Bridging Summative And Formative Assessment

Author(s):

Ragnar Thygesen(presenting / submitting)Astrid Birgitte Eggen

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

General description of the project

The presentation reports from a project titled Developing national standards for the assessment of writing. A tool for teaching and learning. The project aims at developing and implementing norms of expected writing proficiency for teaching, learning and assessment of educational writing in the compulsory education. It builds on a social-semiotic construct of writing as a key competence that yields construct and content validity (The Wheel of Writing: http://www.skrivesenteret.no/nyhet?a=a4821&b1=prosjekt&b2=Prosjekt).

The study was designed in two stages. At stage one of the project, norms were developed as a result of empirical collaboration with experienced teachers at 12 geographically distributed primary schools. The teachers were invited to interview-sessions to discuss what is reasonable to expect of proficiency in writing by an average of pupils after four and seven years of schooling as a basis for setting explicit norms.

The main objectives of stage two were to investigate a) what effects implementation of shared norms across nationally distributed local learning ecologies, may have on the quality of teachers’ assessment competence, and b) what effects an integration of shared norms in teachers’ assessment practice may have on the quality of pupils' writing.

Implementation of the norms was achieved, firstly, through giving extensive courses to the participating teachers. Secondly, the norms were implemented by the teachers through tutoring of the pupils as summative and formative assessment on the basis of the pupils’ written texts.

The norms have been specified in relation to various domains of a text, namely Communication, Contents, Text organisation, Language use, Orthography (with morphology), Punctuation, and Use of the written medium. For each domain, the teachers assessed texts in relation to the norms and scored them in accordance with a five-graded scale.

Sub-study: Transition from summative to formative assessment

In the field of writing as a key competency in school, teachers should focus on both the summative assessment of a pupil’s text and the succeeding formative assessment phase. The latter is characterised by providing the pupil with qualitative feedback/feed-forward information about what has been achieved, as well as defining future learning goals and means to reach these goals. The aim is to reinforce the pupil’s learning with increased learning outcome as the potential result. To adapt teaching to the individual pupil, the pupil’s strengths and weaknesses must be taken into consideration, including his/her learning potential. How to consider these twin assessment purposes is the topic of the presented sub-study: The challenge for the teacher is to accomplish the transition from the summative to the formative assessment phase in a beneficial way.

Method

The project is designed as a repeated-measurements field-study over a 3 years’ span with 21 intervention- and 5 control-groups (which correspond to schools), and with six partially overlapping sub-studies. This extensive sample is not fully representative; however, the participating schools have been selected by various stratifying variables, namely geography, orthographic system (Norway has two orthographic systems), urban-rural areas, small-large schools. Due to the large amount of data, we have selected an intensive sample: Every 11th pupil was selected and is representative for the extensive sample. A primary trait model was chosen as the leading principle for the summative assessment. This model focuses on one major aspect of a text, and other aspects are assessed in view of the primary trait. With reference to the Wheel of Writing, social acts of writing were chosen as the primary trait. This means that the main focus of the assessment can vary - implying e.g. that a scientific text written to convince a reader about some scientific matter has to be assessed differently from a text composed to tell a story or to entertain. The basis for the summative assessment is the question How am I doing? – which the pupil is supposed to ask himself/herself relative to the goal set for him/her. The subsequent formative assessment phase focuses on making the pupil conscious of where he/she is aiming by phrasing the question Where am I going? (cf. Hattie & Timperley, 2007). This question leads to another ‘feed-forward’ question, namely Where to next?, intended to provide the pupil with information that can close the gap between where he/she is and where he/she should be. The formative assessment may include enhanced challenges, new strategies to work on the tasks, deeper understanding, as well as more information about what is and what is not understood. Formative assessment is characterised by an interrelationship between the pupil, the teacher and the text. The transitional process that actuates this situation assumes that the specific aims of the summative and formative purposes are seen as mutually dependent. Each predefined purpose is substituted by a practice that calls for a bridge between the two purposes. The approach is advantageous for the pupils in that it directly affects their learning in a precise and specific way.

Expected Outcomes

The teachers were exact in applying the norms used as assessment criteria as normative for their summative assessment. Assessing a text summatively according to our approach functioned satisfactorily, and the norms that constitute the reference for the assessment proved applicable and valid when it comes to assessment of learning. Splitting up a text into various domains instead of assessing it as a whole enabled the teachers to be aware of which aspects of a text the pupil was struggling with and which parts were managed satisfactorily. This way of organising a text is useful for showing the pupil his/her strengths and weaknesses, and for deciding where further work is required. When they gave feedback on particular aspects of a text, the teachers primarily focused on spelling and punctuation, plus on text organisation. They had to be encouraged to utilise all seven assessment domains. The teachers put emphasis on what was good in a text in order to motivate the pupil to make a further effort. They often focused on elements in the text where the pupil apparently had a potential for learning; they utilised a compensatory perspective. The feed-forward principle states that the norms should form the basis for setting goals for the pupil’s further learning and thereby for his/her revision of the text. The precisely defined norms were suitable for formulation of accurate objectives for each pupil’s further work, and an applicable instrument in the teacher’s learning-supportive guidance. The study confirms that the norms constituting the reference for both summative and formative assessment are applicable and valid when it comes to assessment as learning. The procedure is valid because the norms are empirically driven; the gap between predefined norms and the ipsative application of them can be bridged.

References

Berge, K. L. , Evensen, L. S. & Thygesen, R. (in press). The Wheel of Writing. A Model of the Writing Domain for the teaching and Assessing of Writing as a Key Competency. The Curriculum Journal. Evensen, L. S., Berge, K. L. & Thygesen, R. (in press). Standards as a Tool for Teaching and Assessing Cross-curricular Writing. The Curriculum Journal. Hattie, J. & Timperley, H. (2007) The power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, March, Vol. 77, Issue 1, pp. 81-112. Thygesen, R. & Eggen, A. B. (in press). Bridging Summative and Formative Assessment. In: D. L. Cameron & R. Thygesen (eds.) Transitions in the Field of Special Education. Theoretical Perspectives and Implications for practice. WAXMAN.

Author Information

Ragnar Thygesen (presenting / submitting)

University of Agder

Department of Education

Kristiansand

Astrid Birgitte Eggen