starter got students on their feet and students assessed the severity of some protests using an Active Protest continuum2. After discussing the outcome of the task we moved straight to the assessment task which involved analyzing a range of historical sources. We discussed the source material together as a class first, and then the class explored what they needed to do to answer the question successfully. Students annotate the sources in pairs after which an exemplar answer was given to them.

Task 1: Speed AFL!

In pairs, students faced each other and were informed to mark the exemplar answer using the criteria/mark scheme. The first one to find one of the top levels would win. We then discussed students’ responses and they highlighted where the ‘exemplar student’ had achieved a certain Level on the Interactive Whiteboard. There were some disagreements about how the answer moved up the levels.

Task 2: Towards progress!

The class now moved to a more challenging question and the skill had also changed. We treated this question in the same manner as the previous one and then compared the differences between the two questions. As a class we then analysed the mark scheme for Q4 and what they would need to do in order to reach high levels.

Students then answered question four on their own and a time limit was set. In pairs, students marked the other person’s answer using the criteria/mark scheme. Students discussed how their partner’s had reached a certain level and what they thought was particularly good about their answer as well as setting them a target for improvement. We then examined an answer, which was quickly scanned for students to see, and comments were made about the strengths and weaknesses of this particular response. Questions were taken in to mark for the next lesson.

At the start of the following lesson the class peer-assessed, using mark schemes, three responses from grades A-C, starting with grade C. After discussing the answers, assessments were handed back and students were asked to read teacher’s comments and try to meet their targets – examples of meeting the target were either given by the teacher or the student’s answer showed evidence so this area was highlighted.

This way of using assessments is simple, structured and engaging as students feel they can move forward in that lesson and beyond. When a class has experienced this process they enjoy taking assessments because they know that improvement will be concrete and real.

Extract from Exam Class Toolkit : How to Create Engaging Lesson That Ensure Progression and Results

Extract from Exam Class Toolkit - how to create engaging lessons that ensure progression and results (Watkin & Ahrenfelt)

Sticky = understandable, memorable and effective in changing thought or behaviour.

Two big questions needs to be addressed by teachers each lesson:

• What’s the point of the lesson?
• Why should it matter – will it matter to the students?

It may seem obvious to many but it can be easy to forget when you have taught the same topic for several years. Why should they care that V. Frankl lost his manuscript on psychological well-being; that A bag of butter popcorn contains 37 grams of fat; that Einstein’s theory of relativity does not mean that everything is relative or that the skills of communication and synthesis are probably the most important skills they need in life? Those are fair questions. If we cannot provide a good enough explanation then what is the point?

Some lessons seem to ‘stick’ in students memories more than others, why? If we think about it, some information, facts, ‘knowledge’ is inherently interesting, whilst some will be inherently uninteresting. The million-dollar question is of course how we can ensure that all (or at least most – let’s be realistic!) lessons stick. For example, how do we get students to care about being healthy; relate to life in Warsaw ghetto in 1943; get them to really understand the notion of a mathematical function?

The brothers Chip and Dan Heath have explored the idea why some messages stick and why some disappear. They argue that the main reason why people, such as teachers, fail to create effective and memorable – ‘sticky’ – lessons is because what they call ‘The Curse of Knowledge’[1]. This refers to the notion that educators and presenters of information sometimes fail to see that abstractions, the wealth of knowledge which they have and which makes sense to them, may not make sense to the students. If you try playing the ‘tappers and listeners’ game you will quickly see how this problem could make it difficult to teach students:

Think of a tune, say Penny Lane, then tap the song using your hands on a table to another person – the ‘listener’. They now have to guess which tune you have in your head based on the rhythm being tapped.

