Winter 2005

The Assessment agenda

A new role for school reports

There’s a world of difference between reporting about learning and reporting for learning. MARGARET FORSTER explores an approach to reporting designed to track each student’s development in a learning area over time, thereby giving students, teachers and parents a clearer picture of their progress.

TRADITIONALLY, REPORTING MARKS THE END of the school year cycle for teachers and students. Parents receive information about their child’s achievement before the child moves on and up to the next year level. What have they learnt during the year? Have they learnt enough to ‘pass’? How do they compare to others in the class? How well will they cope next year? (Do they need to try harder?) And the child moves on … to the new year level, to the new yearly cycle, to the new teacher.

It is possible, however, to take a very different perspective on reporting if we view learning as an ongoing process that transcends particular teachers, classrooms, grades, and even schools and jurisdictions. From this perspective, the main purpose of reporting becomes one of tracking a student’s development in an area of learning over time. Where is the student in their learning now, compared with where they were before? What knowledge, skills and understandings do they demonstrate now in relation to where we want them to travel next in their learning? What misconceptions that might block further learning do they still hold? What might be done to support their further development?

We can think of this new perspective as reporting for learning— reporting to establish where students are in their ongoing learning in order to make decisions about how to facilitate further learning.

Reports designed for this purpose do not only include end of cycle summative or comparative information. Instead they also are designed to have diagnostic value, to provide signposts for teaching strategies to enhance student learning and to provide information that can feed directly into the teaching and learning process.

What are the characteristics of reporting for learning?

Reporting for learning has a clear purpose: to provide an understanding of where individuals are in their learning in order to facilitate decisions about how to improve learning. The assumption is that all learners are on a path of development and that every learner is capable of making progress.

Reporting for learning encourages teachers, students and parents to focus on the central issue of teaching and learning— what it means to get better (grow, improve or progress) in an area of learning. What is the nature of the work that a student produces? What is the evidence of their learning? What does this evidence tell us about their ongoing learning? How have they improved—where have they come from and what does further improvement look like?

Reporting for learning brings students directly into the evaluation process, encouraging them to monitor and reflect on their own progress and helping them to develop meta-cognitive skills important in taking control of their learning. To achieve this end students are taught how to reflect on the quality of their work. And of course, like other forms of reporting, reporting for learning provides information that is timely, valid, reliable and objective, and that is based on a sufficient amount of appropriate evidence.

What are the requirements of reporting for learning?

Reporting for learning demands a sophisticated understanding of what it means to make progress within an area of learning, including the beliefs, incomplete understandings and misconceptions that students develop. It also requires an understanding of the wide range of development likely in any one classroom and that the distribution of student achievement in any one classroom is likely to widen over the years of schooling.

Reporting for learning demands a shared understanding of the progress of learning in a school subject across the years of school. This understanding is supported by explicit ‘maps’ of learning that provide a picture of what it means to make progress. Maps of this kind—sometimes called progress maps or developmental continua— illustrate for teachers, students and parents the typical path of learning and provide a frame of reference for monitoring individual progress over an extended period of time.

What does reporting for learning look like?

Example 1: In Ms Y’s year 5 classroom students are encouraged to reflect on and monitor the level of their own learning. The classroom has progress maps along the wall accompanied by student work samples that illustrate progress in learning. Students regularly approach Ms Y to report they have progressed to the next level of learning. When this happens she asks them to show her three work samples in support of their judgement. The work samples are then annotated by the student and the teacher and placed in the student’s portfolio.

Example 2: In jurisdiction X a comprehensive and integrated web-based reporting system facilitates the integration of system and school information about student learning. Teachers are required to provide certain kinds of information (eg information about particular subject areas, attitudes and behaviour) on a password-protected individual student website within the school website. Information relevant to local communities is added also.

The individual student website is the joint responsibility of teacher and student. From the opening page (which has photographs and comments), parents/guardians and the student have access to comprehensive information. Two frames of the website are provided here by way of example.

Frame 1 illustrates the quality of the student’s current writing with comments from the teacher and the student. From this page the reader can link, looking down the right-hand column, to a record of Lauren’s writing that illustrates her progress (shown in frame 2); to information about what is expected of students her age; to her State/Territory testing results; and to an explanation of writing progress in general. Each of these linked frames is illustrated and from each of these frames it is possible to link to other relevant information. For example, in answer to what is expected of students, there is a link to the national benchmarks; and from the individual student’s test results to information about how the school has performed.

What does a reporting for learning system provide?

A coherent system based on an explicit articulation of what it means to progress in an area of learning, that includes annotated samples of student’s work, and that necessitates the involvement of students with their own learning, allows teachers, students and parents to monitor learning over time. It also allows student work to be benchmarked against relevant points of reference, and to be interpreted with reference to actions likely to support further learning.

Importantly, if the system is based on a shared understanding of what it means to make progress within an area of learning, then the significant amount of time that teachers spend each year starting all over again with students will be available instead for more effective teaching and learning.

Margaret Forster is research director of the Assessment and Reporting Research Program at the Australian Council for Educational Research.

The author owns the copyright in this article. For information related to the reuse of this work in any form please contact the publisher denise.quinn@curriculum.edu.au