[MUSIC] Welcome again to week two of this course on assessment. The theme this week is feedback, and this topic, number two, is about building feedback into your teaching, clarifying goals and intentions and being able to identify strengths and weaknesses. In our curriculum map again, I remind you that feedback has to do with the quality and validity of the whole assessment. Learning intentions are an important aspect of good teaching. Teaching gets its goals from the curriculum. We have to have a clear understanding as teachers as to what we want learners to learn, to do, or to understand. We need to be able to describe that. And to the extent that we can do that, we then have a basis for designing assessments that align to those skills, or abilities, or knowledge that we've identified as the learning targets. And once we have that information from assessment, our teaching plans can be modified to close the gap by providing the next steps. And of course, feedback to administrators, to school leaders, to parents, even to the students - depends on being able to say what was the relationship between the performance relative to the learning intention derived from the curriculum, and what the school, the student and the teacher have decided to do next about it. And in this screen, which is a screen shot of a piece of feedback that students have been given in a New Zealand high school setting. The feedback diagram shows a set of assessment criteria given by the teacher, derived from the national curriculum statements for learning English at about Grade 11 in New Zealand. That's the 15 year old English curriculum. And it shows the student has marked another student's piece of work, using these criteria. And the student has written some comments, which you can study in the PowerPoint slide. And the teachers studied these comments, looked at the piece of work, and offered an alternative interpretation. The teachers commented on the strength that the student had in the piece of work, and then suggested actually that overall the quality of the work was not as high as the student has suggested. But throughout this process, the teacher has focused on the characteristics of the work relative to the learning intention or criteria given for this type of work. The teacher hasn't commented on the honesty or intelligence or even the hard work of either the writer or the student marker. The teacher has kept the focus on the task and the process of writing. And this is the kind of style of feedback that has been shown to be effective for learning, in this case not just for the writer, but also for the student marker. It's important to remember that feedback is a social process. Feedback doesn't exist in isolation from being human. The teacher gives feedback, and students sometimes experience that feedback quite emotionally and some students have even said, "Well, she gave me this negative feedback, it must mean she doesn't like me", when in fact all the teacher is trying to do is to communicate: "Here's where you are, this is what you have to do next." So, it's really important that both receivers and givers concentrate on making sure the social relationships and the social aspects of giving good feedback don't interfere. Often learners have quite a different understanding of what counts as good quality work. A lot of students will substitute effort for quality. They'll say, "I worked really hard. I worked long hours. I went to the library. I did lots of work." But actually lots of work doesn't necessarily mean it's good work. Indeed, lack of effort is also not an indicator of poor quality. My father was always angry at me in high school for not doing enough work, and my teachers shouldn't have been giving me As at school because I wasn't working hard enough. And so this whole relationship of effort and quality are quite independent. So, students need feedback on how to judge the quality of their own work. They need information from much more expert and competent people to grow in their ability. That's what the teacher is for. And the teacher's job is to say, "Yes, your work doesn't meet the standard, and here's how you can improve." Without that step, the teacher is simply a judge, rather than an assistant or a facilitator or a teacher. What we know is that teachers and students want to improve in their learning and teaching. Almost everybody involved in schooling is constantly, if not asking themselves deliberately, but somewhere in their minds is the question, "How could I do this better?" And that's the sign of a good teacher and a good student. How could I do this better? One of the challenges of educational assessment is can tests be used to contribute to answering that question. Unfortunately, a lot of tests only give a percentage correct score. You got 83% or 27%. Or they give a rank order score. You're in the top 10%, or you're in the bottom 33rd% or some other rank in class, like you're 15th out of 16 in the class. And this information actually doesn't contribute to giving feedback because it doesn't answer the question "What do I have to do next? What was I good at, and what was I weak at?" It's simply a total score. We need this information, so tests that only give us total and rank are insufficient. And perhaps these kinds of grading systems and testing systems have got a bad grade simple because-- sorry, they've got a bad reputation simply because they've failed to communicate. Tests and grades seem to have gotten a bad reputation simply because they don't tell teachers or students enough information on how to improve. However, relying only on my teacher interaction or comments from my peers or classmates is probably not enough to guide my learning. Tests can still be useful, and we want to talk about how tests can be turned into feedback mechanisms. If all test questions have been linked to curriculum achievement objectives or learning targets or unit goals, then it becomes easier to look at performance on those test questions and say, "How did you do on the various learning goals of this test?" And those scores can make visible relative strengths or weaknesses and identify teachable areas. And tests can provide direct feedback to the teacher, "How did your class go?" To the student, "How did I go?" To parents, "How did my child go?" And even school leaders, "How did this grade go?" If tests focus on learning objectives, rather than how well you behave in class or as a punishment for having bad attitudes, then they can be useful for education. Tests can even be linked to catalogs of teaching materials and teaching resources, so that as students get scores in this range, here's the kinds of materials that can be used to help you build student competence. To design a good test, though, requires some special effort. And the simple mechanism that test companies and test agencies use, and that classroom teachers can use, is a blueprint or a template. It's a way of designing in advance, "What do I want to appear in my test?" And on the screen is an example of a test blueprint developed by one of my colleagues in the University of Macau in Macau, China. And she's designed this test to cover recall, comprehension, and application skills and to cover the content of chapters one and two and some integrated knowledge related to chapters one and two of the textbook. And she's decided how many items for each cell, how many recall, how many comprehension, how many application for chapter one and so on. And this kind of blueprint allows her to strategically design the assessment that she's going to give to her class to check that these students can do the important things that she has decided were the teaching goals. And on screen now, we've given you an example of how you could use a template to design a reasonably short test. This template, we would suggest to cover four areas of something that you're teaching, would be suitable for a 30 to 40 minute test. And it allows you to identify what those areas are, and how many questions of different types you're going to use. Remember, we're going to come to those different types later in this course. But a template like this allows you to think about "What was so important I should ask everybody in the class about this skill or this knowledge?" And then based on how they do on those questions, you can get a profile of their strengths and weaknesses. So, these templates become a mechanism by which you can design your own classroom tests and still use them to identify strengths and weaknesses. Later in this course, we're going to give you more ideas on how you can use a test devised with a template to provide feedback when you report to parents or school leaders. We are looking forward to telling you more, also, in the next session about how students and teachers experience assessment in the research we've done in various parts of the world. [MUSIC]
