I once read or heard, that assessment regularly comes across as a post-mortem, identifying issues long after they became issues. What we really should be doing, though, is using assessment as a wellness check, an MOT, to identify issues before they become issues. Rather than looking back on successes or failures, we should be using assessment to shape future successes.
I think it's always useful when thinking about making changes to first consider what we're aiming to move away from. Some things might be worth saving, whereas others can almost certainly get in the bin.
If you're reading this, you might be looking to move away from a 'traditional assessment feedback lesson', and you might find that this follows a pattern similar to:
0. A class has sat a 'test' and the teacher has marked it between lessons.
1. The teacher gives back the test papers and scores to pupils.
2. The teacher goes through the answers to the test while pupils annotate the paper with correct answers.
3. The teacher suggests that pupils use this later in the year as revision.
Here are a few reflections on these lessons:
I feel as though step 1 seems like the most sensible thing to do following an assessment. It feels natural. Pupils sat the assessment, so we should let them know how they did. Allow them to find out by looking at their papers, and re-focus their attention before we move on to addressing identified issues.
From my experience, I've found that handing out papers in that way results in one of two feelings:
Pupils are happy with their score/grade, or pupils are disappointed with their score/grade. I feel as though any middle ground is minimal.
Suppose that you're happy with your score - you'll want to tell everyone, you'll brag about it, and you'll want to know where you sit in terms of rankings within the class. You're probably feeling like you'll be towards the top, so you're looking at the scores/grades of the perceived 'clever' kids in the class and comparing yourself against these, hoping that you're the one who's on top.
If you're unhappy with your score, the disappointment is likely to cause you to switch off, and you're likely to want to know how everyone else did. There's a desire to see if you're an anomaly, or that this was a 'hard test', and that everyone did poorly.
In both cases, the emotional response is huge and leaves pupils in the wrong frame of mind for growth. In the case of the happy pupil, as soon as you start to go through the paper they're wondering 'Why am I doing this? I answered these questions well!' and the unhappy pupil is thinking 'What's the point?! This always happens!'.
Key learning point 1: Try to give feedback without returning pupils' scores/grades/papers. This removes the emotional response to a score/grade and maintains pupils' curiosity in the questions that the teacher has identified to go through.
Step 2 seems as reasonable as Step 1. Pupils didn't have the correct answers, so we should tell them what they were. We've all deemed this 'test' to be important, so we're hoping that giving them the right answers will trigger something, and they'll remember next time.
Pupils are taking a different coloured pen and writing the correct answers on their scripts, but what is this actually achieving?
Copying down requires little cognitive activity, and Willingham suggests that 'memory is the residue of thought'. What other activity is lacking in active thought as much as copying down?
Suppose that the test was out of 80, and the scores range from 30/80 to 57/80. That's 27 marks that the lowest attainer didn't achieve, that the highest attainer did, and while you go through those 27 marks, the highest attainer is giving minimal attention to the lesson. The teacher is going through the questions one by one, focusing their efforts on questions that some pupils got wrong, but the ones who didn't get them wrong know that they didn't get them wrong. The highest attainer didn't make these mistakes, so their attention is elsewhere.
We then get to question 8 - the first question that the highest attainer didn't get right - so they need to give attention to their mistakes and to the correct method, but because the first 7 questions didn't need their focus, they're not in the frame of mind to give attention to their mistake and learn from it. They're still grinning from ear to ear as they're top of the class.
Now scale this across the class, and you've got pupils across the room giving minimal attention to the answers that the teacher is sharing as they don't need them, and being unable to give attention when needed.
Key learning point 2: Don't go through the whole paper. Focus on key questions to maintain pace and attention.
In Step 3 we might see the teacher hand out pupils' folders and put their assessments away for safe-keeping, or they might ask the pupils to put them in their bags to take away and store with their school work at home for revision purposes.
In my experience, the test put away in the folder never comes back out, and pupils don't have a filing system for their school work at home, other than the bin. The test is almost never revisited, despite the best of intentions. The thing is though, without spacing out revisiting the corrections we just made we're unlikely to learn from these mistakes, rendering the whole activity a little bit pointless.
Key learning point 3: Don't leave revision to pupils, and plan activities for pupils to revisit key information within your medium-term plans.
In the next instalments, I'll look at ways that we can amend the 'traditional assessment feedback lesson' based on the three key learning points here, as well as a few other ideas from replies to the original tweet I put out.
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