Introduction
There are three sets of reasons for making the effort to take the steps that enable assessment to be used to help learning in science. These relate to the value of formative assessment for learning through enquiry, the benefit of involving children in decisions about their learning and the evidence that it works – that standards of achievement are raised when it is in operation (see Box 13.1). The last of these points applies to all learning and so do the others when there is a constructivist approach to learning, but they apply particularly in science. We expand on each of these points in this chapter.
Box 13.1 Reasons for using assessment to help learning
Three good reasons for implementing formative assessment in primary science:
1 Knowing what ideas learners bring to new experiences and how these ideas develop during their activities is central to learning through enquiry. Using assessment as part of teaching means that information can be collected about progress towards all the goals. If activities provide opportunities for skills, understanding and attitudes to be developed, then they also provide opportunities for these to be assessed and for the information to be used to help learning.
2 Widely accepted theories of learning emphasise the role of learners in con-structing their own understanding. Formative assessment involves children in recognising where they are in progress towards goals and in the decisions about what their next steps are and how to take them.
3 There is firmly established evidence that when the key components of form-ative assessment are practised, levels of achievement are raised.
How formative assessment helps enquiry learning in science
In Chapter 7 we described learning in science as a process in which learners develop their understanding of things around them by using and developing process skills. The process is represented by the diagram reproduced in Figure 13.1. The starting point is some new experience – or a new observation of a familiar one. It raises questions for the learner, for there is something that is not understood that needs to be explained. (Why does the size of the shadow change when you move the torch? Why does clay hold more water than sandy soil? What is happening when a bulb is lit from a battery?) The observation or event engages the attention, stimulates curiosity and motivates the action and effort needed to make sense of it. It may be that there is a mismatch between what is observed and what was expected. (A large object floating when it was expected to sink on account of its weight. The shadow formed by red light being black, not red. A rubber balloon sticking to the wall after being rubbed on a piece of woollen material.)
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Figure 13.1A framework for learning through investigation (a) New experience
Many questions and observations occur in children’s everyday experience; others are stimulated by the activities teachers provide in the classroom. We are talking here about advancing skills and ideas rather than using already familiar ones if there is to be learning. While we do not deny that this advance can happen when children investigate and develop their ideas in their unguided exploration of chance observations, it is more likely to happen in a situation set up for the child to answer a question or reconcile an observation with his or her understanding of what is going on.
In Chapters 9 and 10 we discussed ways of helping children to develop their understanding and process skills. There it was noted that children learn best when new experiences are within the reach of their existing ideas and skills: experiences that are novel but not too familiar, so that they call for some extension or enlargement of these ideas and skills.
How is this to happen unless the teacher knows what the children’s existing ideas and skills are? Finding out where children are in relation to the intended learning goals – the first steps in formative assessment – is a necessary prerequisite for advancing their ideas and skills. The need for the teacher to have opportunities to gather this information has important implications for classroom planning and management. It means ensuring that the children have:
■ experiences within reach of their existing ways of thinking and investigating;
■ opportunities to explore these experiences and to make their ideas explicit to themselves and to other children, as well as to the teacher;
■ encouragement to link the new experience or observations to previous ones;
■ opportunities to question and reflect on their understanding of the events or situation.
All these things are among the most important of the conditions required for learning through enquiry to take place (for a more complete list see Chapter 5).
Thus the requirements for using assessment to help learning are central to those for the opportunity to learn science through enquiry.
The teacher’s view of learning
The second good reason for using assessment as part of teaching relates to theories of how learning takes place. The view that a teacher has of what is involved in learning has a significant impact on teaching and the role of the teacher, learner and learning materials.
The following extracts from conversations with two teachers indicate how a view of learning implicitly lay behind their decisions about the way to organise their
classrooms and to interact with the children. Both were teachers in junior schools in a large city; both schools were of similar, early twentieth-century, architecture;
both teachers taught classes of about 32 ten- and eleven-year-olds. The interviews were originally part of the Match and Mismatch materials (Harlen et al. 1977).
The teacher as responsible for learning
The first teacher arranged the desks in straight rows, all facing the front, where the teacher’s desk and blackboard occupied prominent positions. She explained her reasons for this formality in arrangement, which echoed the formality of her teaching, as follows:
Well, you see the main thing – I can’t stand any noise. I don’t allow them to talk in the classroom . . . I just can’t stand noise and I can’t stand children walking about . . . in the classroom I like them sitting in their places where I can see them all. And I mean I teach from lesson to lesson. There’s no children all doing different things at different times . . . And of course I like it that way, I believe in it that way.
