Learning How to Learn

Tools for Schools

Mary James, Paul Black, Patrick Carmichael, Colin Conner, Peter Dudley, Alison Fox, David Frost, Leslie Honour, John MacBeath, Bethan Marshall, Robert McCormick, David Pedder, Richard Procter, Sue Swaffield, DYLAN WILIAM

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134146826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learning how to learn is an essential preparation for lifelong learning. This book offers a set of in-service resources to help teachers develop new classroom practices informed by sound research. It builds on previous work associated with 'formative assessment' or 'assessment for learning'. However, it adds an important new dimension by taking account of the conditions within schools that are conducive to the promotion, in classrooms, of learning how to learn as an extension of assessment for learning. Among the materials included you will find:

• an introductory in-service session
• self-evaluation questionnaires
• an action planning activity
• workshops
• tools for school development
• a network mapping activity
• guidance about different ways of using the resources
• teachers descriptions of ways they have used of adapted them
• references to further information and advice.

In addition, there is a support website and examples of how individual schools have used or adapted these materials to maximize their benefits.

Part I Getting started

Overview

This section begins with a short article ‘Assessment for learning: what it is and what research says about it’ (See page). This is intended as background reading for the school’s professional development co-ordinator, or relevant group, but may be given to all teachers as a handout to accompany an introductory INSET session. Some teachers may feel that they are familiar with these ideas, although our experience suggests that many misunderstandings still abound: for instance, formative assessment is often confused with frequent mini-summative assessments. This article may help to clarify the central role of AfL in teaching and learning. It also provides all the references to source material that are used in the introductory presentation that follows.

The presentation, ‘Learning how to learn through assessment for learning’ (See page) is given here in the form of copies of sixteen slides. This could be used as the basis of a talk to teachers at the beginning of a programme of professional development. The presentation has two parts. The first eleven slides provide a rationale for making assessment for learning a focus for innovation and change in teachers’ classroom practice. These outline the key components – dialogue and questioning, feedback, sharing criteria, and peer- and self-assessment – and what research says about their effectiveness in improving learning. In our experience it is a good idea to allow group discussion of this evidence before moving on. The remaining slides provide ideas, drawn from a number of AfL projects, about practices that might fruitfully be implemented in schools. These slides also emphasise the key learning principles that underpin the practices. A PowerPoint version of these slides, and another version with less detail on the slides but more in accompanying notes, can be downloaded from our website at http://www.learntolearn.ac.uk.

Each school will need to decide how to proceed with development following such a presentation. On its own it is unlikely to be sufficient to stimulate fruitful activity, so it needs to be incorporated into a comprehensive plan for more sustained professional development. This should have two elements: opportunities for teachers to learn together and opportunities for them to develop practice in their own classrooms. Classroom learning can then be brought back to the teachers’ group for further reflection, critique and refinement – an action research sequence.

Activity can be initiated in a number of different ways and two suggestions are offered here. The first is an audit and action-planning activity (See page) that can be used directly after the initial presentation. This asks teachers to reflect on the introductory presentation and decide where they want to go next. On the assumption that not all of what they have heard will be novel, they are asked, first, to note the practices they already carry out and how these might be strengthened. Then they are asked to identify new practices that they wish to try out. The strain of adding to existing workload is acknowledged, so teachers are also asked to consider practices, currently engaged in, which are less productive of learning and might be reduced. Excessive but habitual forms of record-keeping are sometimes identified in this category. The rest of the activity follows familiar conventions for action planning. This activity is easily photocopied but the sheet is also available to download from the website.

The second route to deciding a strategy for development involves more systematic data collection and analysis using a self-evaluation questionnaire (See page) based on thirty statements about classroom assessment practices. The questionnaire can be photocopied from the materials given here or it can be downloaded from the website. You may wish to do your own analysis of the responses in ways that suit your purposes. However, if more help is needed, a spreadsheet can be downloaded from the website.

Schools usually find item level data of great interest because the questions focus on particular classroom practices and can reveal differences in values and practice across categories of staff, e.g. classroom teachers, managers and classroom assistants, across older and newer teachers, or across subjects. However, common patterns of response to groups of questions (factors) can also be important to think about. For classroom assessment practices we have identified three factors which may be of interest to schools in analysing their own results. The following tables list the items that make up these factors and give an indication of the kinds of values–practice gaps that were found by aggregating the results from over 500 classroom teachers in 32 ‘average’ primary and secondary schools. ‘Values’ were assessed by asking teachers how important they felt these practices to be, and ‘practices’ were assessed by asking teachers whether they carried them out. These tables may provide some basis for comparison with responses in your school. This provides a starting point, although there are dangers in simply comparing percentages and it may be better to compare means and standard deviations to measure differences with greater accuracy. Schools that wish to do this will probably need to use a statistics software package or the spreadsheet on our website.

Factor A1: Making learning explicit
Factor A2: Promoting learning autonomy
Factor A3: Performance orientation

When analysing questionnaire results, patterns of similarity or difference might be helpful in deciding where to put the main effort in developing practice in school. For example, you might find that making learning explicit through sharing learning objectives is common practice, but allowing pupils to identify their own learning objectives is underdeveloped.

