Learning and Assessment

Learning and assessment are always at the forefront of a teacher’s mind from planning AFL activities in individual lessons to assessment weeks in the long-term plan.  A careful balance needs to be struck between learning and assessment; in the current educational climate a teacher can even feel pressurized into assessing too frequently cutting into precious learning time. When the proper balance is struck between learning and assessment they communicate what has been learnt and what student and teacher now need to do to move forward, and so, they are a vital pairing.

Assessment is incredibly useful for a practitioner when identifying what learning has occurred and often, most importantly, identifying what hasn’t been learnt. Marton and Säljö (1976) explored the differences between Surface and Deep Learning. Martin and Säljö have defined Surface Learning as the quantitative increase in a student’s knowledge whereas Deep Learning is a far more desirable attribute of being able to comprehend abstract concepts. A saddening truth here is that the recent modifications to the English Language and Literature specifications lend themselves to Surface Learning. Of late many of my lessons and revision sessions have included tasks where students are encouraged to memorise lines of plays, lists of poems and the differences between sentence forms. I’ve found these changes have had an almost numbing effect on students and as a teacher it is difficult to watch a once keen and capable learner become apathetic towards your subject. Indeed the old English specifications had a tendency towards Surface Learning but one always felt students, even the lowest of ability, were at least supported in some way by foundation papers and Controlled Assessments. But in this new age of exclusively exam based English assessments it is an unnerving uncertainty where a B (or a new age five) is now the bottom end of an upper-grade pass one can’t help but feel as apathetic and defeated as the poor students going through the process. My only hope with the new specifications is that my students will be able to develop what Ramdass et.al (2011) identified as self-regulatory skills. Independent learning can only take place when a pupil develops self-regulation skills; self-regulation is integral for an independent learner as it is a proactive process of managing one’s own independent learning, behaviour, thoughts and emotions in order to make progress. The findings of Ramdass et.al have been informing my teaching practice over the last few years and have especially resonated with my development of task menus in lessons. These resources have been useful for both learning and assessment; I’ve noticed my students have become more self-aware of their own progress. I feel at this stage that the implementation of task menus has had a positive impact on my students’ self-regulatory skills as they have begun taking the steps towards more independent learning.

It is my hope that the appropriate use of task menus in my lessons will help in dealing with the ‘fight Vs flight’ mentality that students often face. During the first Teaching and Learning session we were presented with a task involving the Periodic Table. My initial feeling was one of competitiveness; I made the assumption that we were going to be given a few minutes to memorise the table and then would have to recreate it (strange that I made the assumption that this was going to be a Surface Learning based task, or, perhaps not.) After a few minutes it was brought to my attention that there were four or five questions at the bottom of the sheet that I was supposed to be answering. My initial instinct was a competitive fight one but in actual fact this kneejerk reaction became a hindrance: I just went for what I instinctively thought was the task without double checking. Before I had made this mistake I would have probably said that I would want my students to always choose the fight over flight response; this experience provided me with the opportunity to also evaluate the downsides of the fight response, it has become clear to me that contextualising learning –and assessment in turn –is essential.

A lack of contextualisation during lesson time is the reason why teachers can receive some strange responses from students during assessment. I once had an experience with a student when studying Of Mice and Men. The student thought that the quote “live off the fat ‘o the lan’” was not an American colloquialism for “live off of the fat of the land” but thought that George and Lennie were striving to earn enough money to buy fatty lamb’s meat to eat. To add to this need of contextualisation it is also essential that teachers ensure knowledge is not only learnt but embedded. I have found in my experience that when students are presented with a vast amount of Surface Learning material to memorise they have forgotten it after a few weeks so when we return to the topic a few months later it is completely gone. Contrastingly, I have found that students are often able to retain Deeper Learning concepts over longer periods of time because they have related parts of that knowledge to other pieces of knowledge sometimes spanning the curriculum areas. For a brain to validate and embed learning to memory there must be an emotional connection and so a purposeful mixture of Surface and Deep Learning, as well as the contextualization of knowledge, is seemingly vital.

