Leading & Managing Educational Technology
Making judgements -- Part 1: Assessment for Learning in ICT
By Terry Freedman
Thu, 19 Feb 2004, 08:37

Terry Freedman worked at QCA on assessing ICT. In this article he explores the use of Assessment for Learning techniques in ICT.

When you raise the subject of assessing ICT most people assume you are talking about summative assessment: that is, the awarding of a level to a student at the end of a Key Stage. In fact, there is another kind of assessment, and that is assessment for learning, or what used to be generally referred to as formative assessment (although the two terms are not synonymous).

Assessment for learning (AFL) is what goes on -- or at least should go on -- in the classroom on a lesson by lesson basis. And therein lies the rub. One is tempted to make the same remark about AFL that Dr Johnson made about a dog standing on its hind legs: the issues is not that it's done badly, but that it's done at all.

AFL is not a single technique but, if you will, a toolkit of techniques that you can employ in the classroom. In fact, as we'll see, there is nothing particularly special about the techniques -- except that they work.

The term Assessment for Learning is very revealing. It refers to assessment that is taking place for the purpose of improving learning. Although it's sometimes somewhat arbitrary to draw a clear distinction between AFL and summative assessment (because one can contribute to the other), it's worth bearing in mind that they have very different objectives. Whereas summative assessment is employed mainly as a means of informing a third party what the pupil knows and understands about ICT, AFL exists for the purpose of helping the pupil to improve that knowledge and understanding.

So what sort of AFL techniques might be applied in the ICT classroom? What follows is a checklist of ideas which, with some customisation on your part, could form an assessment "menu" in your school.

Rapid feedback
• "short, sharp" tests: a quick test on knowledge, such as terminology or whatever, can be used to provide quick feedback to both the pupil and the teacher.

• skills tests, or knowledge of skills tests. These would be to test whether pupils know how to do things like change font size. Could be either paper-based or electronic, and if the latter could be marked automatically.

• "Awareness" tests. These to check pupils' understanding of when to apply which skills/techniques.
All of these so far listed are for the purpose of getting fairly quick feedback on where pupils are in terms of their basic knowledge and understanding. They provide a kind of snapshot. The next set are more to do with process, and ought to form part of teaching materials (in an ideal world).

Process
• Self-assessment, including questions like: "What do you need to do next, and what do you need to do/learn in order to be able to achieve that?" (but expressed differently, obviously!). It should also be reflective/dynamic. Eg, rather than ask, "How do you think you did?", or as well as that, it should ask "What did you do, why, how could you have done it differently/more efficiently? etc etc)

• "Visual checks" eg traffic light system. This consists of a list of items and 3 columns for tick-boxes: green, amber, red. A tick in the green box means OK, one in the amber box means "keep an eye on this" and one in the red box means "attention needed". These visual checks could easily be electronic, could be adapted to a variety of topics/processes/skills and could be undertaken in 5 or 10 minutes by pupils themselves, at any time they or their teacher felt it to be appropriate. The traffic light system is a very good way of finding out what a pupil knows -- or think she knows -- on a given topic. Pupils can also use it to check whether they have the skills set they need in order to carry out the next piece of work.

• Peer assessment, eg looking at presentations by other pupils/groups at the end of a module or unit of work. The materials could consist of guidelines/questions for pupils to consider. I think there is also scope for getting pupils to work out the criteria for themselves, because that process in itself would lead to learning (or at least has the potential to do so).

• Guidance to pupils on annotating their work, either electronically or on paper, and keeping versions from draft to finished product.

• Guidance to teachers on commenting on work rather than simply giving grades. (Interestingly enough, it turns out that giving grades and comments is also not as good as just giving comments.)

• Guidance to teachers on questioning: most teachers spend most of most lessons answering questions which they then answer themselves after just a few seconds! Also, questions should open up knowledge and understanding, not constitute a kind of guessing game.

• Activities that involve pupils in dialogue about their work, whether with peers or teachers.

• Tests or activities that give an indication of level, and which can therefore contribute to summative assessment. In this regard, the idea would not be to take the place of summative assessment but to be able to provide an indicator of the level a pupil is likely to obtain, other things being equal. If the test provided a report on why the level was indicated, it would enable a dialogue between pupil and teacher to take place.

These are not, of course, mutually exclusive. In summary, any type of assessment for learning in ICT should:

• encourage dialogue

• encourage reflection on the process, not just the end result

• require pupil to do something, such as plan next set of skills to be learn

• facilitate annotation of paper-based work, and/or amendments and saving different versions of electronically-produced work

Where does ICT come in?
So far, all we've looked at is a set of generic techniques which could be applied to any subject. We still haven't considered the particular subject of ICT.

Teachers find it hard to assess ICT for a variety of reasons. First, it is still a relatively young subject in curriculum terms, and so we don't have the same body of shared knowledge and accepted pedagogy and standards that, to an outsider at least, appear to be enjoyed by English, Maths and Science.

Secondly, and related to the first point, ICT is often taught by non-experts: there are very few teachers who have been specifically trained to teach ICT as their main subject.

Thirdly, may people judge the value of a piece of work by the end result rather than the process. That's fine in some subjects, but in ICT it presents a problem insofar as without seeing the pupil actually do the work, you don't know how skilled (in a technical sense) they needed to be in order to do it. Here is an interesting activity you might like to try next time you are running an ICT INSET session. Ask people whether a pupil who uses a wizard to create a newsletter is demonstrating a very high or a very low level of ICT capability. There is no single correct answer to this question, of course: it all comes down to how you define ICT capability, which brings us on to…

…Fourthly, teachers often assess ICT work by the level of technical skill they see (or think they see) demonstrated. Often, the perceived level of skill required is less than the actual level of skill required, because the teacher is judging by her own standards. That complicates matters slightly, but even where the teacher is accurately judging the skills required, they miss an important consideration: certain technical skills may be necessary to achieve a certain level in ICT, but they are not usually sufficient.

The solution is to go back to basics, ie the National Curriculum, and look at what ICT is really all about. In fact, it comes down to a very simple process:

• Finding things out

• Developing ideas and making things happen
• Exchanging and sharing information

• Reviewing and modifying work as it progresses (throughout the other three aspects)

This being the case, pupils' work should be judged on how well they address one or more of those aspects of the process. This definitely helps to put the technical issue in perspective: after all, if a pupil can program a search in SQL, but still not find much out, they've missed the point!

See also the article on summative assessment.

A version of this article was originally published in InteracTive in 2003.


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© Terry Freedman Thu, 19 Feb 2004