![[Quality of Learning - Assessment Alternatives.pdf]] - Formative vs summative assessment - Formative is to help the learners learn - Summative is to report on what has been learned. - Should note that any assessment methodology will play into assessment of facilitators and the learning spaces itself. - High stakes assessment often leads to gamification - The paper talks about unfairness in judgment for unstructured evidence but we don't need to be fair at all. As long as we're able to measure progress of each student with themselves that should work. - pupil-referenced, or ipsative, assessment the pupil’s previous performance is taken into account and the judgement reflects progress as well as the point reached. Works for formative not necessarily summative - New Zealand - "is predominantly low stakes assessment focused on monitoring pupils’ learning, improving learning through direct feedback to students or adjustments to teaching programmes. Written or oral reports to parents can be seen as complementing the formative role by giving guidance to parents and students, while also having a summative role." - Sweden moved towards more decentralisation. - Norm referencing can happen year on year. In this teachers assume that each class should end up with a normal distribution. Hence grades ended giving no information on what the learners could actually do. - "French teachers expected all pupils to tackle the same work and their ‘discourse suggested that it was better for a child’s self-esteem to struggle on the same task as their classmates than to be labelled a failure by being given easier work to do’" - Interesting note here - Anonymous testing and evaluation for summative monitoring and evaluation. In France at the beginning of the year they do this to understand the larger picture. Zero to no stakes assessment. - Validity vs reliability. Validity is how well what is assessed corresponds to processes or outcomes of learning. Reliability is how fair and reproducible results so tends to focus on what can most easily objectively be evaluated. - Though tests are widely considered reliably they still lead to a pretty high level of error. - Moderated teacher judgments is the best way to achieve high amounts of validity and reliability while keeping in line the formative assessment needs of the learner. It's important that this is low stakes though and not tied to any rewards for the teachers in particular. - Need to be careful with assessments since they can create an extrinsic motivation to learning which is quite harmful in the long run. - "Such experiences underline the reality that teaching will inevitably be focused on what is assessed." - Consider resources necessary for whatever assessment method we are proposing. It's important to know what it might take in hours for facilitators and learners. - Hard to answer assessment questions without knowing what it is we want the children to learn. Perhaps we should answer that question first.