I would like to start this blog off with an article for perusal and comments.
ASSESSMENT AND OUR CURRICULUM
Brian Adam Wilson
14 February 2008
Assisting our learners for Life in the world: A discussion document
Preface
Assessment seems to be the bug-bear in many minds – teachers, parents, students and alas, office based officials of the WCED. In our district we have a continuous debate and forum discussions on the true meaning of assessment. During these debates and reading through communiqués received from our colleagues at head office, I become extremely disheartened and frustrated about the variety of interpretation of assessment. I am saddened by the fact that in all our deliberations we tend to long for the flesh-pots of Egypt. In fact we continuously seek to apply bigger weightings to aspects of regurgitation of information (read: tests and exams) as if these are the best ways to ascertain whether our learners have mastered and engaged with outcomes. I specifically mention the outcomes, because whilst we are discussing assessment tasks, we refer to the outcomes, but only perfunctorily, because in our mind of minds we strive to test and examine and evaluate our learners, instead of assessing whether they have effectively engaged with our much maligned outcomes.
We are so blinkered by our past experiences and expertise in evaluations that we tend to make assessment a vicious technocratic exercise. From this all the problems and complaints about administrative overload and misunderstanding of assessment spew forth.
I am generalising, of course, but that is exactly the purpose of this document – to ensure vigorous and rigorous debates about teaching, learning and assessment. These three aspects should be embraced as one continuous cyclical process and not as separate entities.
VALIDITY AND ASSESSMENT
Dylan Wiliam (2003) argues that studies on validity provide only a partial picture. Using the GCSE scores and test in the UK he argues that we skew our tests and questions to ensure particular outputs. In fact, he argues that if we need to find out how good A-levels are as predictors for degree studies at Universities, we need to make ALL students take A-levels and ensure that they all go to University – “whether they wanted to or not!”
This, for me is the dilemma that we are currently facing. We are concerned about the validity of our assessment tasks. In fact, I am actually sure that when we do this, we are secretly deliberating about the “standards” of our tasks. It does not matter whose and what standards we are thinking about – we are trapped in the mind-set of attaching confounding standards to everything we want to do. And then we coat this standard-idea in a chocolate-covered concept of “validity”. Yes, we use national and international benchmarks by continuously “testing and evaluating” our learners and just for good measure, our system as well. At the end we come to the same conclusion, year after year – our learners are the dumbest in the world, and, heavens forbid, in Africa…
Why are we doing this to ourselves and our Education system? Why are we continuously berating ourselves and denigrating our education system? It is my humble opinion that we continuously tend to give more credence to a system where we force our learners to regurgitate information without ever understanding the true nature of constructing knowledge. Our critical outcome #1 is so beautifully phrased: “Identify and solve problems and make decisions using critical and creative thinking” (my italics and bold font). How can we ever truly find out whether our learners can critically think, when we bombard them with information for them only to regurgitate in an examination? The net effect of this is so wonderfully entrapped within the following true occurrence: A first year University student in medicine (who passed with an A-aggregate and also had an A in Biology HG) asking her lecturer whether “coloureds, blacks and whites are all from the same human species”.
Yes, you may say this is preposterous – but this student can show her matric certificate which is absolutely fantastic. I am asking whether we have provided this student ample opportunity to develop her critical and creative thinking skills! No, I say, and again, NO! We have provided this student ample opportunity to memorise particular questions and answers to be able to have great scores at the end of the final examination.
So, why are we still chastising ourselves about our students not being able to think critically and creatively? We put too much stock in the number of As that our learners (and then we call them “bright”) obtain in the final Senior Certificate examination. And then we think that we have prepared them for the world outside.
Paul Black (2003) places the examinations in their proper context when he relates how examinations were devised in the nineteenth century and were thought to have a “salutary influence on society generally”. T.H. Huxley expressed his reservations in 1895 as related by Macleod (1982), and I quote: “A worse system and one more calculated to obstruct the acquisition of sound knowledge and to give full pay to the ‘crammer’ and the ‘grinder’ could hardly have been devised by human ingenuity.” Black further shows how this system of examining led to the formation of exam boards, councils and other structures to ensure a particular way of thinking and strengthening this idea of testing and testing. He shows how the methods used in examinations and the types of questioning hardly changed over the period from the nineteenth century through to the 1960s. Jenkins (1979) alleges that the questions and papers were homogeneous in style over this period. And remember – they did their studies in the United Kingdom – a first world country with all the privileges and resources!
