Transcript FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT: CAN IT BE TRANSFORMATIVE?

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
IN ACTION
W. James Popham
University of California, Los Angeles
Oakland Schools—in Partnership with the
Michigan Assessment Consortium:
NATIONAL SPEAKER SERIES
Waterford, Michigan
February 6, 2015
Today’s Foci: Four Understandings about
Formative Assessment
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What It Is and What It Isn’t
What It Can Do and What It Can’t
One Cut of Formative Assessment’s Cake
Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk
Formative Assessment:
What It Is
Formative assessment is a planned
process in which assessment-elicited
evidence of students’ status is used by
teachers to adjust their ongoing
instructional procedures or by students
to adjust their current learning-tactics.
Formative Assessment:
What It Isn’t
• It is not a test.
• It is not an interim test (also referred to
as a benchmark or periodic test)
administered every few months by
schools or districts.
• It is not the unplanned, serendipitous
use of student cues to adjust teaching.
A Turn & Talk Task
Please turn to one or two nearby
neighbors, if possible, selecting those
who seem fairly bright. Assume they
are not educators but, rather, laypeople
who are concerned about our schools.
They have asked you to tell them what
is meant by this “formative assessment
stuff.” Alternately, describe to each
other what this label means.
FORMATIVE
ASSESSMENT =
A Planned
Process to Base
Adjustment
Decisions on
Assessment
Evidence
Why Michigan Teachers Should
Routinely Employ Formative Assessment
• School Accountability: Because
students’ performances on
accountability tests will play a key role
in determining a school’s success.
• Teacher Evaluation: Because the best
evidence of student growth in teacher
evaluation is apt to be students’ prepost performance on classroom tests.
A Turn & Talk Task
Please turn to one or two nearby
colleagues, then take turns trying to
persuade each other that teachers should
use formative assessment on the basis
of either (1) school accountability or (2)
teacher evaluation. Thereafter, choose
the other reason and, once more, trot out
your persuasion ploys.
Formative Assessment:
What It Can Do
In a research review based on 250 empirical
studies of classroom assessment that had
been drawn from more than 680 published
investigations, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam
concluded:
“The research reported here shows
conclusively that formative assessment does
improve learning.” (Assessment in
Education, 1998)
Formative Assessment:
What It Can Do
Two Other Quotes from the Research Review:
• The student gains in learning triggered by
formative assessment were “amongst the
largest ever reported for educational
interventions.”
• “Significant gains can be achieved by many
different routes, and initiatives here are not
likely to fail through neglect of delicate and
subtle features.”
And More Recently:
“Five reviews of the research in this
area synthesized a total of more than
4,000 research studies undertaken
during the last 40 years. The
conclusion was clear: When
implemented well, formative
assessment can effectively double the
speed of student learning.” (Wiliam,
Educational Leadership, 2007-2008)
And Even More Recently:
“There is now a strong body of
theoretical and empirical work that
suggests that integrating assessment
with instruction may well have
unprecedented power to increase
student engagement and to improve
learning outcomes.” (Wiliam, D., 2011,
Studies in Educational Evaluation)
Besides Analytical and Empirical
Undergirding, Here’s Spiritual Support:
On October 13, 2009, I received an email from a colleague in Ohio, Dr.
Saundra Brennan, who relayed to me
an invitation she had received from the
Ohio Association of Elementary School
Administrators. It was to take part in:
A FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
WORSHIP
Formative Assessment:
What It Can’t Do
It cannot raise scores sufficiently on
instructionally insensitive
accountability tests such as those so
widely used these days to satisfy the
requirements of the No Child Left
Behind Act.
A Definition of Instructional Sensitivity
The degree to which students’
performances on a test accurately
reflect the quality of instruction
specifically provided to promote
students’ mastery of what is being
assessed.
Why Might a Test Item be Instructionally
Insensitive?
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Alignment Leniency
Excessive Easiness
Excessive Difficulty
Confusion-Engendering Item Flaws
Socioeconomic Status (SES) Links
Academic Aptitude Links
Socioeconomic Status (SES) Links
If an item gives a meaningful advantage
to students from higher SES families,
then the item will tend to measure what
students bring to school rather than
how well they are taught once they get
there.