If you tried this with another person you will see that they cannot guess what song you were tapping. Research at Stanford University, USA, discovered that tappers predicted that 50% of listener would be successful in guessing their tune. In fact, only 2.5% of listeners guessed correctly. Why did this happen? According to the Heath brothers ‘the problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to know what it is like to lack that knowledge’[2], so the isolated taps that are so clear to the tapper make little sense to the listener . As teachers we are particularly good at combating this problem and we do so everyday. However, there are still aspects of this challenge, areas of our subjects, which we may find difficult to deal with so that students can conceptualise, comprehend or be able to retain what we teach them. If we are to ensure that our lessons become memorable and therefore ‘sticky’, according to the authors, we need to consider six simple principles:

• Simplicity
• Unexpectedness
• Concreteness
• Credibility
• Emotions
• Stories

Some of these may seem fairly obvious to some (maybe you?). However, it is worth examining them in detail. Let us take a look at a few examples.

Simplicity:

What is the core that students need to understand, the golden nugget, and how can you ensure they understand it? If you think about the topic ‘Titanic’ issues such as inequalities, poverty and social despair might surface. However, if you start the first in a series of lessons investigating the socio-economic problems of late Victorian period, you might see the enthusiastic spark disappear in many of the students’ faces. The core is of course social inequalities, but how will you reach the students? Titanic sank two hours and forty minutes after setting sail and 1,517 people died most of them from the working class. Why? Simple.

Unexpectedness:

This one seems fairly obvious. Suppose you shock them with a terrifying story or image…that is unexpected, but that does not give them the key ingredient which they seek: insight. Instead, get the students’ interest by stimulating their curiosity through showing them there is a gap in their knowledge – how will it turn out? What is the answer? Using Thinking Skills mysteries in the classroom will achieve just that. There are lots of fantastic examples of how effective these can be, some of which are mentioned in this book (see p. xx-xx for an example of how they can be used in Modern Foreign Languages) and some which are published online.[3]

Concreteness:

Students’ experience of education can become abstract particularly during transition phases such as the beginning of their GCSE and A-Level, or when new units of work commence. Therefore, it is crucial that we make our messages, why it matters, clear to our students. In 1992, Art Silverman came across a situation where he had to make a seemingly abstract problem concrete which the general public would understand and remember. He worked for a charity which sought to educate the public about nutrition. He had been asked to inform people about the dangers of eating traditional cinema popcorn as a medium sized bag contained 37 grams of saturated fat. Such a statement would obviously change people’s cinema habits no doubt – ‘no more popcorn for me! The reality was of course much different. Eating this amount of fat is clearly very bad for you but the message was not concrete enough for anyone to really understand that it was dangerous. Silverman had a light-bulb moment. The charity called a press conference in which he explained:

A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighbourhood movie theatre contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon and eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings-combined![4]

Credibility:

Making sure that students believe what you tell them generally is not a problem. Some research has suggested, however, that students more readily trust online material before teachers.[5] Therefore, testing hypothesis is an important part of exam classes learning so they understand that ‘facts’ vary from source to source. If you asked students to decide which source of information is the most trust worthy which one would they choose Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia? Would they even trust information from Wikipedia? Research was carried out which compared the validity, the credibility, of Encyclopaedia Britannica (which costs to subscribe to) and Wikipedia (which is free). Interestingly, there was very little difference in the content both resources provided.[6] By giving them the challenge to test a problem, students are more ready to believe as they are in fact assessing its credibility and make an internal judgement about its trustworthiness.

Emotions:

If we had time we could customise every example we gave to ensure students relate to our messages e.g. adding their names and names of their friends to maths examples. This would of course be next to impossible. Instead we need to try to give them more general examples without losing the opportunity for them to care. As a history teacher in Britain we have to, and rightly should, teach about the Holocaust. This is one example of how one school started the unit:

Question 1. How many people were killed during the Holocaust during the 1940s?

a)      1 million

b)      4 million

c)      6 million

d)     19 million

How far do you think students were able to relate to this tragic period in history? Not far. In fact, how could they relate to the deaths of more than six million Jews at all? Here is another example:

Fill a page with dots (full stops size 20, bold) and you will have approx. 600 dots and photocopy it 10 ten times. Give students a small piece of paper (no more than 2×2 cm) and ask them to draw one small dot for every person they know. Explain that most people probably have between 15-30 people they know incl. classmates, neighbours, family and friends, and that as a class you have about 600 people you know. If you put together everyone from school you will probably have several 1000s. Now scatter the A4 sheets across the classroom, nonchalantly, and explain that these sheets contain 6000 dots (names of people) and that in order to get the full extent of the number of people murdered you need to multiply this by 1000. Penny tends to drop after that.

