This is part 2 of a series of blogs looking at assessment in English. For part 1, please click here.
Part 3, focusing on the reliability and validity of assessments can be accessed here.
Last year, I blogged on the importance of a shared understanding of terminology when it comes to discussing great teaching. Likewise, this shared understanding of key terms is vital when it comes to discussing assessment, especially given the number of disagreements on social media that have arisen from misinterpretation. Nobody understands this more than us, given our knowledge of how meaning is tied to the reader’s interpretation as much as the writer’s intention.
For this reason, I wanted to start by setting out my own interpretations of some key terms that sit behind a solid understanding of assessment in English. I accept that some of these might be widely debated, but I’m hoping that these definitions will help when reflecting on an understanding of assessment in later blogs.
Knowledge
Though this may be a controversial statement, I see knowledge as the foundation of teaching and learning. This is reflected in the Cambridge Dictionary’s definitions of the verbs ‘teach’ (“to give someone knowledge”) and ‘learn’ (“to get knowledge or skill”). Everything we do is rooted in planning, delivering, applying and knowledge.
One of the reasons many teachers might disagree with this sentiment is the concept that skills are not the same as knowledge. However, I view this as a false dichotomy and adopt the view that there are different types of knowledge, including declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (the latter being the knowledge that allows us to demonstrate skills).
Declarative knowledge
Declarative knowledge can be seen as the factual knowledge we teach students )“knowing that- facts” (Raichura, 2018). Examples of this within English could be:
- Knowing that Shakespeare believed James I to be a descendent of the real-life Banquo
- Knowing that inferences are guesses based on evidence
- Knowing that semi-colons are used to separate two independent clauses
Procedural knowledge
Whereas declarative knowledge is factual, such as in the examples above, procedural knowledge is can be used as a term for skills-based knowledge (“knowing how” (Raichura, 2018)). In this sense, knowing how to do something is classed as a type of knowledge in itself. Examples within English could include:
- Knowing how to analyse a simile
- Knowing how to accurately use semi-colons
- Knowing how to interpret a character
Procedural knowledge is based on a foundation of declarative knowledge (you’d be hard-pressed to use a semi-colon if you didn’t have knowledge of the conventions of their use or what they look like) but I believe it shouldn’t be seen as a hierarchy. Though the relationship between declarative and procedural knowledge will impact the sequence of teaching, it doesn’t mean that declarative knowledge is any less complex or powerful.
Curriculum
The Cambridge Dictionary definition focuses on curriculum as ‘what is studied’ (whether it be subjects across a school or the specific knowledge within a subject). However, it’s also important to consider the ‘how’ (curriculum implementation, including sequencing) and the symbiotic relationship between curriculum and assessment. In short, the findings from assessment processes should inform the curriculum choices as much as the curriculum choices inform the decisions around how and what to assess.
Assessment
When I began teaching, I would have seen ‘assessment’ as a synonym for the task a student does that is then marked by me, the teacher. I think that teacher John Dabell would probably see the government-driven APP (Assessing Pupils’ Progress) and the levels that went alongside this as the cause, given that he explains how it “led to merging formative and summative into one big stinking pot of damaging sub-levels and labels which politicians stirred and cackled over.”
Either way, the view that ‘assessment’ is a task completed by students is a problematic one. Instead, it’s better to take Dylan Wiliam’s lead and focus on its root word: to assess. If we do this, then the focus shifts to the process the teacher undertakes instead. The tasks are just the input that allow us to ‘assess’. In defining this, I’ve also followed up on Wiliam’s interpretation by focusing on Lee J. Cronbach’s (1971) definition of assessment as ‘a procedure for drawing inferences’ (Wiliam, 2020).
Our purposes for those inferences and the subsequent actions then lead us to the definitions of formative and summative assessment.
Formative assessment
Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam’s seminal work Inside the Black Box (1998) is well known for exploring formative assessment as a process. Wiliam even went so far to reflect on the coinage of the term in a 2013 tweet, by considering that it should have been named ‘something like “responsive teaching”’ (Wiliam, 2013).
So how we we define this? Let’s go back to the root word again: form (from the Latin ‘formare’ - to form). Formative assessment helps us make inferences that allow us to form the next steps of the learning process. Essentially:
What do they know?
What do they not know?
What next? How does this impact our teaching and students’ learning?
In this sense, formative inferences form part of a cycle of learning where the inferences from assessment constantly feed into teaching on an ongoing basis. Great teachers make and act on formative inferences constantly, both within and between lessons.
Harry Fletcher-Wood explores this effectively in his blogs and also his book on the subject (Fletcher-Wood, 2018), which look at responsive teaching across different subjects. In later blogs, I intend to set out how we can utilise effective formative assessment in the English classroom.
Summative assessment
Whereas formative assessment forms part of a ‘cycle’ of learning, summative assessment focuses more on the end goals by representing the sum of a student’s learning. The most ubiquitous example of a summative inference is the grades students are awarded at the end of a course (students’ knowledge of the course content is assessed through a sample in an exam paper and/or non-exam assessment and the summative inference is made about their attainment in that subject).
However, making such inferences can be problematic, as they are often reported to external stakeholders (whether it’s parents, the press or politicians) and can be based on a narrow sampling of students’ learning. Even where these are well-designed, Daisy Christodoulou highlights how despite the ‘accurate shared meaning’, they provide us with ‘relatively little information that will change [our] teaching’ (Christodoulou, 2016). I would argue that this is especially true for English that other subjects for formal qualifications, due to a combination of subjective criteria and other variables that impact students’ ability to hit the criteria in place.
As the focus of summative inferences is to make judgements of students’ learning and attainment across a longer span of time, we encounter summative assessment less frequently and it doesn’t impact our teaching directly. That being said, the fact that - since the removal of levels - English schools are now freer to make their own decisions about how to assess summatively makes it worth considering effective approaches to this (which I discuss in the final section of this book).
Reliability and Validity
The final two terms that I feel are vital to the design and use of effective assessment are reliability and validity. In part 3 of these series, I’ll explore what these terms mean in terms of assessment in the classroom and how they impact the design and use of assessment.
Reflection Questions
To what extent do these definitions chime with your existing understanding of the terms?
Where do you currently make formative inferences as part of assessment processes?
How do these impact the next steps for teaching and learning?
What summative inferences do you currently make in your school?
How useful do you find these summative inferences in your practice?
References
Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/teach
Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/learn
Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/curriculum
Christodoulou, D. (2016) Making Good Progress? The future of Assessment for Learning, Oxford University Press
Fletcher-Wood, H. (2018) Responsive Teaching: Cognitive Science and Formative Assessment in Practice, Routledge
Raichura, P. (2018), https://bunsenblue.wordpress.com/2018/05/31/procedural-declarative-knowledge-my-cogscisci-talk/
Wiliam, D. (2013), https://twitter.com/dylanwiliam/status/393045049337847808
Wiliam, D. (2020), ‘How to think about assessment’, The ResearchEd Guide to Assessment, John Catt Educational
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