A 4th-Grade Reading Item:
My father’s field is computer graphics.
• In which of the sentences below does the
word field mean the same thing as in the
sentence above?
A. The shortstop knew how to field his
position.
B. We prepared the field by plowing it.
C. What field do you plan to enter when you
graduate?
D. The nurse examined my field of vision.
Academic Aptitude Links
If an item gives a meaningful advantage
to students who possess greater
inherited quantitative, verbal, or spatial
aptitudes, then the item will tend to
measure what students bring to school
rather than how well they are taught
once they get there.
A 4th-Grade Mathematics Item:
• Which of the letters below, when
folded in half, will have two parts
that match exactly?
F
Z
(A)
(B)
S
B
(C)
(D)
A Turn & Talk Task
Turning to a colleague (If you seem to be
running out of bright neighbors, you
might move to another group.), assume
that your colleague is not familiar with
instructional sensitivity. Thus, please
explain to your colleague what
instructional sensitivity is, and how it can
reduce the accurate evaluation of
teachers or schools. Then switch roles.
Why Partitioning It Can Pay Off
We will now consider a partitioning
proposal, that is, a four-level view of
formative assessment. Although this
and other partitioning schemes should
cleave to the essence of researchratified formative assessment, they
often help teachers clamber aboard the
formative-assessment flotilla.
Four Levels of the FormativeAssessment Process
• Level 1: Teachers’ Instructional
Adjustments
• Level 2: Students’ Learning-Tactic
Adjustments
• Level 3: Classroom Climate Shift
• Level 4: Schoolwide Implementation
Level 3 Shifts
Four Levels
of Formative
Assessment
Level 4 Strategies
1.
Learning Expectations
1.
Professional Development
2.
Responsibility for learning
2.
3.
Role of classroom
assessment
Teacher Learning
Communities
Level 4: Schoolwide Implementation
Level 3: Classroom-Climate Shift
Level 2: Students’ Learning-Tactic Adjustments
Level 1: Teachers’ Instructional Adjustments
Learning Progressions
Teachers’ Level 1 Steps
Students’ Level 2 Steps
1.
Consider adjustment occasions.
1.
Identify adjustment occasions.
2.
Consider assessments.
2.
Select assessments.
3.
Consider adjustment triggers.
3.
Establish adjustment triggers.
4.
Adjust learning-tactics?
4.
Make instructional adjustments?
Formative Assessment:
Why Learning Progressions Must Lurk
(What a learning progression is:)
A learning progression is a sequenced
set of building blocks (that is, subskills
and/or bodies of enabling knowledge) it
is thought students must master en
route to mastering a more remote,
target curricular aim.
Two Learning Progressions:
Both Useful to Educators
Upper-case LEARNING PROGRESSIONS
Lower-case Learning Progressions
Target
Curriculum
Aim X
Subskill
B
An Illustrative
Learning
Progression
Enabling
Knowledge
B
Subskill
A
Enabling
Knowledge
A
A Horizontally Represented
Learning Progression
Enabling
Knowledge
X
Enabling
Knowledge
Y
Subskill
Z
Target
Curriculum
Aim Q
Formative Assessment:
What a Learning Progression is not
• A learning progression isn’t unerringly
accurate.
• A particular learning progression isn’t
going to work for all students.
• A learning progression isn’t necessarily
better because it’s more complicated.
A Final Turn & Talk Task
Why, despite substantial empirical
evidence to support formative
assessment, are most Michigan
teachers not actually using it in their
own classes? Please explore this
question with a neighbor or with your
entire small group. Can you come up
with any ameliorative fixes?
To travel more suavely along the
formative-assessment trail, read one or
more of these encapsulations of wisdom:
• Heritage, M., Formative Assessment: Making
It Happen in the Classroom, 2010, Corwin
• Popham, W.J., Transformative Assessment,
2008, ASCD
• Popham, W. J., Transformative Assessment
in Action, 2011, ASCD
• Wiliam, D., Embedded Formative
Assessment, 2011, Solution Tree
Genial Jim’s e-mail address:
[email protected]