Coherence in Science Assessment Literacy

Assessment has been our main focus during our professional development (called light house sessions) and Science Department meetings. In 2020, the lighthouse sessions helped deepen our understanding of what assessment can do for learning. Our journey on assessment continues in 2021 in various ways, with a common department goal of making students more independent in learning through focusing on process-level feedback.

This is a pivotal change which requires a lot of effort, from reviewing the existing assessment task to revising feedback comments. Despite the hard work, the teachers see the value of such change. This is a quote given by a Science teacher:

“I see more value in trying to start working on our feedback with the purpose of enabling our learners to attain the process level. Through the sessions, I see that there is a link between a well-crafted question and how I can enhance the effectiveness of our feedback in helping our learners to attain, at least, the process level.”

Due to the emerging demands for ICT skills and abilities to manage students with different learning needs, teachers have to attend courses such as e-pedagogy, differentiated instruction and blended learning. Often, teachers view these courses in isolation.  Hence, it is essential to continue the dialogue with teachers and reiterate the focus of assessment to support and serve the learning needs of students in all our teaching approaches. The following are examples of using assessment to support students towards process level outcomes in Science.

The implementation of a new Lower Secondary Science syllabus
provides an opportunity for us to leverage the integrative activity created by
Science CPDD to assess students differently using rubrics. Our Science teacher,
Xing Yu, will elaborate more on using rubrics to encourage self and peer
assessment in Secondary one Science this year.

On top of that, the emerging use of ICT tools/platforms such as
Students Learning Space (SLS) allows teachers to reconsider the roles of
technology in designing meaningful assessment tasks, which will be shared in
detail later by our Physics teacher, Thiam Soon.

To give helpful process level feedback, teachers have to be skillful
in designing learning tasks that can help to identify specific learning gaps
from students’ answers. Min Huey will share her own experience in the last
segment of this article.

Using rubrics in science assessment – Xing Yu

After completing several science topics, we wanted to allow
students to apply their learning across different topics on an authentic task.
We leveraged on the integrative activity designed by CPDD in activity book 1A.
The students were required to write a proposal stating their plans,
experimental procedures and evaluation of their plans in water purification.

We developed rubrics to assess students’ application of their
learning on the given task. The main aim of our rubrics was to provide the
students with guidance on what is expected and to encourage them to be more
self-directed in striving for the best. We hope students will take the
initiative to improve their plans by self-evaluating using the rubrics. Annex
1.1  shows parts of our first draft of the rubrics. Through our
PD sharing and discussion, we realised that we may not achieve our objective
with this set of rubrics. For example, big words like “scientifically
sound” may not be understood by the students. To improve our rubrics, we
refer to the example given by Tan, Salim & Manimala (2020) on how the
teachers crafted their rubrics by including positive criterion specific
examples. The teachers included descriptions in their rubrics to showcase what
they meant by “apt and precise” vocabulary and “conveying messages in a
compelling manner” in writings. Taking ideas from Tan (2020), we decided to
unpack the term “scientifically sound” using an example from a
scenario whereby students are required to separate a mixture containing soluble
and insoluble solids. 

Annex1.2 shows how we unpacked the terms by giving examples of the steps
required for the separation, classified into different levels of attainment. We
also included comments on the strengths or weaknesses of the examples given.
This approach not only gave the students an idea of what is “scientifically
sound”, it also prompted us to think through what exactly  we are
expecting for  each level of attainment. Two concerns with
having a detailed rubric like this are that we need to spend more time creating
the rubrics and the students may be overwhelmed by the amount of information
presented. To make the work more manageable, we decided to unpack only one
criterion, which is harder to comprehend. For the students, we broke down the
rubric into two parts, giving only necessary information for the project at
that moment. Part one consist of the criteria for planning and peer evaluation
while part two consist of the criteria for conducting the investigation,
concluding and evaluating their project.

We felt that the detailed rubrics had guided the students well in
planning their investigation. The majority of the groups provided sound
procedures although they have different foci for their investigation. The
rubrics reminded students to give illustrations to complement their procedures.
To score in creativity, students created diagrams to match the plans that they
came out with instead of using readily available images. Annex1.3 gives an example of work produced by students.

Rubrics are useful tools for assessing tasks that allow students
to produce a wide variety of work. To encourage students to be more independent
in learning through rubrics, we must be mindful of providing age-appropriate
content with examples when necessary. Doing so also helps us to be more precise
about what we are expecting.

Technology-enabled Feedback – Thiam Soon

With technology so pervasive in our lives, we would naturally tend
to explore how it could supplement the learning experience of our students.
Technology can enhance learning by providing a different platform for teachers
to assess the students’ learning.

I focused on two main Key Applications of Technology (KAT) of
e-pedagogy outlined in my science class: “Support Assessment for Learning” and
“Facilitate Learning Together”. The learning topic was on the Kinetic Model of
Matter in Physics.

In “Support Assessment for Learning”, the Student Learning Space
(SLS) was used to get students to respond to the questions via the Interactive
Thinking Tool (ITT). Students were given some time to submit their responses
online, and then the teacher reviewed and commented on their responses verbally
in class, thus providing feedback to the students.

In “Facilitate Learning Together”, the students also
used the ITT in the SLS, but this time instead of the teacher actively
reviewing and providing feedback for learning, the students were tasked to
evaluate their peer’s works and give feedback on them. The teacher’s role was
to facilitate, guide and monitor the students in the peer review exercise. It
was hoped that this would be a positive step forward in getting students to be
more self-directed and take charge of their learning.

The diagram below shows how we focused on giving feedback to
improve students’ answers instead of responding to the question using ITT in
SLS.

For more
details, click on the link here to
access the full article.

Process-level feedback – Min Huey

In the teaching of Biology, many students struggle with answering
lengthy and complicated application questions. Students’ struggle was often
masked under a myriad of other problems, such as the inability to unpack the
information given in application questions and weak mastery of content
knowledge. The use of process-level feedback will help the teacher to identify
learning gaps clearly and provide targeted feedback. Hence, allowing students
to reflect upon their work, improve the skills needed to attempt future
application questions and attain subject mastery.

Process-level feedback gives students targeted feedback to improve
their mastery of the processes involved in attempting a question to show
conceptual understanding (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). This will help
students attain subject mastery and transferrable skills beyond the initial
task (Goh, 2021). To give effective process-level feedback, the teacher has to
consider the learner’s profile, and craft assessment tasks that allow targeted
feedback to help students close the learning gap. The design of an assessment
task can involve a variety of ways of collecting evidence of students’
learning, such as drawing and writing in prose. 

In the full article here,
I will elaborate on how I have changed my correction process and redesigned the
assessment task during corrections to give process-level feedback. After
marking the assessment task, I noticed three learning gaps and addressed them
by changing the correction process. The assessment task was redesigned and used
for corrections. The new correction process allowed me to give process-level
feedback that targeted the learning gaps (shown in the table below).

In summary, complicated and lengthy Biology
application questions can be unpacked to

●      make
students’ thinking visible (being intentional with the questions that help to
scaffold students’ thinking)

●      allow
for targeted feedback (breaking down one long lengthy question into many small
targeted questions)

●      enable students to express
their understanding through drawings (to help students who struggle with
expressing their answers in prose)