External Examinations As Teachers Professional Development Support In Their Summative Assessment Practices

Author(s):

Walther Tessaro(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

09. Assessment, Evaluation, Testing and Measurement

Format:

Paper

Session Information

09 SES 02 C, Summative and Formative Assessments in Primary and Secondary Education

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

15:15-16:45

Room:

334. [Main]

Chair:

Agnes Stancel-Piatak

Contribution

Among the markers that can serve as referents for teachers’ summative assessment of student learning, external examinations are significant sources.

Indeed, if students’ results in these tests allow to identify learning needs, they are also often used as indicators to improve classroom practices (Rosenkvist, 2010). Besides their contents, including documents for students but also those intended for teachers, seem of great interest for their training and professional development. They may also contribute to practice harmonization.

If external examinations are generally intended to test learning objectives achievement, they also show teachers’ expected skill levels at a given time of school curriculum.

By observing European countries external assessment practices (Morris, 2011) it appears that tests sometimes fulfil several functions simultaneously. If their goals may be different, they contribute, in one way or another, to teaching practices regulation, results exploitation potentially taking place at school system, in-service training, school or classroom levels.

For some authors, external examinations can serve as a "didactic lever" and favor practices changes (Bodin, Delory, Lafontaine & Wolf, 2001), in particular by contributing to new teaching methods or a new curriculum implementation.

By completing the results of teacher-made tests, external assessment should ensure a greater equity. According to Allal (2009), if this equity is estimated by statistical indicators on a system scale, for teachers it is realized by carrying out the fairest possible assessment considering the often multiple information that they have at their disposal.

If external tests refer to theories of measurement and benefit from significant docimological work, teacher practices are characterized by professional judgement, considered both as a cognitive act and a social situated practice (Mottier Lopez & Allal, 2008). Several studies in school context have shown that teacher assessment judgment is a dynamic and complex process. It is considered as "professional" (Lafortune & Allal, 2008) when its practice reflects characteristics such as rigor, coherence and transparency. Multidimensional, the professional judgment integrates diverse and combined qualitative and quantitative sources of information.

In our paper, we will focus on teacher-made written tests elaboration and on student productions appreciation, which are two of the three levels of professional judgement in assessment defined by Allal (2013). For teachers participating in the research, these two levels concern (1) the construction of a summative assessment instrument (2) the assessment of their respective students work in the form of judgements such as manifested during marking and resulting decisions.

From documents produced by teachers and tools proposed by researchers in a longitudinal research conducted as part of a Swiss National Fund (Mottier Lopez, Tessaro & Filliettaz, 2012), as well as teacher verbalizations during marking and exchanges during social moderation meetings (Wyatt-Smith, Klenowski & Gunn, 2010), we have examined the role of external examinations as possible referents in the choice of curriculum objectives and task types proposed by teachers in constructing their own summative assessment instrument, as well as during judgement assessment processes resulting in grading.

Method

The longitudinal research in which fits our study included two primary school teacher cohorts (total: 28). They worked in contrasted socioeconomic level schools, had an experience of at least three years long in the concerned degrees and committed to follow their students during two years (Mottier Lopez, Tessaro, Dechamboux, Villabona & Morales, 2012). The three stages of this research are (1) observations of marking practices in French and Mathematics, associated with semi-structured interviews; (2) social moderation meetings aiming to compare summative assessment practices and to build a common understanding of standards; (3) replication of part 1. The plan of research was replicated twice: a first cohort of teachers (degrees 3 and 4 - students 8-10 years old), then a second in degrees 5 and 6 (10-12 years old). During individual meetings (stages 1 and 3), summative assessment tools (written copies, referents, corrective controls) developed by each teacher have been collected. Semi-structured interviews have been conducted to collect information on: teaching programs, assessed learning objectives, choice of items and scales in particular. Each teacher then corrected four copies of students likely to encounter difficulties, while verbalizing emerging interpretations and reasonings, according to a "thinking aloud" methodology, in a qualitative analysis approach. In stage 2 a social moderation process has been proposed, aimed at collectively building a common representation of official expectations translated in external referents and leading to consensus about teachers assessment practices (Wyatt-Smith, Klenowski & Gunn, 2010). Meetings alternated exchanges in groups and collective interactions. All verbal interactions were recorded and all written data collected for analysis. For this paper, we analysed a part of the research corpus: a few transcriptions both from stage 1 and from moderation social meetings. This data was completed by findings obtained during in-service training, reproducing partly the social moderation form.

