The NFER Formative Assessment Service and Assessment for Learning
Marian Sainsbury
The NFER Formative assessment service and Assessment for Learning v2 © NFER, 2010. All rights reserved. The NFER Formative assessment service is a trademark of the NFER. NFER The Mere Upton Park Slough Berkshire SL1 2DQ
Contents Introduction ........................................................
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Assessment for Learning .......................................
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Principles and practice .............................................. Attitudes, values and classroom atmosphere ................ The place of AfL in school assessment policies .............
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How the NFER Formative Assessment Service supports AfL 6 Assessment purpose: to plan teaching ......................... Observing learners ................................................... Sharing the child-speak profiles .................................. Talking about learning ..............................................
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Background ................................................................ 9
Introduction
Introduction Assessment for Learning (AfL), or formative assessment, is a powerful process that can improve pupils’ engagement, attitudes and attainment. Assessment information is used by teacher and pupils to feed back directly into active learning. Pupils understand what they should be learning, identify how they can improve and monitor their own progress, alongside the teacher. The current drive to promote AfL stems from the seminal work of Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, which was then taken up and championed by the Assessment Reform Group. AfL is now an explicit part of assessment policy in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The NFER Formative Assessment Service can support AfL, helping to make it more manageable and accessible for teachers as they develop their classroom practice. There are a number of advantages to using the NFER Formative Assessment Service to support the implementation of AfL.
The NFER Formative Assessment Service provides a rapid snapshot of each child’s existing understanding and misconceptions in a specific curriculum area. This gives teachers an immediate starting-point for grouping, teaching and making their own more detailed observations.
The NFER Formative Assessment Service profiles describe each child’s strengths and weaknesses in words, with suggestions for next steps for teaching and learning. These detailed descriptions can support teachers in recording and discussing their pupils’ understanding and in planning learning experiences.
The NFER Formative Assessment Service child-speak profiles can be shared with pupils, involving them in setting learning objectives and developing success criteria, promoting independent learning.
The NFER Formative Assessment Service itself cannot replace teachers’ own ongoing monitoring of each child’s learning, but it can be used as a tool to support and develop AfL and formative practice. This booklet gives suggestions for how the NFER Formative Assessment Service can be used in conjunction with AfL.
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The NFER Formative Assessment Service and Assessment for Learning
Assessment for Learning
Assessment for Learning Principles and practice The Assessment Reform Group give a useful definition of AfL: Assessment for Learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there. The essence of good teaching and learning is to start from a learner’s existing knowledge, understanding and skills and move forward from there into new areas of learning, enrichment of understanding and refinement of skills. Good teaching has always meant making efforts to identify what pupils already know, and the gaps in and blocks to that knowledge, and planning learning experiences to build on strengths and address weaknesses. In AfL practice, this process becomes more explicit. Teachers use all the ongoing assessment information available to them in planning learning experiences. They share the learning intentions with their pupils at the outset, so that all are focused on the objectives. They use a variety of methods and techniques to elicit assessment information so that they can give feedback and tailor each child’s learning experiences. Throughout the learning process, reflective discussion maintains a focus on the learning that has taken place. Alongside the teacher’s role, AfL stresses the value of involving learners themselves in gathering assessment information and monitoring progress, developing self-assessment skills. A pupil who understands what he or she should be learning and who learns to identify gaps in that knowledge is working alongside the teacher to bring about improvements. Similarly, learners who understand the learning intentions and success criteria for the work can give feedback to one another as peer assessors. The power of AfL is in multiplying the capacity for collaborative and independent learning through continuous monitoring and feedback in this way. In introducing AfL into the classroom, teachers will use a variety of methods that get learners generating and discussing ideas, such as: paired/small group work; asking and exploring open questions; encouraging risk taking, speculation, hypothesising and predicting. As part of this process, some teachers help children to foster AfL habits by building in techniques such as ‘no hands up’, ‘traffic lights’ or ‘two stars and a wish’. The notion of focused, specific feedback is fundamental to AfL. It may take many forms, for example individual discussion between teacher and learner, structured peer assessment using success criteria or teacher comments when marking a piece of work. In all cases, the value of the feedback is that it helps the pupil to understand what is successful and how to improve, which in itself begins to bring about that improvement.
