Editorial
The landscape of education and…
By Melissa Chin Pei San
What?
Before embarking on the MLS Assessment Series, and possibly even for the most part of it, I have been entrenched in a narrow view of assessment. In asking the 3 critical questions in formative assessment – 1) where the learner is going, 2) where the learner is, and 3) how to get there – I was often absorbed in determining the efficacy of my instruction, and how I could tweak my instruction to enable my students to achieve the learning outcomes, eventually helping my students to attain respectable grades. The adoption of this view of assessment also meant inflicting substantial stress on myself, particularly nearing periods of examinations when I would tear my hair out wondering why my students kept making the same mistakes repeatedly. It appeared that my students’ learning was a responsibility that fell squarely on my shoulders.
My view constructed the learner as a passive subject, as a vessel to be manipulated or filled. It prompted me to impose standardised assessment tasks on learners, which in turn allowed me to label learners according to their ability to learn, that is “high-progress learners”, “middle-progress learners” or “low-progress learners”. I did not give much thought to whether these assessments were equitable and fair for all learners, and I blindly accepted the unintended consequences that could arise from learners getting a poor letter or numerical grade, a critical one being the dampening of the learner’s motivation to learn.
In essence, I was forgetting that the learner matters most in learning. I began to understand what A/P Kelvin Tan meant in his final lecture – the learner is active, the learner has rights, and the learner has a voice. As educators, when we recognise that learners want to and can take charge of their own learning, we would take steps to meaningfully involve them in decisions about their own learning. We would involve learners in co-authoring how they would like to shape their learning experiences to get to where they would like to go. We would accord learners space to reflect on their past learning experiences and the feedback that has been given to them and accord them an integral role in planning how they would act on feedback to close any identified learning gaps. This is powerful because learners who are active and exercise their rights and voice in learning are ultimately learners who are engaged!
So What?
Assessment in the 21st Century: Developing Future-Ready, Lifelong Learners
Instead of looking at assessment as merely a means of measuring outcomes, David Boud (2007) suggests that we pivot our view to assessment as a central component of the learning process itself. He referred to this longer-term view of assessment as “sustainable assessment”, which aims to develop in students the capacity for future learning beyond the context of formal education. We need to equip the lifelong learner to ask 3 critical questions: What am I learning? Why am I learning this? How will I know that I have learnt it?
The removal of all weighted assessments for P1 and P2 in 2019, and the removal of all mid-year examinations in 2023 are among the several policy shifts to enable schools to implement initiatives to better prepare our students to learn for life and navigate the ambiguities of the VUCA world. However, many educators in schools are only beginning to grapple with this paradigm shift, and much of the policy implementation is currently being implemented in token forms. For instance, some P1 and P2 teachers continue to fuss about how to fairly measure students’ academic progress using qualitative descriptors for the sole purpose of reporting in the Holistic Development Profile (HDP). Yet, amidst all the fuss of measuring, how do students, teachers and even parents use the information gathered to inform the next steps in teaching and learning?
With the recent introduction of the enhanced framework for 21CC and the push for schools to assess these competencies, educators on the ground must be mindful that such assessment should not count for “nothing”.
Now What?
What might sustainable assessment look like in the primary school setting? How can I begin to implement a sustainable assessment culture in my school?
What to Focus On: Learning Dispositions
In my subject domain, the development of positive learning dispositions is emphasised within the “attitudes” and “metacognition” arms of the pentagonal Mathematics Framework (below). Students can be provided with more structured opportunities to reflect on their attitudes towards learning math, and how they can monitor and regulate their own learning during mathematical problem-solving. Making students’ thinking and dispositions visible to teachers is a crucial first step towards dialogue and intervention to help frame students’ explanations of success and failure around internal, controllable factors and to promote growth mindsets.
In my 1CPT’s capstone study, we found that Primary 4 students in our host school demonstrated low levels of competence for mathematics, which is a mediator for motivation in learning. Qualitative data revealed that students commonly interpreted their own attainment and ability in the subject based on how they scored on the weighted assessments. It is important to influence our students’ internal discourse by helping them to interpret their growth in learning mathematics through a portfolio of their learning achievements and through varied modes of demonstrating their learning.
