[MUSIC] Welcome to week six of this course on assessment. In this last week, we're going to look at the rationale and practices of involving students in assessment in your classroom. In the first lecture, we're going to look at why we should bother doing this. And it's really simple, involving students in judging and evaluating their own work or each other's work leads to improved learning and, as a bonus, improves self regulation of learning, and these are worth having. In terms of our curriculum map, we're still looking at interactive, informal, student-centered versions of formats of assessment. In a classroom situation there are three sources of feedback. We've already told you how important feedback is for improved learning. In a classroom situation instructors, teachers give feedback. Clearly the self - any student thinking upon their own work is, can potentially give him or herself feedback. And of course, the other classmates are sources of feedback. In terms of why we involve students in this type of assessment. We draw on the notations of assessment for learning, instead of just of learning, or what we described earlier in the course, formative assessment. This is assessment done during the process of learning, early enough to lead to modifications or changes. And in assessment for learning, there is a high involvement of students in the process of judging and evaluating learning. Five key strategies have been identified and promulgated in the assessment for learning policy reform. And you can see those list of five strategies on the screen. The key ones that matter to us in this context are numbers three to five, where it's focused on giving feedback, and activating students as the owners of learning, and activating students as instructional resources. So, in order for this to happen, we use techniques called peer and self assessment. You'll see it abbreviated on screen as PASA or pasa. But effective peer and self assessment depends on certain conditions. But first of all, let's remind ourselves what we mean by "peer and self assessment". On the screen are the two definitions, and you'll see these definitions are very similar and the only difference is who's work is being evaluated. In peer assessment, I appraise a fellow learner, in relationship to specific learning intentions, goals or criteria that are hopefully derived from the curriculum. And in self assessment the student evaluates his or her own work relative to the same criteria. So, it's very similar, it's just whose work is it. In order to make peer and self assessment work, certain things are required. First of all, it requires that you, the teacher, are willing to let students participate in the process of critically evaluating each other or their own work, if you won't let them do it, then it's clearly not going to happen. Students also have to be willing to take on this evaluative assessment action. Traditionally, assessment was done by the teacher, or by some end of year exam system. Now, we're saying to students "Hang on, you'll learn more, if you judge your own work, or each other's work", and some students find that a difficult transition to make. They have to be willing to critique. The point is to say what's strong and what's weak. And therefore, students have to have the courage to say, "My work isn't very good" or "Actually, in this aspect your work isn't good enough, or doesn't meet the criteria". And that takes courage, both to give that feedback, as well as to receive the feedback. Remember, my classmates are not experts. They're not usually much better than I am, and I have to listen to them telling me about strengths or weaknesses of my work, that takes a certain inner strength as well. And it all depends on having clear agreed and easily understood criteria as the basis for a judgement. So, that means some sort of rubric - like we talked about in the last week - has to be available in terms and language that students can understand and appreciate. So, you can see that for most students and in many classrooms, this is a difficult transition to make. To go from simply "The teacher determines whether my work is good enough", to "I'm participating in judging myself, my own work, and my classmates' work". There's some strong issues and transitions that have to go through. Why would we bother? The evidence is very clear. Students who are involved in judging their own work, or each other's work do better. Clearly the process of looking at your work, and critically evaluating it against criteria helps you do your work better. You're thinking about your learning and that's good for learning. Furthermore, it actually helps improve their general ability to self-regulate. Instead of being dependant on parents telling them how to study or teachers how to study, they become their own self control mechanisms. And they learn to do things such as understand a rationale for why am I doing this, they develop goals or plans, they're trying to learn things, they develop new methods, they have to think about how should I do this, how should I learn this - and so that teaches them about monitoring and evaluating their progress. Evaluating and saying "Here's where I am and this is what I need to do next". And also, to develop that metacognitive skills saying "Well, actually, this is where I'm trying to get to but I'm not succeeding. The things that I'm doing aren't working and I need to do something different other than what I'm doing". So, these processes of judging my own work and my classmates' work teach not only better outcomes but also better life skills for self-regulation. But we need to keep in mind, there's certain limits to this promise. One, remember humans aren't very good judges of their own work let alone each others', and novices as your students will be relative to you, and younger students who are less experienced with the content area, and students who are less academically able are especially noteworthy as making wrong judgments or inadequate or inappropriate judgements. So, when you have younger students or less able students, you need to work harder to help them get the skills to be able to judge. And let's not kid ourselves, what we're teaching in school is hard, complex stuff. We don't teach just simple stuff, we teach hard stuff. And it's hard to know, the harder the stuff is, how good you are at it, and how good your work is. And with easy stuff, it's easy to tell whether my words are spelled correctly or my mathematics addition problems have been done correctly, but hard stuff is hard to judge. And we're always tempted to substitute invalid criteria for judging our work. Even teachers will sometimes substitute effort or tidiness or amount instead of quality when it comes to judging work. Students have these same temptations and it's up to us as teachers to help students learn skills and learn how to judge appropriately. And that's what the rest of this week will focus on. [MUSIC]
