Effective Formative Assessment in English
‘Catch up’ is a phrase which has been on everyone lips since March and schools were forced to close their doors to all but the most vulnerable of students or children of key workers. This phrase has raised a number of questions as we consider exactly what they are ‘catching up’ on, especially with the exams content and process being unclear, and when we think about exactly what elements may have or may not have been missed in the last few months.
There is no doubt that however robust your remote learning package will have been there will have been some students who may not have been able to access this for a myriad of reasons. Furthermore, identifying exactly what has ‘stuck’ in terms of learning, what may have been mis-learnt and what may not have been learnt at all is a difficult and delicate thing to ascertain, especially if we don’t want to overwhelm students, and teachers, with formal assessment after formal assessment.
This has led to me looking at formative assessment in a number of the network meetings I ran over the summer, including a combined session with Maths and Science for subject leaders across all subjects, and to return to this for the NQT/RQT session which I ran on 13th October.
In this session we explored three main ideas:
- What is formative assessment and why it matters?
- What constitutes effective formative assessment?
- And what practical approaches could we use in English?
Most importantly we came back to the idea of purpose. Effective assessment should have a clear purpose (what are we looking for?) and reveal some things which we would not know without doing them. They are supposed to offer up some surprises. It is important to take time to plan for that.
With the first question we looked at the idea of formative assessment and considered what our understanding was. Formative assessment isn’t just the means of identifying what students know and can do. Instead it is ways we can understand the learning which has taken place, including where misconceptions may be, and consider what our next steps may be. We returned to one of my favorite quotes which came from David Ausubel, an Educational Psychologist, in 1968. He said:
If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle I would say: The most important single factor influencing learning is what a learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him (or her) accordingly.
This is precisely what good formative assessment does. It sounds simple, but as Graham Nuthall’s excellent book The Hidden Lives of Learners shows us, knowing exactly what learning has taken place, and perhaps even more importantly, how our students got to that learning, is complex and difficult to make visible. Often, we rely on proxies, such as what students have written in their books which may not represent exactly what they understand if wrapped in a layer of literacy issues or problems with academic writing. In longer assessments like this, students are often juggling quite a number of concepts so identifying exactly what they do and don’t know can be difficult.
This is where I urge people to rethink how they are approaching formative assessment. This should be what we are continuously doing throughout our lessons, not only formally but in the informal queues we pick up from students. That students who has their pen down, perhaps gazing into space, might be a student who may have got lost in their learning and we pick up on those kinds of things constantly. The micro interactions we have in our classrooms as continuously feeding us information about what is happening with our students and the more we are aware of that, the more we can respond to this.
For formative assessment to be effective though we need to really drill down into the most important ideas which could present a barrier to our students. Hinge questions are an important tool in this. These often focus on misconceptions and threshold concepts, those points in learning where students can become either misdirected, hold false learning already, or are required to really understand in order to move forward. They are often multiple choice, with carefully chosen distractors to explore why someone may have come to the wrong conclusion.
One of the participants identified word classes as being both a barrier to her students’ ability to analyze poetry and other texts. This could be an important focus then for the hinge questions in her class should then focus on ensuring that understanding of this concept is becoming embedded, especially when our language becomes tricky and we find what would more commonly be used as a verb, suddenly taking on the role of an adjective. Dickens is, well, a Dickens for doing this. It will also be important to check that misconceptions or unhelpful definitions are eradicated, so for example the ‘a verb is a doing word’ which only covers a limited definition, can be hard to move on from, so hinge questions, returned to regularly will be a way to address this, along with reteaching for those who cling to this or can’t see beyond it.
Of course, there are many ways you can formative assess in the class, using everything from mini whiteboards, plicker and other voting systems, rag cards, hands up and verbal responses. For hinge questions, it is really important that we check that ALL students have understood this, otherwise the learning that follows is likely to stall. This raised an interesting question from one of the participants: what do you do it one student doesn’t get it? It is easier when you have a group in the class who don’t understand as you will reteach the concept, reinforcing it for those who may have known, but may be insecure. If all others have the idea but one doesn’t it won’t be appropriate to pause the learning completely. It might be that a recap from the class could be enough to move that one student on, with perhaps a few students explaining their thinking. However, if this still doesn’t work, you have some options: either make the opportunity to work with that student one to one, set an alternative task for this student (something which is more possible if you have planned the hinge questions) or get the student to the point where they can move forward, but provide homework which will cover this. Definitely make sure you revisit it with them in the next few lessons and continue to circle back to the concept to ensure you are making the most of the forgetting curve and spaced practice for all students.
There are also other things you want to know about the learning, so following up hinge questions with probing questions, more open questions which allow students to explore their thinking in detail, is another way to formatively assess. When we ask students these questions it is again important to consider what are we going to do with this information? What are we trying to find out? Discussion activities, including think, pair and share, can be really effective in encouraging students to articulate their thinking and as they do so for you to draw some conclusions. Circulating the room whilst discussion is happening will be a good way to identify again the misconceptions and ensure you can address them.
There are also other things you want to know about the learning, so following up hinge questions with probing questions, more open questions which allow students to explore their thinking in detail, is another way to formatively assess. When we ask students these questions it is again important to consider what are we going to do with this information? What are we trying to find out? Discussion activities, including think, pair and share, can be really effective in encouraging students to articulate their thinking and as they do so for you to draw some conclusions. Circulating the room whilst discussion is happening will be a good way to identify again the misconceptions and ensure you can address them.
Circulating the room is also a good way to formatively assess, but it is again important to consider what you are circulating for and consider how you will respond. As with all formative assessment, once you have gathered information it is what you do with it that matters most.
During this time of Covid measures, circulating can happen in some classes more easily than others. One of the teachers in the session had been getting students to take pictures of their work which allowed her to virtually circulate. Where you have access, Google Docs can be another mechanism which would allow the kind of instant feedback on what your students know and can do and allow you to adapt as needed to the whole class or individual.
Despite a few technical difficulties with participants sound, it was another good opportunity to work with a range of practitioners and I hope all were able to take something useful away from the session.
The next NQT session is going to look at effective retrieval practice in English and is on 17 November, 4.00pm to 5.00pm via Zoom. To sign up to go to CPD online here.
Further reading
The Hidden Lives of Learners by Graham Nuthall
Inside the Black Box by Dylan William and P.J. Black
Making Good Progress by Daisy Christodoulou