There are other classroom-level research instruments on the project website, which are available to download, and may help you to examine certain issues in more depth. For example there are students’ beliefs about, and attitudes to, learning questionnaires, for various age groups, and a teachers’ beliefs about learning questionnaire. We had no space to reproduce these in this book but teachers might find them useful as self-evaluation tools.

Background reading

What follows is the short summary article, ‘Assessment for learning: what it is and what research says about it’, which provides background to assessment for learning research and practice. It will be useful for anyone who leads professional development in this area as it provides more detail on the slides that are used in the presentation (See page). As mentioned earlier, INSET leaders may choose to give copies to teachers to read either before or shortly after the first session in the professional development programme they plan.

Assessment for learning: what it is and what research says about it

What is assessment for learning?

It would be quite reasonable for any teacher to ask, with a degree of puzzlement, why something called assessment for learning (AfL) has moved centre stage in the drive to improve teaching and learning. The past experience of many teachers, pupils and their parents has been of assessment as something that happens after teaching and learning. The idea that assessment can be an integral part of teaching and learning requires a significant shift in our thinking but this is precisely what assessment for learning implies. So, before we look at what research on AfL can tell us, it is important to understand what it is.

The nature of assessment

It is no accident that the word ‘assessment’ comes from a Latin word meaning ‘to sit beside’ because a central feature of assessment is the close observation of what one person says or does by another, or, in the case of self-assessment, reflection on one’s own knowledge, understanding or behaviour. This is true of the whole spectrum of assessments, from formal tests and examinations to informal assessments made by teachers in their classrooms many hundred times each day. Although the form that assessments take may be very different – some may be pencil and paper tests whilst others may be based on questioning in normal classroom interactions – all assessments have some common characteristics. They all involve: (i) making observations; (ii) interpreting the evidence; (iii) making judgements that can be used for decisions about actions.

OBSERVATION

In order to carry out assessment, it is necessary to find out what pupils know and can do or the difficulties they are experiencing. Observation of regular classroom activity, such as listening to talk, watching pupils engaged in tasks, or reviewing the products of their class work and homework, may provide the information needed, but on other occasions it may be necessary to elicit the information needed in a very deliberate and specific way. A task or test might serve this purpose but a carefully chosen oral question can be just as effective. Pupils’ responses to tasks or questions then need to be interpreted. In other words, the assessor needs to work out what the evidence means.

INTERPRETATION

Interpretations are made with reference to what is of interest such as specific skills, attitudes or different kinds of knowledge. These are often referred to as criteria and relate to learning goals or objectives. Usually observations as part of assessment are made with these criteria in mind, i.e. formulated beforehand, but sometimes teachers observe unplanned interactions or outcomes and apply criteria retrospectively. Interpretations can describe or attempt to explain a behaviour, or they can infer from a behaviour, e.g. what a child says, that something is going on inside a child’s head, e.g. thinking. For this reason interpretations are sometimes called inferences.

JUDGEMENT

On the basis of these interpretations of evidence, judgements are made. These involve evaluations. It is at this point that the assessment process looks rather different according to the different purposes it is expected to serve and the uses to which the information will be put.

Different purposes

A distinction between formative and summative (summing-up) purposes has been familiar since the 1960s, although the meaning of these two terms has not been well understood. A more transparent distinction, meaning roughly the same thing, is between assessment of learning, for grading and reporting, and assessment for learning, where the explicit purpose is to use assessment as part of teaching to promote pupils’ learning. AfL becomes ‘formative’ when evidence is actually used to adapt teaching and learning practices to meet learning needs. AfL came to prominence, as a concept, after the publication in 1999 of a pamphlet with this title by the Assessment Reform Group, a small group of UK academics who have worked, since 1989, to bring evidence from research to the attention of teachers and policymakers.

ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING

In AfL, observations, interpretations and criteria may be similar to those employed in assessment of learning, but the nature of judgements and decisions that flow from them will be different. In essence, AfL focuses on what is revealed about where children are in their learning, especially the nature of, and reasons for, the strengths and weaknesses they exhibit. AfL judgements are therefore concerned with what they might do to move forward.

The Assessment Reform Group (2002a) gave this definition of AfL:

Assessment for Learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there.

One significant element of this definition is the emphasis on learners’ use of evidence. This draws attention to the fact that teachers are not the only assessors. Pupils can be involved in peer- and self-assessment and, even when teachers are heavily involved, pupils need to be actively engaged. Only learners can do the learning, so they need to act upon information and feedback if their learning is to improve. This requires them to have understanding, but also the motivation and will, to act. The implications for teaching and learning practices are profound and far-reaching.

ASSESSMENT OF LEARNING

In contrast, the main purpose of assessment of learning is to sum up what a pupil has learned at a given point. As such it is not designed to contribute directly to future learning although high-stakes testing can have a powerful negative impact (Assessment Reform Group, 2002b). In assessment of learning, the judgement will explic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction About this book
• Part I Getting started
• Part II Going deeper
• Part III Learning across and beyond the school
• Part IV Developing and sharing practice
• Appendix