When asked why the desks were all facing the front, she replied:
if they’re all facing me, and I – well, I can see them and I can see what they’re doing.
Because quite honestly I don’t think that – when they’re in groups, I mean all right they might be discussing their work. But, I mean, how do you know?
As well as her own preference for quietness, she was convinced that it was from the blackboard and from herself that the children would learn. She worked hard to make her method work, setting work on the blackboard and marking books every evening. She did not think that children handling things or talking to each other had any role in learning.
The learners as responsible for learning
The second teacher arranged the desks in blocks of four but in no particular pattern. There was no discernible ‘front’ or ‘back’ of the class. The children moved about freely and chatted during their work. She explained:
I hate to see children in rows and I hate to see them regimented. At the same time, you know, often I get annoyed when people think that absolute chaos reigns, because it doesn’t. Every child knows exactly what they have to do . . . And, it’s much more – you could say informal – but it’s a much more friendly, less pressing way of working and . . . it’s nice for them to be able to chat with a friend about what they’re doing.
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Asked if she worried that the chat might not be about work, she replied:
Oh no. I mean, obviously adults do that when they work. As long as I get the end result that’s suited to that particular child I don’t mind . . . I’m not against formal education I’m not against informal, there are advantages to both methods – but I think the great danger of very formal teaching is that the teacher’s seen as a tin god figure. And very often the children aren’t given the opportunity to think for themselves.
The role of learners
The point here is not to suggest that either teacher is ‘right’ but to show that both have a clear rationale for the decisions they make about the organisation and methods they use in the classroom, and that this is related to their views of how children learn. Both show consistency between what they do and what they want to achieve through it and so both are at ease in their classrooms.
It is worth noting in passing that to change the practice of either of these teachers would require far more than different teaching materials or an insistence on rearranging the desks. There are masses of examples of teachers who have been asked to make organisational changes that simply result in children sitting in groups but being taught as a class and having to twist their necks to see the blackboard. To make real changes requires a change in teachers that is far more than adopting different ways of working; it means changing their views of how children learn and of their own role and the role of materials in fostering learning.
The chief point of relevance here, however, concerns the role of the children in their own learning. The first teacher implicitly embraces a view of learning that is called
‘behaviourist’ because it focuses on the external behaviour of the learner rather than what is going on inside the mind. In this view learning is dependent on the teacher providing instruction in the form of information and exercises in a sequence that is the same for all children. The role of the learner is essentially a passive one, as a receiver of knowledge created by others. The second teacher implicitly embraces a constructivist view of learning in which the focus is on thinking and how the learner is making sense of the learning activities. This view of learning is supported by modern psychology, which explains learning in terms of links made to existing mental frameworks, requiring the active participation of the learner. Box 13.2 summarises these two views and the relevance of formative assessment for each.
Box 13.2 How formative assessment relates to the teacher’s view of learning
The passive learner
If learning is viewed as the construction of knowledge by the teacher, rather as a builder constructs a building, piece by piece, the teacher will regard all that
children learn as coming from the teacher or other authority. The learning is dependent on how well the teacher sets out the pieces to be learned and the children’s role will not be highly valued. Thus there will be no need to find out what the children’s ideas are, since the learning experiences do not depend on them.
This is the end of the story as far as formative assessment is concerned.
The active learner
If learning is viewed as the construction of knowledge by the learner, the teacher is concerned to adapt learning experiences to match the learner’s developing understanding. The teacher therefore needs to know about the children’s skills and ideas and to use this information in adapting teaching. Formative assessment has a key role in the teaching and learning.
There is a great deal of evidence, some of which we have presented in Chapters 7–11, to support the notion that the constructivist view of learning leads to understanding, whereas the behaviourist view, which ignores the learners’ exist-ing ideas, often means that what is presented is not understood and has to be memorised. For the learners this is not an enjoyable state of affairs and they are likely to lack motivation for further learning. On the other hand, understanding creates motivation and the enjoyment of learning. Thus the use of formative assessment to enable children to arrive at ideas that make sense to them is an important factor in motivation for learning as well as in learning with understanding. Formative assessment enables children to have an active part in their own learning – for they are at the centre of the formative assessment cycle (see Figure 12.3).