This infatuation with testing and examinations led to the fact that the school inspectors became the inquisitors of schools, rather than being supportive and assisting teachers in their quest to provide better futures for the learners. In fact, here are writings from an inspector about the negative effects of this system as quoted from Holmes (1911): “As profound distrust of the teacher was the basis of the policy of the Department, so profound distrust of the child was the basis of the policy of the teachers. To leave the child to find out anything for himself, to work out anything for himself, would have been regarded as proof of incapacity, not to say insanity, on the part of the teacher, and would have led to results which, from the ‘percentage’ point of view, would probably have been disastrous.”
We place an unreal and an unfortunate emphasis on certain aspects within our subjects and Learning Areas. We perceive examinations in Mathematics as the true test of the mathematical knowledge of our learners. We place a high premium on literature in our languages as the true test of linguistic and language abilities of our learners. We provide opportunities for our learners to discuss theoretically which experiments we can use to ascertain whether photosynthesis has occurred. We are setting a false platform for our learners to take off from and make their mark in the world. We are creating virtual realities and our learners will have virtual truths!
OUR CURRICULUM
My argument is simple and clear: We have created a curriculum that purports to provide all the essences of true learning for our learners. We have created a curriculum which provides clear and unambiguous outcomes. We have narrowed down the outcomes to be effected with and by the assessment standards. We have created a curriculum which should provide a place in the sun for each and every child and learner. We have moved away from a purely content-driven, information-giving syllabus to a true curriculum. Why then do we confound our own efforts by wanting to mask true assessment in an evaluatory cloak of the past? Are we so unsure of our own practices and knowledge of assessment that we tend to divorce assessment from the cycle of learning, teaching and assessment where it truly belongs?
Let me take you to Paul Black’s (2003) deliberations again. He explains how changes crept in through 1960 to 1988 in the UK until they finally had a national Curriculum after 1988. During the years 1960 – 1988 educationists dabbled with different types of assessment – and especially practical examinations. They provided opportunities for the learners to do projects and investigations. And then they had their National Curriculum! Black explains how the national curriculum called for new thoughts about assessment. The assessment tasks should have been exercises closely following the work that the learners have been doing in class. It required new methodologies and teachers to devise new strategies to assess the work done by the learners effectively. What happened was a reverting back to traditional methods of testing. In fact where other methods were sought, they kept repeating these same stereotyped exercises year after year.
Does this scenario seem familiar? Does this ring the same type of bell in our minds? Why do we not look at other systems before we go the same route? Oh, yes, we are quick to compare OBE and the apparent “failure” of the system in first-world countries. We are quick to say that it never worked in Scotland, England, Australia, USA, but we fall in the same traps. We have a wealth of literature and research that shows what the pitfalls were. Yet, we keep on struggling on that same route. Why do we revert back and cling to having tests and examinations as the only ways to assess, when the research clearly shows that we need to think and act differently? Why are we continuing on the path of trying to give more weight to exercises where the only skill to be tested is the regurgitation of information?
Tunstall and Gipps (1996) state very clearly that the classroom assessment of teachers does not always enhance or support learning. This is so true for our situation in South Africa as well. My point is that we completely miss the fact that teaching, learning and assessment form a complete whole – these should never be separated. – and I cannot overemphasise this point. What we have generally been doing in the past was teaching/lecturing. Teachers were regarded and regarded themselves as “masters” in their little space (the classroom) which Black and Wiliam (1998) refer to as the Black box. In fact, as an old teacher of mine stated quite categorically: “A child can only speak in my class when I have asked him a question!” This attitude prevailed and actually still prevails in many a classroom. We think of ourselves as the sole purveyors of knowledge and actually what we bring to the classroom are mere information. Many times the information that we bring to the classroom is out of date, or simply irrelevant – but still we persist in providing this, because we need to show we know “everything”. We persist in using information from textbooks that are completely removed from the context of our learners. Schools buy expensive modules and programmes that expect of learners in Worcester to investigate gold mining and learners in Beaufort-West to study marine ecology. And we go home after school, patting ourselves on the back, stating that we have really taught well today!