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Assessment for Learning
Attitudes, values and classroom atmosphere Although AfL may involve specific techniques and methods, the changes it brings about are more profound. Successful AfL can only be implemented where there is an open and trusting classroom atmosphere between teacher and pupils where all contributions are respected and valued. This is because AfL requires learners to be open about their mistakes and misunderstandings and to use them as learning opportunities. This is quite different from a classroom atmosphere where the teacher values only correct or predetermined answers. To establish a successful AfL classroom requires a major investment of time and effort. The teacher needs to model the new ways of working and to consistently reward and encourage children towards openness. Pupils who are used to concealing their mistakes need time and support to value them instead. Recent research suggests that, in moving towards establishing this new atmosphere, teachers should delay the use of techniques such as ‘traffic lights’, which are based on the assumption that an open and trusting atmosphere is already in place. Instead, a focus on collaborative discussions about learning intentions, success criteria and feedback, in the early stages, may be less threatening and offer important opportunities for modelling and rewarding openness and trust.
The place of AfL in school assessment policies An understanding of AfL gives teachers valuable skills to use in assessing and fostering their pupils’ development. When AfL is embedded in the work of a class, it leads to high levels of engagement and attainment. In practice, an AfL approach to assessment will sit alongside other assessments, for other purposes, in the teacher’s repertoire. School assessment policies will reflect this variety:
When the purpose of assessment is to support teaching and learning, the challenge for teachers and pupils is to understand and embed AfL. To track pupils’ progress through the curriculum, the day-to-day judgements need to be summarised and the next steps planned systematically. When the purpose is to finalise a teacher assessment judgement, for record-keeping and reporting, teachers need to summarise their knowledge of each child and compare it to standard criteria. Skills for moderation across classes and schools become important in these circumstances. Many teachers will also need to integrate high-stakes national tests into their classroom assessment practices. The challenge in meeting this assessment purpose is to ensure that the high-stakes nature of the tests is not allowed to distort teaching and learning.
In all these cases, assessment-literate teachers and well thought-out school assessment policies will be clear about the purpose of the assessment, the use of the resulting information and the skills needed to meet that purpose. 4
The NFER Formative Assessment Service and Assessment for Learning
Assessment for Learning Many schools in England currently use Assessing Pupils’ Progress (APP) as a way of integrating all these assessment purposes in a meaningful way. This is the subject of a separate guidance booklet.
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How the NFER Formative Assessment Service supports AfL
How the NFER Formative Assessment Service supports AfL The NFER Formative Assessment Service is a newcomer on the assessment scene and does not fit neatly into any pre-defined categories. It is presented as a standard question-and-answer assessment which marks children’s answers; but it is formative and low-stakes, providing rich information to inform teaching and learning as well as monitoring progress. It is intended to support AfL, and schools where it is in use have demonstrated how it can be used in this way.
