You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
Another week, another stuffing for my head of new concepts or clarifications and formalisation of old concepts! I guess that is what the Constructivist idea of Assimilation and Accomodation of new schema is all about!
A pig never got fatter by measuring it!
Anyway, many of the units this week focussed upon the ideas of Assessment. Assessment from most of our schooling will have consisted of what was known now as Assessment OF learning, which is basically akin to the exams and tests that we are familiar with and associate with "education". It is an old idea that is useful in context with other forms of assessment, but should be viewed as a snapshot at each point of assessment. Generally, it is now used as snapshot at the end of a course or at major points in the course.
However, alone, it is a terrible tool for learning. But it produces numbers and metrics, which politicians are incredibly fond of for justifying their pre-ordained narratives. High number good, low number bad. Sadly, a snapshot number doesn't ever tell a complete story...
... for instance, given an end test exam score. You aren't able to see the path that led to the score... was the student always great and didn't really learn/progress much? Or was the student terrible and progressed in leaps and bounds? Those are two potential extremes (excluding the hyper extreme case of the student being brilliant and getting stupider!) that a single snapshot assessment has no way of divining. Put in a different way, would you employ someone who is slightly better at the start and never really gets much better... or someone who is less good initially (but still competent) but has the ability and drive to get MUCH BETTER!
Now, as someone who has generally performed relatively decently at these snapshot examinations, I've never really understood the weakness of them. However, after this week of reading and studying... I begin to see the problems. Like most structural problems, when you are the one that is the beneficiary of the structure, you don't notice that others find that the system works against them! For instance, in mathematics/physics exams... it was noticed that girls tended to perform worse than boys, not because they were worse, but because the exams and the structure of the learning tended to favour modes that benefited boys in general. Not because they actually knew or understood less. Some ways that this happened was the favouring of remembering and understanding in Bloom's Taxonomy over Application and Creating. All aspects are important for an in-depth knowledge of a topic, but if you favour one over the other, then you are getting a false impression of a student's ability..
... and society (social constructivism) also has a hand in this. If girls are told that they are going to do worse at a test subject (like Maths...), then unsurprisingly, they do worse. If they aren't told, they tend to perform evenly. Now, think of the times that we unconsciously split subjects into "male" or "female" roles without really thinking about it.
So, a different way of assessment might be required to tease out what a student knows and understands.
So, we have the slightly confusingly named Assessment OF learning, Assessment FOR learning and Assessment AS learning. I really wish that they had named them slightly differently, as I find it really confusing! But that is my own special little problem...
We already covered Assessment OF Learning. Important, but a snapshot.
Assessment FOR learning is more like the continual prodding and questioning that a teacher does to see how a student is tracking over an extended period of time. This has the benefit of allowing student to fall into knowledge for themselves rather than having it pushed in their faces (if applied wisely). It also allows for multiple modes of HOW a student can express their knowledge, and is definitely beneficial in that you are constantly aware of strength and weaknesses of understanding long before they become foundational problems. The definite downside is that it is much more draining time and effort wise on the teacher... and teachers are incredibly time (and money) poor. Plus, making this extra effort doesn't result in pleasing numbers for politicians to take credit for!
Assessment AS learning is the small but important part of "FOR". It is the ability to teach students skills to self-assess themselves. This is actually something that we do all the time as musicians (well, some musicians)... we practice for performances, and we are constantly and in real time assessing and improving. Constructively... you can assess yourself to destruction as well! It is the continual introspection to realise that you can constantly improve, and how to make those improvements... instead of assuming that you are infallible and the greatest!
So, again... another week of really interesting education theory. But sadly, very little in the way of implementation. I guess that is really what the practicals are mostly about. This is the sort of thing that you learn from experience... but if you aren't aware of them in theory, then you would never know what to look for in your own teaching that you would need to aim for and improve! ... Self Assessment perhaps?
... perhaps that is a notion that our political masters could take a leaf from? After all, it always appears that they NEVER consider the fact that they might ever be wrong!
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