Categories of Assessment

When a teacher looks at a piece of learner work, they do so through learned eyes.

It is as if they are wearing a pair of thought spectacles, crafted from their experience of teaching.

They do not need to do the hard work of thinking through what constitutes success, failure, lack of effort, effective effort and all the rest of it.

They know this. It is committed to long-term memory.

For these reasons, most teachers can pick up a piece of work and make a quick and highly accurate broad-brush assessment of its quality.

If we ask learners to assess their own work, or the work of a peer, we are asking them to do something that doesn’t come as easily.

The reason is simple.

They do not have the same level of experience as we do.

Nor do they have the same knowledge or understanding.

This is also why peer- and self-assessment are so useful.

They help learners to better understand what we take for granted – the criteria of assessment, the hallmarks of good work, and the separate elements that constitute success.

One of the main ways peer- and self-assessment fail, is through lack of scaffolding.

Learners do not have the tools they need to make effective judgements.

This, in turn, leads to ineffective application of effort.

In some cases, it results in learners making irrelevant or unhelpful judgements:

• ‘I like the way you’ve coloured in the title’.

In other cases, it causes learners to withdraw or give up:

• ‘I don’t see why we need to do this, anyway. What’s the point? Why don’t you just mark our work?’

This can be avoided, and effort successfully targeted, by providing a set of categories learners can use as the basis of their assessments.

Here is an example:

Task

A picture of a butterfly is displayed on the board.

Learners are given ten minutes to copy the image as best they can.

Peer-Assessment

• Outline; Colour; Pattern; Shape; Line; Symmetry; Wings; Antennae; Body; Scale.

Swap your work with a partner.

Look at their drawing and select one of the categories.

Give your partner feedback based around this category.

Tell your partner where they have succeeded and give them one thing they could do to improve.

Remember to keep your feedback focussed on the category you select.

The technique turns peer- or self-assessment from a potentially vague or ambiguous exercise into a highly specific one.

The categories give learners access to your expertise and make it easier for them to give meaningful feedback.

Everyone’s effort is targeted as a result.

Modelling, Prompting and Clueing

If a learner is stuck, we don’t necessarily want to give them the answer.

This undermines the beliefs we are trying to promote – that effort is a path to mastery and that persistence in the face of challenges is a good thing.

At the same time, though, we know that there are many situations where, if we do nothing, the learner in question may give up, withdraw, or decide that there is no point continuing to try.

In these situations, we can call on modelling, prompting and clueing.

Each strategy presents a subtly different way through which to help learners, without doing too much of the work for them.

The help we provide gives them what they need to refocus their attention and to apply their effort in the direction of learning.

Let’s look at each in turn.

Modelling

This sees us giving learners a model of how to do something, allowing them to copy, imitate, or adapt what we present.

For example, we might model how to complete a task, how to search for the answer to a question, or how to use trial and improvement to develop the quality of your work.

Prompting

This is less interventionist than modelling. It involves using prompts to spark learner thinking. Here are some examples to illustrate the idea:

• What was that word we used earlier…?
• Is this a good time to return to the checklist?
• Can you remember what you told me last time you hit a problem like this?

In each of these examples we are not going so far as to provide learners with a full-blown model of what to do.

Instead, we are prompting them to think in a certain way or to go back to a certain thing with which they are already familiar.

Clueing

This is the least interventionist of the three techniques.

Clueing involves us giving learners clues about what to do next or how to think.

It is then up to the learner to interpret the clues.

Here are some examples:

• Try having a look at Page 16. See what you can find there.
• It could have something to do with refrigeration. I’m not saying for definite … but it might be worth thinking about.
• Well, I think Bohr’s work offers an interesting perspective. I’ll leave the rest up to you.

Being aware of the differences between modelling, prompting, and clueing ensures you are well placed to use the most appropriate technique for the learner in front of you.

This makes your interventions more effective, and lets you target learner effort with a greater degree of skill.

Strategy Sharing and Strategy Reflection

One of the characteristics of many learners operating under a growth mindset is that they persist in the face of challenges.

But what form does this persistence take? What does it look like in terms of effort?

Well, one of the key things we tend to see – and you will undoubtedly be able to relate this to learners you have taught – is learners trying different strategies in an effort to reach their goal.

For example, a learner in PE might be trying to bend a free kick around a wall.

They try this ten times, failing on each occasion.

So, what do they do?

They start thinking about how they are approaching the ball, the part of the foot they are using to strike it, the point at which they make contact, the position of their standing leg.

Over the next fifty or sixty attempts they vary each of these factors, observing the results.

Essentially, they are engaged in a process of trial and error in which they employ a variety of strategies and make a variety of tweaks to what they are doing.

This is targeted effort.

They are trying to solve the problem of how you bend a free kick round a wall.

Their effort is focussed on this goal.

We can take away two things to use in any lesson we teach.

First, strategy sharing is always welcome.

It could be that you share strategies with your learners, giving them different techniques to try.

Or it could be that you encourage learners to share strategies with one another.

Either way, the aim is to ensure everyone in the class has options open to them when they hit a problem – and knows how to take advantage of these.

Second, strategy reflection is a useful way to get learners thinking critically about the techniques they used when faced with a problem, and the results that sprung from this.

You can make strategy reflection the focus of a plenary, or you can use it as a mid-lesson review, inserting it directly after an activity in which learners have had to struggle to be successful.

Both techniques encourage learners to think about the strategies they are using, the results to which these give rise, and how they might alter their actions to better target their efforts in the future.