Assessment purpose: to plan teaching When a teacher sets out to teach a new topic, concept or curriculum area, the first need is to establish children’s existing understanding, so that the learning experiences planned for them are appropriate – neither redundant nor out of reach. Typically, this might be done by means of a class discussion, to activate prior learning. This may confirm the teacher’s beliefs about the class’s current understanding, or may reveal some surprises – for example, when a child has a strong interest in a topic outside school. However, although such a discussion will give a general impression of where the class is starting from, it cannot give precise information about each child. The NFER Formative Assessment Service units are designed to fit into curriculum planning so that there is a unit to match most curriculum topics. By giving the children an NFER Formative Assessment Service challenge at the same time as the initial class discussion, the general information is supplemented by a more detailed assessment of the existing knowledge of each child. To use the NFER Formative Assessment Service to support this assessment purpose:
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Select an assessment unit that matches the curriculum area that will be the focus of teaching and learning. Give the same challenge to all the children. Select ‘Plan teaching from a single test’ from the Teacher reports menu and select the subject, class and test. Use the pie chart to form initial groupings of children for teaching. Click on each profile name for more details. Note the strengths, weaknesses and next steps that are suggested for each group. If appropriate, build this information into teaching plans. The NFER Formative Assessment Service is assembling a bank of resources that could be used for teaching in some curriculum areas, tailored to the profiles. At the moment, these consist of links to the Oxford University Press Treetops reading series and to a set of materials for fostering peer assessment in literacy developed by the NFER. Links to information about these resources can be found in the relevant profiles. The NFER Formative Assessment Service and Assessment for Learning
How the NFER Formative Assessment Service supports AfL
Observing learners The NFER Formative Assessment Service profiles set out the strengths and weaknesses that the challenge revealed and form a starting-point for teachers’ own observations. This is only the first step in moving forward with AfL in the classroom. Once the initial groupings of children have been formed, teachers will want to:
Observe each group working to check how well the characteristics described in the profiles are reflected in each child’s understanding, as shown in their work and discussions. If appropriate, move children from one group to another if the initial assessment seems inaccurate. The profile listed for each child is the ‘best fit’ and the NFER Formative Assessment Service report also gives a probability distribution – that is, it tells you how likely it is that the profile selected is the correct one. Sometimes, children are on the borderline between two profiles and an alternative may be a better fit. To find this, select the ‘View performance on a single test’ report and click on a child’s name. Some teachers find it helpful to use some of the information from the profiles in deciding on learning intentions and thinking about success criteria with the group. Building on this basis, move forward with observing each individual child, questioning, giving feedback and marking their work throughout the learning activities. The NFER Formative Assessment Service is not intended as a substitute for this process, and aims to support rather than supplant the teacher’s observation skills by providing some useful pointers.
Sharing the child-speak profiles Each learner profile has a ‘child-speak’ version, in which the strengths and weaknesses are identified and described in simple, positive language. If teachers wish to use this feature, it could be integrated in various ways:
Working as a group, the children could use the child-speak profiles to develop success criteria related to the activities planned for them. Teachers could discuss the child-speak profile with each individual child to help develop individual targets. The child-speak profiles have also been found useful in discussions with parents, to present their child’s strengths and development points in a straightforward, jargon-free way which is more meaningful than a test score or level.
Talking about learning As teachers build their rich picture of each child’s attainments and development points, they may need to pinpoint and record progress from time to time, and to discuss this with other professional colleagues. In schools using the NFER Formative Assessment Service, the profiles have been found useful by teachers as a shared basis for discussion, record-
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How the NFER Formative Assessment Service supports AfL keeping, in-school moderation, to develop a shared understanding of standards and for monitoring progress year to year.
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The NFER Formative Assessment Service and Assessment for Learning
Background
Background The NFER Formative Assessment Service is a brand new approach to ongoing assessment designed to support AfL and to fit with current assessment policy in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
References The following documents have informed the development of this guidance and can be referred to for further information.
Paul Black’s and Dylan Wiliam’s seminal paper:
Black, P. & Wiliam, D. (1998) Inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment (London, School of Education, King’s College).
The Assessment Reform Group Ten Principles:
http://www.qcda.gov.uk/4335.aspx
The Assessment Reform Group’s ARIA report:
Gardner, J., Harlen, W., Haywood, L. and Stobart, G. (2008) Changing Assessment Practice: Process, Principles and Standards. http://arrts.gtcni.org.uk/gtcni/bitstream/2428/24592/1/ARIA%20Changing %20Assessment%20Practice%20Pamphlet%20Final.pdf
The DCSF’s Assessment for Learning Strategy:
http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/default.aspx?PageFunction=productde tails&PageMode=publications&ProductId=DCSF-00341-2008
A recent scholarly investigation of conditions for introducing AfL:
Webb, M. & Jones, J. (2009) Exploring tensions in developing assessment for learning, Assessment in Education, 16, 2, 165-184.
Acknowledgements I am very grateful for comments and suggestions from Juliet Sizmur and Claire Hodgson in writing this booklet.
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