Formative Assessment Issues Across the Curriculum The Theory and the Practice TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC MỞ BÀI GIẢNG GIÁO TRÌNH

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Formative Assessment Issues Across the Curriculum: The Theory and the Practice

PAUL BLACK

King’s College

London, England

 In the past decade, formative assessment has attracted a good deal of research interest in all subject areas, including second language educa-tion It is interesting to note that there is now a lively discussion on the relationship between assessment and learning among applied linguists and language educators In this short contribution to the Forum, I will attempt to map out some of the key developmental issues in formative assessment that may resonate with the concerns of language teachers and language assessment professionals

The practice of formative assessment has been developed, in the last few years, in four main ways (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2003):

1 An enhanced attention to classroom dialogue , starting from a focus on

the use of open questioning, but then broadening in scope to be enriched by a wide range of studies of such dialogue

2 Peer- and self-assessment , helping students to become independent

learners by engaging in the assessment of their own and one another’s

work through focusing on the aims of their learning and on the

cri-teria by which its quality can be judged

3 Comment-only marking, or dialogue in writing, acting on the fi nding that

marks on written work do not improve attainment, whereas formative

comments do so improve

4 The formative use of summative tests , an extension of comment-only

marking, treating test answers as an occasion for formative feedback

This can also develop peer- and self-assessment activity if students

either try setting test questions, which requires them to think about

the purposes of the work to be tested, or mark one another’s test

responses, thereby focusing attention on their criteria of quality

This primarily pragmatic approach to formative assessment has given rise

to theoretical questions, particularly because it has been seen as successful

and has been widely disseminated, adapted, and distorted (Black, 2007)

Some of these questions will be addressed in the following sections 1

Feedback is an essential element of all four of these aspects of

forma-tive assessment For both oral and written dialogue, the fi rst resource for

eliciting and responding to feedback is the teacher, who does so in a way

designed to help learners make progress In peer- and self-assessment,

the students can become resources for one another for the same

pur-pose However, in a well developed whole-class discussion, they can also

develop this role in the context of oral dialogue Thus while this fi rst

prac-tice is obviously complemented by the second , it can also incorporate the

third , and the fourth practice overlaps with both the second and the third

Self-assessment is a key aim which all four may serve It helps to develop

metacognition, which can be seen in the light of Ramaprasad’s (1983)

analysis that the three key processes in learning are to establish where

learners are in their learning, where they are aiming to go, and what

needs to be done for them to get there

The aim of helping students guide and improve their own learning is

an important aim of education—some would argue that it should be the

main aim The need for a clear understanding of the aims of learning is

refl ected in the current emphasis on target setting and on tracking

stu-dents’ progress, which are seen as requiring frequent testing However,

this emphasis often neglects research fi ndings about formative

assess-ment Broad targets, such as the levels in the U.K national curriculum,

are too vague to help struggling learners along the often small steps that

they need to follow, while, as I shall argue, frequent measurement can be

counterproductive

A more detailed look at oral argument can start with Figure 1, which

upper arrows represent the teacher addressing a challenge, a task, or an explicit question, to the student, and the lower arrows represent the response What is heard may not be what the teacher intended, hence the break in the fi rst arrow: The student may misunderstand the terms used or may have an inadequate idea of what might count as an answer The skilful teacher may anticipate and try to minimise such problems, but diffi culties of this type are inevitable The break in the lower arrow represents the reverse diffi culty—the teacher may misinterpret the stu-dents’ meaning or intention

The diffi cult task is to interpret a student’s response in the light of some theory of the thinking and motivation of the student who produced

it Some theoretical models, notably those which focus on self-regulated learning (Greene & Azvedo, 2007), may be helpful The main features of this model are represented in Figure 2

This representation oversimplifi es the model, which explores the mul-tiple interactions between the two sets of these elements (e.g., the stan-dards deployed will relate to the identifi cation of the task) and the cyclic processes involved However, Figure 2 does serve to illustrate the com-plexity of the process and indicates the variety of reasons that might account for those student responses which may seem so strange that it is hard to see how they can be the product of thoughtful effort However, more is involved than a merely cognitive exercise, for the response may

be controlled by a desire to protect one’s own sense of well-being (Boekaerts & Corno, 2005) For example, a learner may refuse to engage for fear of appearing stupid Dweck (2000) shows how important this dimension can be One implication is that a focus on marks and grades,

on written work or in a regime of frequent testing, can do positive harm

by developing obstacles to engagement, effects which can be as harmful

to the high achievers as to the low

An obvious outcome of this analysis is that, if formative teaching requires that feedback should help to identify and address specifi c learning needs, then it will be strongly contingent, adapting the teacher’s best-laid plans to deal with responses which are often unforeseen and surprising The discussion so far has been limited to one-to-one teacher–student exchange; there is ample evidence that in most classrooms teachers