We can also influence students’ internal discourse by getting students to reflect on their performance in weighted assessments using the reflection template developed by my team members for 2Assessment Task 2A (see sample reflection below). This can help students to better understand their grades and adopt a focus on improvement and goal-oriented action, in turn developing the “academic buoyancy” that A/P Tan referred to in Lecture 1. A concept developed by Ahmed Shafti et al. (2018), students who are “academically buoyant” are more able to deal with patches of poor performance and recalibrate when they experience dips in motivation and engagement in their lifelong journey of learning.
In addition, our reflection template included probes in the affective domain (e.g. “What feelings do you have about this work?”) adopted from the REAL framework of student self-assessment developed by Munns & Woodward (2006). This enables students to articulate their emotions about the assessment, an aspect that may be sometimes overlooked in the reflection process.
Improving Feedback Uptake
With a clear focus on the dispositions needed to develop the lifelong learner – Box 4 of A/P Tan’s (2022) four-box theory – we then examine the conditions that promote or hinder students’ receptivity to teachers’ feedback (Box 3). The tone of the learning environment as well as students’ engagement with the learning experience likely plays an important role. This could include whether students feel they are valued as individuals and learners, as well as their perceived levels of autonomy in shaping how learning is designed and evaluated in the classroom.
To help students get from Box 3 to Box 4, it is necessary to ensure that assessment for learning is coherent and integrative (Tan, 2013). A whole-school approach will yield the most benefits, as positive learning dispositions can be nurtured across the spectrum of student experiences within the school. The inclusion of Dedicated Improvement Reflection Time (D.I.R.T.) mentioned in Lecture 1 provides protected time for students to decide how they can learn from assessment. Students may make use of this protected time to synthesise and implement feedback by engaging in activities such as redrafting and revising their work in response to a specific feedback comment or to identify areas to work on and plan their next steps (Winstone & Winstone, 2021). This will further help students make sense of how they learn and take steps to achieve how they would like to learn in a more holistic and integrated manner.
Anticipating Resistance
As I prepared my P6 students last year for their Prelims and PSLE, I began to emphasise the quality of learning from every serious attempt on a practice paper over the quantity of practice papers attempted. Working in groups, students pored over their assigned challenging questions, gathering information about, and analysing the mistakes made by their classmates. They sieved out the key concepts to be applied for the question and then presented what they had learnt to the class. The process, though tedious, was energising for the students and took up 2 weeks per practice paper. In the process, students shared their “Aha!” moments and articulated their plans to improve on the next practice paper.
When I attempted to share this reflective learning approach with my level teachers, they expressed curiosity about how I could spend such a long time on a practice paper (pragmatic resistance) while continuing to take comfort in own approaches (epistemic resistance). Such resistance is to be expected in bringing about any change and as an assessment leader, I would like to inspire a sense of hope (as opposed to invoking a sense of despair and burden.
Conclusion: Learn, Unlearn and Relearn
As an educator, it is important to role model the positive learning dispositions that we aim to inculcate in the learners under our charge. MLS was the true litmus test: there are no grades (pass-fail) and even so, we are told it is quite impossible re-course. One then, needs to approach learning with intentionality. An open, curious, independent, at times creative, and all times persevering mind is what it takes. Such learning can be joyful, and I hope to inculcate this joy of learning in my students.
Footnotes:
1Management and Leadership in Schools (MLS) Capstone Project “Making Formative Use of Summative Assessments (Math)” by Melissa Chin Pei San, Lee Minyu and Toh Wei Zeng.
2MLS Assessment Seminar artefact by Melissa Chin Pei San, Lee Minyu and Toh Wei Zeng.
References
Ahmed Shafi, A., Hatley, J., Middleton, T., Millican, R., & Templeton, S. (2018). The role of assessment feedback in developing academic buoyancy. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(3), 415–427. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2017.1356265
D. Boud. (2007). Reframing assessment as if learning were important. In Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education (pp. 24–36). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203964309-8
Munns, G. & Woodward, H. (2006). Student engagement and student self-assessment: The REAL framework. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice. 13. 193-213.
Tan, K. H. K. (2022). The Four Boxes of Assessment Literacy Feedback. Assessment For All Learners. https://assessmentforall.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-four-boxes-of-assessment-feedback.html
Tan, K.H.K. (2013). A Framework for Assessment for Learning: Implications for Feedback Practices within and beyond the Gap. ISRN Education, 2013, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/640609
Winstone, N. E., & Winstone, N. (2021). Harnessing the learning potential of feedback: Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time (DIRT) in classroom practice. In Y. Zi and Y. Lan (Eds.), Assessment as learning: Maximising opportunities for student learning and achievement (pp. 206-216). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.