This need of an emotional connection has been touched upon by Gardner (1983). He noted that there are a number of different types of intelligences and that individuals are often proficient in some and less able in others. Gardner noted that there were seven in total (logical; mathematical; linguistic; musical; bodily-kinaesthetic; interpersonal; and intrapersonal.) Of the seven I would argue that English Literature and Language touch most often on the linguistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and logical intelligences (when I completed the Gardner questionnaire during the session these were the areas I was most closely aligned to.) These are therefore the areas in which students are using the most during their learning in English and therefore are being assessed on most frequently. Fleming and Chambers (1983) found that the majority of assessment-based questions were Surface Learning based concerning factual information. Long (2000) later built on this noting that the frequent use of knowledge-based assessments was due to their ease during the planning and feedback stages. Robinson (2006) noted that as teachers we should be asking ourselves how we can make a positive change and how can we effectively measure the intelligence and creativity of our students. This flummoxed me after I became conscious of Gardner’s ideas concerning the seven intelligences. Not only did this stump me I actually experienced a pang of professional guilt. I fervently began scribbling down a spider-diagram which simply had a question mark in the centre because I didn’t know the answers. I wrote down the embarrassingly obvious: assessment tasks, work in their books, data, none of which even scratched the surface of what Robinson was posing. I was trapped inside an educational box with every other teacher in this seemingly flawed educational paradigm. I then posed myself another question after failing at answering Robinson’s: what could I do to foster the creativity of my learners? My first thought was to dismantle my physical educational box: my classroom. What if I started to wander from the assessment objectives and consider Deep Learning activities over Ofqual’s preferred Surface Learning ones? What if I changed my students’ stimuli and did away with the technology which is arguably dulling their thirst for discovery? What if I went one step further in altering my students’ stimuli by removing the chairs and desks and had my students sitting on the floor receiving nothing more that verbal teaching and verbal feedback? I’m quite sure I’d be haunted by the ghost of Gove. Although some of these ideas are perhaps in the extreme they do highlight our need in evaluating the current model of Surface based Learning in the English Curriculum and whether teachers should be evaluating it in a balanced way.

Conveniently, the musings of Claxton (2008) bring me back down to earth. Claxton noted that the most academically well-rounded students are good at sticking with things even if they are difficult and they are willing to ask questions if they are stuck. These types of students are also willing to share with their peers but are also willing to think independently of their teacher. They essentially choose an appropriate contextualized fight response. As an English practitioner I am now considering the following questions: what can I do to foster the creativity of my learners? How can I effectively assess the creativity of my learners? How will I know if I have struck the appropriate balance between learning and assessment? How can I help my students to develop their resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness and reciprocity? Rather than making a shallow conclusive statement about these questions I’m going to spend some time contemplating them and perhaps doing some reading around them. My hope is that by the end of this course I will be able to not only answer these questions but to truly understand their answers.

References

Claxton. G (2008). What's the Point of School?: Rediscovering The Heart Of Education. Oneworld Publications, London.

Fleming, M. & Chambers, B. (1983). Teacher-made tests: Windows on the  classroom. In W. E. Hathaway (Ed.), Testing in the schools: New directions for testing and measurement, NO. 19 (pp.29-38). San  Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gardner, Howard (1983), Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books, New York.

Long, M. (2000) The Psychology of Education , Routledge Falmer, Berkshire.

Marton F. and Säljö R. (1976) On qualitative differences in learning. I – Outcome and Process’ British Journal of Educational Psychology 46, pp. 4-11.

Ramdass.D. Zimmerman, B.J. (2011) Developing Self-Regulation Skills: The Important Role of Homework. Journal of Advanced Academics. 22 (2), 194-218.

Robinson. K, (2006) Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk". TED.com. Retrieved 21.12.2016.