Expected Outcomes

Integrated into teachers marking guides, external examination specification tables include important elements for student productions analysis. They contain several issues identified in tools developed by teachers. This similarity suggests that on this point, this external referent participates in a formalization of teacher’s summative assessment practices. First analyses show that external tests support teacher practices harmonization by valuing, for example, the presence of complex items in mathematics. According to some teachers, this orientation has contributed to change classroom practices and has been used as " didactic lever ". However, classroom assessment practices seem to resist. In social moderation meetings, teachers explained the presence of a majority of specific tasks in their written tests by the fact that they are easier to assess on one hand; that they do not discriminate as do complex tasks and thus contribute to students achievement on the other hand. Teacher’s assessment practices seeming close to those promoted by external examinations, they would thus contribute to alignment and internal cohesion (Laveault, Dionne, Lafontaine, Tessaro & Allal, 2014) in a top down way. Social moderation could, however, also participate in a bottom-up perspective, since practice harmonization issued from meetings contributes to the formulation of even more adequate assessment policies.

References

Allal, L. (2009). Pratiques évaluatives des enseignants face aux méthodologies des recherches évaluatives portant sur les systèmes scolaires. In L. Mottier Lopez & M. Crahay (Ed.), Évaluations en tension : entre la régulation des apprentissages et le pilotage des systèmes (pp. 29-45). Bruxelles : De Boeck. Allal, L. (2013). Teachers’ professional judgement in assessment: a cognitive act and a socially situated practice. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, (special issue: Moderation practice and teacher judgement), 20, 20-34. Bodin, A., Delory, C., Lafontaine, D. & Wolf, J.-L. (2001). Quelle évaluation externe des élèves pour quels socles de compétences ? Pédagogies, 14, 56-65. Lafortune, L. & Allal, L. (2008). Jugement professionnel en évaluation, Pratiques enseignantes au Québec et à Genève. Québec : Presses de l’Université du Québec. Laveault, D., Dionne, E., Lafontaine, D., Tessaro, W. & Allal, L. (2014). L’évaluation des compétences en salle de classe : régulations entre politiques et pratiques. In C. Dierendonck, E. Loarer & B. Rey (Ed.), L’évaluation des compétences en milieu scolaire et en milieu professionnel. Bruxelles : De Boeck. Morris, A. (2011) Student standardised testing : current practices in OECD countries and a literature review. OECD Education Working Paper No. 65. Mottier Lopez, L. & Allal, L. (2008). Le jugement professionnel en évaluation : un acte cognitif et une pratique sociale située. Revue suisse des sciences de l’éducation, 30(3), 465-482. Mottier Lopez, L., Tessaro, W. & Filliettaz, L. (2012). Etude des jugements d’évaluation des apprentissages des élèves et des pratiques de modération sociale. Requête acceptée par le FNS de la recherche scientifique : 100013_143453/1. Mottier Lopez, L., Tessaro, W., Dechamboux, L. & Morales Villabona, F. (2012). La modération sociale : un dispositif soutenant l’émergence de savoirs négociés sur l’évaluation certificative des apprentissages des élèves. Questions vives, 18, 159-175. Rosenkvist, M.A. (2010) Using student test results for accountability and improvement: A literature review. OECD Education Working Paper No. 54. Wyatt-Smith, C., Klenowski, V. & Gunn, S. (2010). The centrality of teachers’ judgement practice in assessment: a study of standards in moderation. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 17(1), 59-75.

Author Information

Walther Tessaro (presenting / submitting)

University of Geneva

Sciences of Education

Geneva

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