FIGURE 1

A Teaching Interaction

conduct class dialogue as a sequence of such interactions, in that

succes-sive students may interact with the teacher, but not with one another

(Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003; Smith, Hardman, Wall,

& Mroz, 2004) In a more ambitious approach, a teacher may listen to

several responses before deciding how to intervene or might bounce

back the suggestion of any one student by asking others to propose

alter-natives or to evaluate what has been proposed This approach involves

students acting as resources for one another, and in conducting the

class-room in this way, the teacher can serve as a model for the way in which

students should interact with one another in any learning dialogue

A teacher can also enhance the quality of student’s involvement by

allowing students time to think, and by encouraging them to discuss with

one another, before calling for responses A simple indicator of quality in

this scenario is the nature of the learner’s contributions, which can range

from the utterance of single words or short phrases to whole sentences

(Black et al., 2003) or whole paragraphs (Dillon, 1994) The aim is that

the classroom should be a place where students are involved in thinking

and in learning through discussion Detailed analysis of this theme can

be found in van Lier (1996) and Alexander (2006) However, there is still

a range of choices, between tight steering of the discussion, by clues and

cues, to ensure that it keeps on track to achieve a given aim, and looser

control to ensure that the outcome is more clearly in the hands of the

learners

The formative element, that is, the contingent interaction within a

learning situation, is inevitably embedded within the strategy for the

over-all aim of the learning Other components of that strategy include the

choice of the task or the question, designed by the teacher to help explore

the relevant arena of learning, and the teacher’s choice, between

alterna-tive formaalterna-tive responses, designed to steer the discussion to serve the

FIGURE 2

A Simplifi ed Model of Self-Regulated Learning

concept in relation to experimental evidence that students may have col-lected However, if the lesson is designed to promote cognitive accelera-tion (Adey, 2005), a similar experimental exercise may lead to a discussion prioritising a different purpose—to develop students’ reasoning skills in relation to (say) proportionality, or the control of multiple variables Thus cognitive acceleration lessons, and similar examples (e.g., dynamic assessment, see Leung, 2007), are characterised by a design that is based

on a very specifi c model of learning By contrast, in the concept-oriented science lesson, the teacher would be guided only by very general princi-ples of learning, such as starting from where the learner is, or involving the learner actively through discussion Yet all the lessons considered in this paragraph may be making effective use of formative assessment practices

By its focus on oral dialogue, the preceding discussion only begins to explore the place of formative assessment within a more comprehensive theory of pedagogy There is need to explore its other aspects, notably the theory and practices of students’ group work in relation to formative interactions, the optimum interleaving of group work with whole class discussion, and formative interaction in written exchanges

THE AUTHOR

Paul Black is emeritus professor of science education at King’s College London, England His research interests include assessment—both formative and summative— and the school curriculum in science, and design and technology

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Principles for Large-Scale Classroom-Based Teacher

Assessment of English Learners’ Language: An

Initial Framework From School-Based Assessment

in Hong Kong

LIZ HAMP-LYONS

University of Nottingham

Nottingham, England

 Davison and Leung (this issue) describe the fi eld of teacher-based

English language assessment as having “much variability, a lack of

system-atic principles and procedures and a dearth of information as to the

impact of teacher-based assessments on learning and teaching” (p 389)

In this Forum contribution, I briefl y explore an example of teacher-based

assessment of oral English that has been implemented across Hong Kong

(see Davison 2007; Davison & Hamp-Lyons, in press) and the ways which

elements of practice have contributed to or inhibited the establishment

of the systematic key principles that are needed to establish any form of

large-scale alternative assessment

As this issue shows, assessment for learning is different from assess

-ment of learning Black and Wiliam (1998) have summarized fi ve

ele-ments that seem to be essential in the effectiveness of any attempt to

improve learning by applying formative assessment or assessment for

learning approaches: (a) the setting of clear goals; (b) the design of

priate learning and assessment tasks; (c) the communication of

assess-ment criteria to teachers and learners; (d) the provision of high quality