Professional Practice
Standard 5 - Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Reflective commentary
This standard is concerned with assessing, interpreting and reporting on all aspects of learning, providing constructive and specific feedback to students and moderating assessment in grade level teams. In addition to this there are often subject specific requirements for assessment that need to be considered.
I have had varied experiences with the range of assessment methods required in an effective teaching / learning / assessment / reflection cycle. Teachers need to constantly gather information about their students, including anecdotal records. I have conducted detailed diagnostic assessment and forward planning for English with a year 3 class, an assignment for which I received a high distinction. On my final practical I utilised a range of assessment options, including focused observation, a selection of assessment products and informal interviews. I recognise the need to blend different assessment forms to profile a child accurately, and to inform future teaching. I also understand the vital importance of being active in the classroom, assisting children and providing specific feedback and encouragement.
This standard is concerned with assessing, interpreting and reporting on all aspects of learning, providing constructive and specific feedback to students and moderating assessment in grade level teams. In addition to this there are often subject specific requirements for assessment that need to be considered.
I have had varied experiences with the range of assessment methods required in an effective teaching / learning / assessment / reflection cycle. Teachers need to constantly gather information about their students, including anecdotal records. I have conducted detailed diagnostic assessment and forward planning for English with a year 3 class, an assignment for which I received a high distinction. On my final practical I utilised a range of assessment options, including focused observation, a selection of assessment products and informal interviews. I recognise the need to blend different assessment forms to profile a child accurately, and to inform future teaching. I also understand the vital importance of being active in the classroom, assisting children and providing specific feedback and encouragement.
During my recent teaching experience I gradually developed a full assessment and recording system that enabled me to begin to see where my learners were at, notice significant trends and respond to this information in my teaching. While this system will need improvement to provide further clarity on reporting outcomes, my system of a raw assessment record file, and a profiling folder for student evaluations worked well. This was identified in my practical as an area for me to work on, I did not manage to evaluate records data for all children, however I have established the structure required to allow effective assessment, feedback, recording, evaluation and input into further teaching objectives to occur.
I have made many improvements to my system through the valuable feedback of my mentor, including the need to specifically detail the learning objectives in my assessment record summaries (AITSL focus area 5.1, see below), rather than just rate whether children got the lesson. Additionally, providing a summary comment of the child's abilities after a series of learning experiences will aid in the evaluation and records phase later. I produced raw assessment records sheets for all subject areas taught including Mathematics, English, Science, Health, and History for two classes, marking all assessment pieces generated. One thing I quickly learned was that if we are not careful as teachers we can be swamped with marking! Over time I learned to be realistic with the number of assessment pieces I initiated, to allow me to cope, while still gaining comprehensive understanding of the level of learning occurring. I also strived to record and consider social / emotional / physical and behavioural anecdotal observations as seen below, but I will need to refine my method with this to ensure that it is practical when teaching my own class. Some good examples of successful assessment products are also provided below, a Science group work exploration on solids (Australian Academy of Science, 2013), and an English reading comprehension before and after web (Cameron, 2009). As with all assessment these pieces contained specific requirements to consider, mainly that both of these pieces were of group generated work. This lends a difficulty, particularly with Science assessment often based in research teams, in identifying what specific contributions and understandings were made by each child. This can be resolved via summative assessment at regular intervals, such as a good summative Mathematics test I created to assess my financial maths topic. In the cases below I simply assessed all students at the level set by the group, but through formative focused observation in future lessons, I could record explicit contributions. Another way I got around this issue with other group work was to ask children to write in separate coloured pens, and to write their names with that pen. Science assessment like the piece below can also form a difficulty as sometimes science questions are interpretive unless provided with clear definitions. In my final report it was noted that I gave excellent personalised feedback to each student when marking my work, and I also make a point of this during lesson time, being highly mobile within the class, and being available to my students and their learning. An example of my feedback to students on marking pieces is that I try to tailor encouraging responses to each child, and provide small rewards like appropriate stickers, and even the odd smiley face! Another great example of feedback to the class has been my creation and usage of assessment rubrics, indicating to the students the learning objectives upfront, and later the level of success they have achieved (AITSL focus area 5.2, see below). I feel that when provided real, specific and encouraging feedback, not just meaningless praise, student's appreciate this both in academic and emotional terms, which contributes to their understanding, self-esteem and me winning them over. A great expression of this was the significant effort made by students in one of my final pieces of work with them, a catalogue dubbed 'Awesome Toys!' a look into the purchasing devices used in such material. I recognise that I will need to align my evaluation and reporting file with school recording and reporting methods, and an example of my evaluation of a student's understanding of part of the English Curriculum is provided below (AITSL focus area 5.2, see below). I developed this recording template myself from scratch, and utilised a similar record for Mathematics. I have not provided the maths record sheet as I committed not to disseminate school programs or recording systems, although I have been given the privilege of using them myself if I need to. I realise that next year I will also need to take on the daunting requirements of NAPLAN assessment. Finally, I have decided not to include samples of what I perceive to be below standard work on this site as this is available to the public and my more computer literate students might be able to locate it. Action Plan My action plan for Standard 5, Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning, is to firstly improve my assessment and feedback system generally, linking with any school wide practices, and clarifying my method of deriving and recording raw assessment data. I will also look to limit the number of assessment pieces I create to a manageable number as I have come to realise that being at the end of the teaching process assessment can suffer (simply due to tiredness). I would like to learn the requirements of making consistent and comparable judgements through common assessment tasks and moderating across year levels, while also moderating against my own bias in my own assessment. I will need to learn more clearly how to interpret student data to inform my teaching. This will be a matter of sorting out routine practices with a mentor, and will no doubt be subject specific. I also will need to become familiar with the requirements for reporting at my new school. |