Our learners go home to their shacks or mansions, thinking “what the hell happened at school today?” Their learning stops at the gate when they leave the school – or have they even started to learn at all? Our teachers give loads of homework to the learners which, if they are of the fortunate few, their parents will Google or go to the library and complete for them. As Pink Floyd so effectively put: “All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.” Who has gained from this experience? – no-one! We concentrate on teaching, forgetting who we are supposed to teach and we provide the learners with nonsensical tasks because we are “required” by policy to finish a certain number of tasks.
Then we give marks or percentages to these tasks. These marks and percentages many times mean very little and provide scant information regarding the ability and competency of the learners. The marks and percentages generally do not provide the learners, their parents or the teachers any insight into their engagement with the outcomes. That is why Black et al (2003) agitate for real comments to be used instead of marks and percentages. They argue, and present enough research data, that learners perform better when they understand quite clearly where their particular challenges lie. They will perform better when they know how they should engage with the outcomes and how to address their shortcomings, or enhance their strengths. At the end we look at all these tasks and state quite boldly that we need a test or exam to make up the bulk of the final mark for the learners, because the tasks that we have provided were bogus. This happens so often, because we are trapped in denuding the assessment tasks of their true function – the assessment of learning. We limit our assessment tasks to a mere form of assessment and even then we do not provide our learners ample opportunity to practise and to develop towards the effective engagement with that assessment task.
And this is where we are at this particular stage of our development in curriculum. We have not actually moved with the changing curriculum. We have not stayed abreast of all the developments within our profession. We have seriously stagnated in our understanding of the holistic development of our most precious asset, viz. our children. We have seriously disadvantaged each of them. We are putting new wine into old vessels.
HOW TO CHANGE – WHAT IS THIS PARADIGM SHIFT?
My absolute contention is that we have a wonderful curriculum. We have a National Curriculum that will stand the test of time, because of the values within our curriculum. The curriculum would and could never become stagnant or static but will continue to grow organically, as it is based on the concept of competencies, skills and outcomes. Our curriculum is ensconced within our Constitution and the values espoused therein. What other purpose could we have but to follow the path of the curriculum?
Yes, let us not be fooled or drowsed into a false sense of Nirvana. We have particular challenges and large classes is but one of these challenges. We would be able to fill out an A1 page of challenges providing hurdles to our effective implementation of our curriculum. We know that the playing fields are of course not yet level and very far from that… This should, however, not stop us from pursuing the goals entrenched within our curriculum. We are a nation that has overcome the worst of scenarios and the threat of so many ills and evils and we are going strong.
Why then do we persist in falling back into old trenches? Why do we persist in arguing that tests and examinations should count the most or weigh the heaviest in our assessment of learners? Another evil has taken hold of our thinking about assessment: The evil of degrading assessment into little boxes of “forms of assessment”. This is part of our mindset of wanting to compartmentalise everything that we do. We want to draw clear lines between oral and written work in our languages. Draw lines between creative writing and verbal communication. Draw lines between the making of a poster and communication about a project. Knowledge could never be compartmentalised. When an apple falls from the tree, it does not consider the distance to be travelled and whether it is an act of God or gravity. It falls irrespective of our human minds wanting to work out the precise science behind the fall of the apple. Herein lies the paradigm shift. What do we understand by knowledge and the holistic development of learners? How do we measure and understand our learners? What is assessment all about?
We have become creatures of technocracy. We have isolated assessment into sterile assessment tasks. We have begun number-crunching… you have to complete so many tasks before such and such a date. Why? – Because policy dictates this. It does not matter whether the learners gain and construct knowledge from these tasks, as long as they are done. We have lost our essence of engaging with the spirit of teaching, learning and assessment.
