The AfL truth about assessment

David Warlick once said 'for the first time we are preparing young people for a future we cannot clearly describe.' In a fast changing world where everything technology touches grows exponentially, we really are in serious trouble if we cannot prepare children for uncertainty. And yet that is exactly what many school curricula are failing to do. Change is accelerating and uncertainty is ... well.... a certainty. Many of the jobs children will take when they leave school in ten years or so haven't even been conceived yet. What are we teaching them now, and will it be adequate to prepare them for this kind of uncertainty?

This entire week for me seems to have revolved around assessment. I have either been grading assignments, setting assignments or thinking about assessment (I'm speaking at an event on assessment in London later this week). There was even a live #edenchat on Twitter this week about e-assessment, which is archived here. Yesterday I presided over a 2 hour session on assessment with my second year Computing and ICT specialist primary education students. I showed them how assessment is vital - not for awarding grades, but for feeding back to students how well they have done, and what they need to do to improve. This is assessment for learning (AfL) rather than assessment of learning, and it's critical for good pedagogy. What's the difference between formative and summative assessment? I asked. Formative assessment is when the chef tastes the soup. Summative assessment is when the guests taste the soup. You have a lot of scope to change learning, unlearn, relearn in formative contexts. When summative assessment comes along, sadly it is often too late. And that's a problem with final exams and high stakes assessment.

We had a wide ranging discussion about other kinds of assessment (diagnostic, ipsative, triadic, etc), and a deep and meaningful debate about the nature of knowledge. I think we all agreed that in this information rich society, knowledge is changing, and that in some cases 'knowing' itself is taking on new meaning. What does it mean to 'know something' today? In an age where the vast majority of knowledge is discoverable via Google, what happens when kids smuggle wearable technology into the exam room and Google everything? Shouldn't curricula and assessment (especially the high stakes kind) now focus more on unGoogle-able knowledge - the kinds of knowledge and cognitive skills students need to survive and thrive in an information rich world? Testing is far too frequently administered in many schools to be effective and many exams still rely heavily on the testing of fact based learning - essentially the testing of crystallised intelligence. Shouldn't we instead be concentrating on developing young people's fluid intelligence? Does testing serve any other purpose than terrifying children and overburdening teachers? Yes - cynics would argue that it feeds into government league tables and ultimately contributes towards (the leaning tower of) PISA. Should there now be more emphasis on problem solving, team working and collaborative learning? I think we are heading in this direction, but we need to do so more quickly, or we risk losing the hearts and minds an entire generation of learners. Assessment should be primarily about helping students to learn better. It should be AfL. Anything else is mere candy floss.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Hariadhi



The AfL truth about assessment by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This time it's personal

Personal. Idiosyncratic. Individual. Separate. Different. Unique. Singular. Distinct. You.

Yes, you. Nobody else is like you. Many are similar, but only you are... you. That means that when you learn, you do it differently to everyone else. If you are a student you may be sat in the same classroom or lecture hall as many other students, and listening to the same content, but you interpret it differently to everyone else. You have a unique experience, peculiar to you. You have your own preferences, approaches and strategies. It follows that the tools and technologies you use for learning are those you have selected to use because you are (or should be) comfortable with them, personally. These tools, services and technologies become a part of your personal learning environment or PLE. The PLE is an approach rather than a technology.  It is something that evolves as we evolve, and adapts to our new knowledge and skills, our changing contexts and our circumstances.

Much has been written on PLEs, including a wealth of peer reviewed journal articles that feature empirical research. There is also at least one specialised conference dedicated to the concept. You can trawl the Web (using your PLE tools) and discover many videos, websites and blogs that focus largely on PLEs and their place in education. There is also a strong discourse around PLEs and the philosophy that underpins the concept.

One of my third year teacher education students, Tyla Elworthy, added to the discourse recently when she decided to create an animated video about PLEs and personalised learning. View it and I think you will agree that she has captured the essences of the idea, along with some useful discussion around its significance in education, now and in the near future.


Photo by Adib Wahab



This time it's personal by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A FOTE opportunity

I greatly enjoyed attending the Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference at London University's Senate Building last week. It was an exciting and thought provoking, well attended event which somehow resembled a TED talk, with its large stage, bright studio lighting, music and arena style seating. It was also great to catch up with so many old friends and to meet some new ones. By the time I presented my closing keynote, I think just about everyone was a little 'conferenced out' but the audience was receptive and polite, and apart from one heckle (which I dealt with brutally), I wasn't booed off the stage. If you would like to know the essence of my talk entitled 'Digital Learning Futures: Mind the Gap', then look no further than the official review by FOTE which can be found right here. My thanks to Frank Steiner and the organising team of FOTE for giving me the opportunity to present.