The impact on learning
The third point in Box 13.1 refers to the research evidence that using formative assessment raises the levels of children’s achievement. The initial evidence came from a review by Black and Wiliam (1998a) of research studies, which were generally carried out in experimental conditions. Since then there have been studies to show that implementing the essential features of formative assessment in normal classrooms leads to gains in achievement that are greater than those of equivalent groups where formative assessment is not practised.
From their review of evidence from over 250 reports of research into assessment and classroom practice, Black and Wiliam (1998a) concluded that improvement of formative assessment could lead to considerable gains in levels of achievement.
The outcome of the review was unequivocal evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards by substantial amounts, ‘larger than most of those found for educational interventions’ (Black and Wiliam 1998b: 4). The main points emerging from the review are given in Box 13.3. One of the key results was Using assessment to help learning in science 137
that while all children’s learning benefited, children with mild learning difficulties gained most, thus reducing the spread of attainment.
However, improving formative assessment requires teachers to make considerable efforts and to have the confidence ‘that they can make anyone learn as long as they go about it the right way’ (Black 1993: 79). What this means includes sharing learning goals with children, feeding back the teacher’s assessment to children in particular ways, involving children in self-assessment and using effective methods of helping children to take the next steps in their learning. We deal in some detail in Chapters 16 and 17 with what changes are required in these practices.
Box 13.3 Formative assessment and changes in teaching
The main points about formative assessment from Inside the Black Box
■ All such work involves new ways to enhance feedback between those taught and the teacher, ways that require new modes of pedagogy — which will require significant changes in classroom practice.
■ Underlying the various approaches are assumptions about what makes for effective learning — in particular that pupils have to be actively involved.
■ For assessment to function formatively, the results have to be used to adjust teaching and learning — so a significant aspect of any programme will be the ways in which teachers do this.
■ The ways in which assessment can affect the motivation and self-esteem of pupils, and the benefits of engaging pupils in self-assessment, both deserve careful attention.
(Black and Wiliam 1998b: 4, 5)
Work carried out in England since the publication of the Black and Wiliam review has shown that when teachers changed their practices to implement aspects of formative assessment, there were substantial and significant gains in their pupils’
achievement over a period of two years. Although the work so far published has been carried out in secondary schools, the findings have implications for all teachers, since the changes introduced by the teachers were not dependent on their being subject specialists, although most of the work was with teachers of science and mathematics. Indeed, the opportunity for a considerable impact on pupils could be greater in primary schools, since teachers would have more sustained contact with the children.
The teachers involved in what was called the KMOFAP (Kings–Medway–
Oxfordshire Formative Assessment Project) decided on particular aspects of their practice that they wished to change in order to implement formative assessment,
the main ones being questioning, feedback through marking, peer and self-assessment and the formative use of summative tests. After two years of collaborative working with the researchers, the results for each class were compared with those for an equivalent class in the same school. The differences found could be expressed in terms of National Curriculum levels: just under half a level at Key Stage 2 and just over half a level at Key Stage 3. The researchers pointed out:
Such improvements, produced across a school, would raise a school in the lower quartile of the national performance tables to well above the average. It is clear, therefore, that, far from having to choose between teaching well and getting good national curriculum test and examination results, teachers can actually improve their pupils’ results by working with the ideas we present here.
(Black et al. 2002: 4)
Summary
This chapter has provided some empirical evidence and some theoretical arguments relating to how learning takes place, to argue that formative assess-ment has an important role to play in children’s learning, particularly in science.
The key points are:
■ Formative assessment has particular value in the context of learning science through enquiry, where teachers need to know what ideas and skills children have in order to provide opportunities for their development.
■ Related to this is the role that formative assessment has when practice is derived from a constructivist view of learning. When the children’s role in learning is recognised as an active, not a passive, one it follows that they should under-stand the goals of their work, and take part in decisions about where they are in relation to these goals and about what next steps they need to take.
■ Implementing formative assessment in practice is likely to require some effort to make changes, particularly in relation to questioning, marking and giving feedback, and in involving children in the process of assessing their work.
However, the impact on learning is considerable for all children and especially for the previously lower achieving ones, making the effort well worthwhile.
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