How do we utilise informal assessment? It is so aptly called assessment for learning by Black and Wiliam (1998). It simply means that all the strategies and methodologies we employ should provide learners with opportunities to construct their knowledge. We use these to build up towards a particular point in time (as planned for in our work schedule) when we will formally assess by means of an assessment task. This means that we will provide guidance and practice for our learners to eventually be able to tackle the formal assessment task. This, for me is the essence of learning. Our formal assessment tasks should never be articles of torture for our learners. They could never be exercises to trap, catch out or bamboozle our learners. These formal assessment tasks should be, as Black and Wiliam (1998) put it, assessment of learning. This means that these formal tasks are the things we use to ascertain whether learning has taken place and to provide us with information regarding the gaps in our teaching strategies and in the learning of the learners. It should provide the basis for our engagement with the outcomes for the next session of informal assessment and would guide our teaching strategies to ensure effective learning.
How do we structure our formal tasks? We need to do this in a holistic fashion. I maintain that it is senseless and educationally foolish to concentrate on one aspect only within our formal assessment task. This is where the greatest problem in our stagnant minds lies. We have now degraded our formal tasks to particular forms of assessment. We use our tasks to test – and therefore have just an examination as the formal task. We use our tasks just to test a particular skill – and therefore just have a practical examination or just a piece of creative writing. Where is our own concept of knowledge, of the understanding of the holistic development of our learners? Where is our sense of being true educators? Or have we been robotised to technically administer tasks for the sake of policy or dictates from the “department”?
Then, because we belittle the essence of the formal tasks as instruments of assessment of learning, we set tasks that have absolutely nothing to do with what actually happened in and outside the classroom in the weeks preceding the formal assessment task. In our planning we should ensure that we know when, what, how, why and where we are going to assess formally. Once this has been established our lesson plans should strategically form the route to that formal assessment task. This is where our curriculum lends itself so majestically to ensuring holistic development of our learners. We have to plan from and towards engagement with the outcomes. Our outcomes have been illuminated by the assessment standards. These assessment standards provide clear beacons towards our complete engagement with the outcomes. When we do our planning properly, we will notice that it becomes IMPOSSIBLE to only assess one particular form within our assessment task. In fact when we utilise our lesson plans as stepping stones towards the formal assessment task and we institute true informal assessment within our strategies and methodologies, then we become true teachers on the road to learning and assessment.
Our outcomes embrace and address the three domains of the learning child viz.: The Cognitive, Psychomotor and Affective domains. Let us never lose sight of these.
Assessment should in essence provide assistance for our learners to embrace knowledge. It should provide the basis of finding out the routes which different learners uniquely follow to reach their destination. Our assessment for and assessment of learning form absolute essential parts of the spiral of teaching, learning and assessment and with proper and effective planning we will provide the foundation to provide all our children a place in their future.
Lest we forget: Let us live for our children!
Brian Adam Wilson
14 February 2008.
REFERENCES
Black P. & D. Wiliam (1998) Inside the black box: raising the standards through classroom assessment. (London, School of Education, King’s College London)
Black P. & D. Wiliam (2003) In praise of educational research: formative assessment. British Educational Research Journal, 29(5), 623-637.
Black P. (2003) Testing, testing: listening to the past and looking to the future. School Science Review 85(311)
Black P., C. Harrison, C. Lee, B. Marshall & D. Wiliam (2003) Assessment for learning Maidenhead, Open University Press
Holmes E. (1911) What is and what might be. London: Constable
Jenkins E. W. (1979) From Armstrong to Nuffield: Studies in twentieth-century science education in England and Wales. London: John Murray.
MacLeod R. (ed) (1982) Days of judgement: science, examinations and the organisation of knowledge in Late Victorian England. Driffield, Nafferton Books.
Tunstall, P & C. Gipps (1996) Teacher feedback to young children in formative assessment: a typology, British Educational Research Journal, 22(4), 389–404.
Wiliam D. (2003) Validity: all you need in assessment. School Science Review, 85(311)
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