Winter 2005

The Assessment agenda

Whole school matchmaking

Videos, audio files accessed through the Internet, online learning resources— multimedia played a large role in one school’s quest to discover how well its assessment practices matched changes in teaching and learning. KERRI MCKENNA tells the story.

As schools have worked to incorporate many new areas of knowledge, such as ICTs and theories of learning such as Gardner’s multiple intelligences, new ways of working with students have evolved. In 2002, the Education Committee in my school was keen to investigate how we could link clearly understood assessment criteria more closely to the learning activities we saw taking place throughout the school— activities that were dynamic and that involved multiple ‘modes’ of communication including talk, visual communication, action, gesture, gaze, posture and movement.

The purpose of assessment is to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning processes—through assessment, teachers and students should be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses and the effectiveness of particular programs. Yet, too often we see students involved in learning activities that do not closely relate to the assessment task which is supposedly ‘measuring the learning’. One example of this I witnessed was when students in a year 8 class were asked to construct a model of a medieval house, yet their assessment was a written report. This mismatch of learning activity to assessment task creates problems for the learner in adequately demonstrating their knowledge (they’ve learnt model-building skills but now have to demonstrate report-writing skills) and confusion for the teacher in terms of what exactly has been learnt and is being assessed.

Inspired by the book by Gunther Kress (et al 2001), I was interested in how we could be more deliberate in our use of different modes for teaching and learning and how we could use our access to multimedia equipment to make assessment more effective. Throughout our school we started to investigate the nature of our assessment and how well it ‘matched’ our teaching and learning activity. We explored material about assessment (what it is, its purpose and different forms of assessment) and created a shared resource which helped us to standardise our language and understandings about assessment. But this work would have meant little if individuals didn’t continue their explorations by incorporating multimodal activity into class work and assessment. The following stories are about individual teachers who used the work we were doing as a whole school to improve their practice over the past three years.

Using multimedia to enhance student learning activities

Julie, a physical education teacher, wanted students to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in particular skills, such as how well they worked with the other netball team members on court. The students videoed each other as they participated in netball games and then developed training programs to help them to improve their skills. The use of video enabled the students to evaluate their own actions (and how they played as a member of the team) on the court and then to compare that to follow-up video taken some weeks later. Having used this technique, Julie reported that her students were more self-directed, taking responsibility for assessing their own skills and evaluating successful intervention strategies.

Loretta initiated a project in the LOTE department in which teachers use audio files to provide learning resources for students which can then be accessed through the Internet at school or at home. The department is also using video to record students’ oral presentations so that they can self-evaluate and improve their pronunciation and conversation skills throughout the school year.

Using video to enhance teacher knowledge

Jane asked another staff member to video her Mathematics class so that she could evaluate the students’ activity in the room when small group and individual work tasks were underway. She shared her analysis of the video to the wider staff as an example of one form of multimodal assessment—in this case, of student interaction and teacher-student interaction. Jane used the video and her own observations of the class to help her gauge student participation in activities, student involvement in their groups (who initiated group action, who was reflective), her interaction with students and students’ problem-solving strategies.

Using the video, Jane was able to more effectively target particular students for support and advice and to assess some of her teaching strategies (such as her movement around the groups/individuals). Jane was also able to use the video with the students to help them better understand when some of their learning strategies were more, or less, successful.

Using online learning to enhance student learning and teacher knowledge

Andrew explored two aspects of multimodal learning through BlackBoard™ (an online curriculum development and delivery tool)—the use of interactive multimedia resources such as simulations and the online assessment tools available. He recently demonstrated his use of the assessment tools in BlackBoard™ to a teacher meeting. By using the web-based pre-testing and self-correcting quiz tools for content-based assessment and the scoring and access data available within BlackBoard™ he has been better able to diagnose student weaknesses and strengths in both content knowledge and their learning processes. Andrew has found that the more thorough knowledge he has about his students’ learning behaviours and outcomes has helped him enormously in parent-teacher interviews where he can talk readily about how the students learn and work rather than ‘just the marks’.

Overall, these teachers learnt a great deal from the work we did as a whole school staff on assessment but most importantly they re-thought how they worked with students and what they taught to ensure that their work was more effective for both them and their students.

In the end, to make assessment change in a school you have to have whole school discussion and decision making about very fundamental aspects of teaching and learning practice. You have to ask: Why are you teaching that? Why are you teaching it that way? How does it fit with other subjects? How do your criteria for assessment match up with the expectations in other subjects? What are the expected generic skills at each year level, and who is teaching them? These lead into discussion about reporting. What is an ‘A’ in English at year 7, compared to an ‘A’ in Science? What processes are there for late submission of work? Is a late piece of work still worth an ‘A’? Do we want grades on our reports? What do they represent? How does that match what was taught and how it was taught?

At our school we found that often things which we thought we all understood were in fact assumptions and that we had to raise these issues for discussion and come to agreement about what we would adopt as policy and/or guidelines of practice. Sometimes discussions were heated, but I am confident that we are more

effective in our work with students because this has been a shared journey. In 2005, the use of multimedia for learning, assessment and reporting is now embedded at our school and teachers, parents and students are discovering how this benefits student learning.

Reference

Kress, G, Jewitt, C, Ogborn, J & Tsatsarelis, C (2001). Multimodal Teaching & Learning: The Rhetorics of the Science Classroom, Continuum, New York.

Kerri McKenna is the director of eLearning at St Catherine’s School, Melbourne.

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