Winter 2005

The Assessment agenda

Tasmania gets down to essentials

Essential changes are afoot in Tasmania in assessing, monitoring and reporting practices. JENNI CONNOR reports.

IN 2001, TASMANIAN TEACHERS BEGAN IMPLEMENTING a new curriculum called the Essential Learnings Framework. The curriculum has five organisers—thinking, communicating, personal futures, social responsibility and world futures.

The Essential Learnings Framework—designed as a concept-based, inquiry-driven and world-related curriculum—emphasises learning and teaching for understanding, rather than representing pieces of discrete knowledge. ‘Understanding’ involves students being able to transfer and apply knowledge appropriately and accurately in new situations. This suggests a need to monitor how understanding is developing during a study or inquiry, with teachers and students reflecting together on what has been learnt so far in order to plan for improvement and further learning. Assessment is built into the teaching and learning process and occurs both formally and incidentally at various points in a learning sequence.

Lorna Earl, an acknowledged leader in the field of assessment and evaluation, has informed thinking in Tasmania about current emphases in assessment. She describes three different approaches to classroom assessment: assessment of learning, assessment for learning and assessment as learning.

• Assessment of learning is ‘summative’. Its purposes are to ‘certify learning and report to parents and students about students’ progress in school … Assessment of learning is typically done at the end of something (eg a unit, course, grade, key stage, a program)’. As Earl says, ‘There will always be milestones and junctures where summative assessment is called for and Assessment of Learning is essential.’
• Assessment for learning, on the other hand, is ‘formative’. It ‘shifts the emphasis from making judgments to creating descriptions that can be used in the service of the next stage of learning’. With this purpose in mind, ‘teachers collect a wide range of data so that they can modify the learning programs of their students’. The teacher is still central to this process, but in interactive ways. It helps teachers to identify students’ current understandings and move them on to higher-level concepts and skills.
• Assessment as learning emphasises the role of the student. Students ‘personally monitor what they are learning and use feedback from this monitoring to make adjustments, adaptations and even major changes in what they understand’.

The method of assessment needs to match the purpose. For example, self-assessment is appropriate if the purpose is to inform the student about how they are going with learning and help them to set goals for revision and new learning. However, if the purpose is to determine how student achievement compares with their age peers, a different form of assessment is called for.

The table below illustrates some of the shifts in thinking about assessment to support learning.

(Adapted from the National Research Council 2001)

The Essential Learnings Framework identifies five ‘culminating outcomes’ which are long-term goals. The outcomes will result from refining and applying understanding about each of the five Essential Learnings throughout life. From such an education and lifelong learning, we would want people to be:

• inquiring and reflective thinkers
• effective communicators
• self-directed and ethical people
• responsible citizens
• world contributors.

To describe student learning during the years of compulsory schooling, outcomes have been identified across the 18 key elements of the five Essential Learnings. These key element outcomes describe expectations for student achievement by the end of year 10. The Essential Learnings Outcomes are what all K–10 teachers use to assess student progress.

Standards have been written for each key element at five points along a continuum. The standards provide a sequential description of student learning. Each standard describes what students should know, understand and be able to do at different stages. The standards form the basis of cluster, school and individual teacher planning, assessment, monitoring and reporting.

Executive director for the project, David Hanlon, points out:

The identification of a small set of Essential Learnings, and the development of outcomes and standards that focus on understanding, are responses to research that raises serious concerns about students’ lack of understanding about what is learnt and their consequent difficulty in applying what they have learnt to real-life situations. This body of research identifies comparatively low levels of intellectual engagement by students and the fragile grasp of many key concepts even by highachieving students.
The new curriculum framework is one in which powerful, generative topics appropriate to this early part of the 21st century can be embedded. Our approach recognises the indivisibility of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. We are obliged to transform each if we are to make a meaningful difference to the education we provide.

To be able to assess against the outcomes and standards, teachers need to establish clear ‘understanding goals’ when they are beginning to plan a sequence of learning. Martha Stone Wiske (1997) states: ‘Understanding goals state explicitly what students are expected to come to understand … they define specifically the ideas, processes, relationships or questions that students will understand better through their inquiry.’

To assist Tasmanian teachers, an online resource, the ‘Learning, Teaching and Assessment Guide’ (available at www.ltag.education. tas.gov.au) has been created, showcasing best practice examples of teachers’ planning for learning and assessing. For example, the ‘Value 4 Money’ box illustrates how ‘understanding goals’ and assessment criteria were designed in relation to the ‘being numerate’ key element of the ‘communicating’ essential. (View this unit at http://ltag.education.tas.gov.au/planning/numerate/Value/default.htm)

The quality of the learning that students are able to demonstrate is strongly influenced by the quality of the assessment tasks they are asked to complete. Assessment tasks should be authentic and rigorous. Grant Wiggins, in his 1998 work on designing educative assessment, proposes that assessment is authentic if it:

• is realistic
• requires judgement and innovation
• asks the student to ‘do’ something with their learning
• replicates or simulates the contexts in which learning is ‘tested’ in the workplace, civic life and personal life
• assesses the student’s ability to efficiently and effectively use a repertoire of knowledge and skills to negotiate a complex task
• allows appropriate opportunities to rehearse, practise, consult resources and get feedback on and refineperformances and products.

In the Essential Learnings Framework, teachers design performances of understanding that can be assessed throughout a learning sequence. Each of these connects to one or more understanding goals. Those against which final judgements will be made about student achievement are called ‘culminating’ performances. Culminating performances are ‘substantial products or presentations, which are often complex public performances showcasing student learning and competence. They may be judged by an expert panel and can incorporate judgements from a range of sources including learners, peers, educators, parents and others’.

This year, schools in Tasmania will be reporting to parents in relation to the outcomes and standards of the Essential Learnings Framework. Many Tasmanian schools have been using ‘the language of the Essentials’ in school reports over the past two years to familiarise parents with the areas being assessed and to deepen teachers’ understanding about what is being taught and measured as they articulate it for others.

Research indicates that parents are quite specific about the information they want about their children’s learning. Parents want to be:

• kept well informed about their children’s progress
• given information about achievement and progress in both academic and non-academic areas of learning
• informed about both the strengths and weaknesses of their children
• provided with pertinent and constructive advice about how they can support their children’s learning (Cuttance & Stokes 2001).

There are many challenges ahead as teachers, schools and the system come to terms with the new curriculum and its implications for assessing, monitoring and reporting on student learning. However, it is already evident that these new approaches are enhancing student engagement, involving the community in valuable discussion about ‘what knowledge is most worthwhile’ and re-invigorating the teaching profession.

References

Cuttance, P & Stokes, S (2001). Reporting on Student and School Achievement, University of Sydney, Sydney.

Department of Education, Tasmania (2005). ‘Learning, Teaching and Assessment Guide’, available at www.ltag.education.tas.gov.au

Earl, L (2004). Assessment as Learning: Using Classroom Assessment to Maximise Student Learning, Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, CA.

National Academy of Sciences (1995). ‘National Science Education Standards’, see www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/nses/5.html#changing

Wiggins, G (1998). Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA.

Wiske, M S (1997). Teaching for Understanding: Linking Research with Practice, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA.

Jenni Connor writes for the Department of Education, Tasmania. Publications include resources to support implementation of the Essential Learnings Frameworks.

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