Stories:

“We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”[7]

Do you remember what Frankl lost, which was mentioned at the start of this section? Maybe, possibly not. If we had told you the following story then you probably would have remembered:

Victor Frankl and his wife were arrested together with hundreds of other Jews in 1942, Vienna, Austria. Unbeknown to many, Frankl had developed a new theory of psychological well-being. Both he and his wife had anticipated what would happen to them so they had sewn the manuscript of the book he was writing into the lining of his coat. Victor and his wife Tilly were later transported to Auschwitz and the manuscript was eventually found and destroyed. Frankl began re-writing his work from scratch on bits of paper and he had to endure the death of his entire family – his wife, brother, mother and father all died in the concentration camp. When the allies liberated his camp in 1946 he had completed what was to become one of the most influential books of all time according to the New York Times – A Man’s Search for Meaning.[8]

We know that planning all lessons based on a series of principles may not be possible all the time. However, by considering these ideas, coupled with lashings of our own creativity, we can produce powerful, purposeful lessons which contain enriching tasks that will ensure skills and learning progression for all classes.

[2] Ibid. p. 20

[3] Please visit this website for great Thinking Skills activities: http://www.innovativeict.net/examples

[4] C. Heath & D. Heath, Sticking to it, Association Now, February 2007

[5] Haydn, T * Counsell, C History and ICT (Routledge)  p.

[6] See Chapter 2 p. xx – xx for a more detailed look at using online material and a further discussion on the comparison between Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia

[7] V. Frankl (2000) A Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press

[8] M. Scully, Viktor Frankl at Ninety: An Interview, www.FirstThings.com (April 1995).

“The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers – will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys”.

Daniel H. Pink[1]

Not quite.

The debate over the value of measuring and testing intelligence has been fiercely debated in the press particularly around the time of GCSE and A-Level results, over the past few years. Arguments vary from suggesting that exams are becoming easier to they no longer serve any purpose.

The number of exams is not as important as what those exams are. Pure regurgitation of facts is not as useful as being forced to use your reasoning skills under pressure. In my work, remembering things is important, but many of those things can be looked up if I can’t recall immediately. The important thing is being able to use those facts well, quickly and under pressure. That is what exams should demonstrate. /lbw, Reading, England
BBC News Online, Talking Point, Are Exams a Waste of Time?

A similar debate has been on-going in a series of articles in Time Magazine in 2003 in the U.S about the SAT Reasoning Test,a standardized test for college admissions. A year later, in 2004, the journal reported about a new method of testing students. Robert Sternberg created a number of tasks that, in his mind, would challenge students beyond linear and analytical thinking. For example, students were presented with various scenarios which they had to solve such as arriving to a party where they do not know anyone to convince friends to help move furniture. These seemingly unorthodox activities are designed to measure the creative and practical skills that Sternberg says are crucial to success in college and in life but are ignored by the typical pencil-and-paper exam:

The traditional theory of IQ deals with a very important part of intelligence, namely, memory and analytical skills, and that’s what [our exams] measure. Those skills are important for success in school and in life. But what I discovered over the years… is that some students were very gifted in traditional memory and analytical skills, but never good at making ideas of their own. They were good if you told them the paper topic, if you told them what exactly would be on the test. There were other students who were creative, but not necessarily as analytical as the first group. They tended to be imaginative, to have new ideas, to discover things, to invent things, but they were not necessarily the ones who are going to the best in standardized tests or going to excel in a typical class.

(The Yale Herlad, DECEMBER 3, 2004 VOL. XXXVIII, NO. 13)

Students must prepare themselves for an emerging labour market which has evolved from a knowledge based sphere to a conceptual sphere. Linear thinking, analytical and calculating skills is being replaced with the ability to detect patterns and opportunities. If the former were the skills of the Information Age, then synthesis will become the core skill of the 21st Century, where students are required to grasp the bigger picture and to combine contrasting elements into a new impressive whole. Welcome to the Conceptual Age.