Assessment Cheeses
& Re[Port]ing
"the
majority of year 11 students defined studying or learning with surface
strategies or methods (i.e.,, revision, re-reading, and reviewing of
the year's work) and strongly agreed that learning involved building
up knowledge by getting facts and information. In contrast, teachers
preferred a deep view of learning, usually focused on academic, cognitive
development, while at the same time, emphasising surface methods of
teaching in order to prepare students for high-stakes qualification
examinations or assessments (Brown: Teachers Conceptions of Assessment."
[Unpublished
doctoraldissertation, University of Auckland, Auckland, NZ].
Assessment has been
the focal point of much of the professional development carried out
over last 25 years and we have learnt much from this. One of the unfortunate
consequences of this focus on assessment is the "paper war"
that has resulted. In order to make the assessment process manageable
and more meaningful for both the teacher and the learner two fundamental
adaptations need to be brought into the assessment repertoire:
1.
The use of electronic assessment is starting to become a viable and
pedagogically acceptable part of the assessment process.
There are a variety
of assessment tools available, some which are very rigorous and have
the possibility of providing considerable and informative data about
student understanding [www.asttle.org.nz
as an example], while other assessment tools provide very limited feedback
on what students understand. It is imperative that we mitigate the effects
of and limit the amount of standardised testing as much as is possible.
2.
Assessment
needs to be a partnership between the students' metacognitive reflections,
(via the e-portfolio within their Knowledge NET or similar) in partnership
with the teacher assessing submitted work from the students in all three
language formats (oral, visual and written).
The
SOLO Cognitive Processing Taxonomy
The SOLO cognitive
processing taxonomy is very effective in its simplicity and we would
suggest strongly that in order to provide a framework for delivering
an assessment schema that this replaces the Blooms or modified Blooms
taxonomy currently used by many teachers.
| |
Surface Question |
Deep Question |
| One
Idea |
Uni-structural |
Relational |
| Many
Ideas |
Multi-structural |
Extended abstract |
Historically teachers have dominated the assessment
process but in this new model it is a partnership between the teacher
and the student as the student increasingly takes ownership of their
own learning. This is an essential aspect of becoming a lifelong learner.