Photos by FOTE 



A FOTE opportunity by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Stage by stage

This is number 33 in my series on learning theories. Psychologists and cognitive scientists have offered a number of useful theories that aid our understanding of learning. In this series I'm providing a brief overview of the theories, and how each can be applied in education. Previous posts in this series are all linked below. My last post explored the work of Allan Paivio and his theory of dual coding. In this post we examine one of the most influential theories of the 20th Century - the stages of cognitive development model proposed by Jean Piaget. As usual, this is a brief and concise explanation of the theory, and if you wish to delve deeper, you are advised to read the associated literature.

The Theory

Jean Piaget was interested in how children develop their thinking. He proposed several influential ideas about how as they grow, children pass through several stages of cognitive growth. The first level (0-2 years) was the sensorimotor stage where children are preoccupied with exploring the world through their senses and constructing mental models of what they discover around them. The second stage of cognitive growth, which he called the preoperational stage (2-7 years) is where the child begins to determine what is important from their own perspective. In other words, they understand the world only from their own viewpoint, or egocentrism. The third stage of development was named the concrete operational stage (7-11 years) where children can reason numerically and begin to decentre from their egocentrism to consider the perspectives of others. The final stage of development is the formal operations stage, where children can manipulate ideas inside their heads, and are able to reason abstractly.

Piaget believed that children developed along these lines by exploring their world more or less independently, assimilating new information, and accommodating it into previously formed knowledge, to construct their mental models of the world, which he identified as schemas. Children like to achieve a balance, but if they are in a state of disequilibrium (between what is understood and what is experienced), he claimed, they will seek to reduce this by resolving the deficit in their understanding.

How it can be applied in education

There is already substantial evidence that Piaget's ideas have been applied in schools. Discovery learning was introduced as a direct consequence of Piaget's theory, to encourage children to explore and discover for themselves as they learnt. Another key theme to emerge from Piaget's theory of stage development is the idea of 'readiness', where children are expected be able to cope with incremental rises in complexity and abstraction as they mature. The entire modern school curriculum is premised on this assumption, and is constructed in ways to support children's cognitive development. Children need to be active rather than passive learners, said Piaget, and this requires effort on the part of the teacher to stand back and let children learn for themselves. We should focus on the process of learning as well as the product, and offer children learning experiences that offer them problems to solve and challenges to meet, so that they are kept in a state of disequilibrium (uncertainty).

There are numerous criticisms of Piaget's work, especially around the provenance of his data (he predominantly gathered this by observing his own three children learning and growing), the concepts of egocentrism and conservation, and the inflexibility of the stages as described in his theory. For further reading on these criticisms, see Donaldson (1978).

Reference
Donaldson, M. (1978) Children's Minds. London: Fontana Press.

Previous posts in this series:

1.  Anderson ACT-R Cognitive Architecture
2.  Argyris Double Loop Learning
3.  Bandura Social Learning Theory
4.  Bruner Scaffolding Theory
5.  Craik and Lockhart Levels of Processing
6.  Csíkszentmihályi Flow Theory
7.  Dewey Experiential Learning
8.  Engeström Activity Theory
9.  Ebbinghaus Learning and Forgetting Curves
10. Festinger Social Comparison Theory
11. Festinger Cognitive Dissonance Theory
12. Gardner Multiple Intelligences Theory
13. Gibson Affordances Theory
14. Gregory Visual Perception Hypothesis
15. Hase and Kenyon Heutagogy
16. Hull Drive Reduction Theory
17. Inhelder and Piaget Formal Operations Stage
18. Jung Archetypes and Synchronicity
19. Jahoda Ideal Mental Health
20. Koffka Gestalt theory
21. Köhler Insight learning
22. Kolb Experiential Learning Cycle
23. Knowles Andragogy
24. Lave Situated Learning
25. Lave and Wenger Communities of Practice
26. Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs
27. Merizow Transformative Learning
28. Milgram Six Degrees of Separation
29. Milgram Obedience to Authority
30. Norman The design of everyday things
31. Papert Constructionism
32. Paivio Dual Coding Theory

Photo by Pixabay



Stage by stage by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.