Category: Assessment

In his TED Talk titled How to escape education’s Death Valley, Sir Ken Robinson uses the Californian Death Valley as a metaphor to describe the effect of learning conditions on education. Death Valley is considered the driest, hottest part of America where nothing grows until once in a blue moon, mass rainfall floods the landscape awakening dormant seeds that come to life and sprout and bloom into a magnificent valley of life. Robinson says that teaching is a creative profession, not a delivery system, and that by allowing the proper conditions of possibilities, expectations, opportunities, relationships, innovations and creativity, learning is as inevitable as life in Death Valley after a downpour. Education that is narrowly focused, restricted, and conformed, however, will dry the learning from the education leaving behind a dormant arid scape of monotony. It is a great metaphor because at some point in time, every one of us has experienced curiosity, the spark the drives true learning, the engine of achievement, the water that brings the desert to life. Nevertheless, sparking curiosity in a collective of individual learners in a curricular framework that provides systematic assessment and reporting to bureaucratic officials in charge of monetary distribution can be a hurdle.

Before getting into curriculums, I would like to consider the differences and values of summative and formative assessment. Formative assessment is commonly an informal and ongoing tool used by teachers orient themselves to where a student is in their learning process. This style of assessment is not meant to be high stakes, but to diagnose the strengths and weakness of both the learner and the instruction so that the education is purposeful and effective. Conversely, summative assessment may be thought of as the formal cumulative outcome of learning intentions following instruction—the assessed product of what the student knows after the learning has occurred. These assessment types are often modeled in the K-12 education system, particularly in high schools as I have come to observe through my practicum experience this past month. The generalized model for what I have observed follows the similar process of presenting a lesson (full of required content based on curriculum), a work block (where students are given time to work on assignments, tasks, practice problems, quizzes, etc.), and finally a unit test that tests the important material of the unit. During the lesson portions, where content is transmitted, the teachers are constantly performing formative assessment by posing questions to the class and judging their answers and understanding, observing levels of attention and body language during instruction, and continuously communicating with students individually or as a collective. During work blocks, students have the time and resources to engage with the material and discover their own deficiencies in their learning; furthermore, they are able to ask the teachers for help or further explanation on individual levels. The teachers use this time for formative assessment as well, noting which students are struggling or motoring through content, so they may make individual adjustments and additionally use the student’s work as a metric for where their understandings are at. Formative assessment also helps orient the teachers to where discontinuities of learning stem from—if no one in the class appears to grasp the material following a lesson, perhaps corrections should be focused on the instruction, not the individual learner’s inability to understand, or visa versa. After the teacher makes appropriate efforts in mitigating discrepancies discovered through formative assessment, summative assessment is issued through the form of a written test so they may show their understanding in a standardized format.

Personally, I see clear advantages and short comings in the way formative and summative assessment are being used in the classes I’ve observed this year and these observations are independent of the educator’s abilities to perform effectively within this framework. On one hand, I see a written unit test being a summative tool that tells the teacher how well students write tests in a particular format; this could be completely independent of what students know or understand because it leaves out human variables like whether a student was bullied that day, whether they ate breakfast that morning, whether they memorized the material or understood it, and so on. Furthermore, we know from behavioural psychology and studies like the Candle Problem, that high-stake, extrinsic rewards and punishments (contingent motivators), like grades, restrict creativity and dulls cognition by narrowing focus. This phenomenon may be contrary to expectations, however, it does tell us that the model of testing, when based on contingent motivators, is best fitted to assess rote or mechanical tasks and that the act of testing creative and critical thought with contingent motivators is in itself a fallacy for achievement. On the other hand, I see an obvious need for summative assessment in that there must be some metric that provides structured feedback into the effectiveness of the educational process and the ability of the learner. But if the curriculum is content driven, then how would one possibly assess a student’s learning that may include creativity and critical thinking, while not narrowing focus through contingent motivators, without getting rid of summative assessment? Change the curriculum.

Curriculum may be thought of as the scaffolding that supports the space where learning can be explored by guided and planned intention. Many models of curriculum exist, and I suspect many of us have knowingly or unknowingly been subjected to several of them. Academic post-secondary institutions often model their curriculum with a syllabus which might include a timeline of headings describing content to be covered through a series of lectures or assignments and eventually leading to a form of summative assessment like a final exam. The largest shortcomings I have experienced with this style of curriculum is that it does not require the learner or teacher to be curious, critical, or even knowledgeable about the body of knowledge being transmitted. For example, I attended a course in genetics during my undergraduate degree where I observed a professor reading directly off PowerPoint slides borrowed from a different professor who had previously taught the course; furthermore, these slides were adapted from a the textbook manufacturer. As slides were read off to the class during lectures, questions from students would occasionally arise around the material and more often than not, students and their questions were deferred to asking again after class unless the answer to the questions happened to be within the slides being read. I will never forget the lecture following our second midterm. The syllabus stated that we would cover a third of the content in lectures before the first midterm, another third before the second midterm, and the final third before the cumulative final exam. Well, due to poor time management, the lecture following the second midterm landed on the final week of classes meaning there were two lectures left to complete 33.3% of the content, and with the miraculous rate capability of pressing the next button on PowerPoint presenter, we were able to cover all the material in the course and endure the final exam that upcoming Saturday morning. In this model, there was no need for us to be curious, there was no need for the professor to hold any knowledge in the subject, and there was no need to attend lectures (because we can all read). There was no formative assessment (as even questions went unanswered), and the summative assessment tested our ability to rote memorize words from slides. When I reflect on that experience, I realize that although the quality of education I received in that course was lacking, to be polite, it easily followed the requirements within the bounds of the curricular model. The information we needed was transmitted to us via prepared slides and we were assessed on our ability to reproduce the content, end of story.

In contrast, during my undergraduate honours thesis, I experienced a curricular model that was far closer to curriculum as praxis. Praxis as a curriculum can be conceptualized as the action of engagement in learning and situation which embodies qualities leading to human emancipation. On praxis, Mark K. Smith writes that “[i]t is the action of people who are free, who are able to act for themselves.” In my honours thesis, I was given that exact gift of freedom—to act and engage in the learning because it mattered and meant something. The research and topic of my thesis was collaboratively decided by myself and my PI, Dr. Sarah Gray. Afterword’s, I was given an intimidating level of autonomy with high stake responsibility in how I used my time and accomplished my work. For example, I was permitted to purchase thousands of dollars’ worth of laboratory equipment and materials on Dr. Gray’s account, but the onus was on me to give purposeful and precise reasoning for every decision I made. As a time commitment, there was a minimum requirement of hours I was to spend in the lab per week (although how and when I allocated my time was up to me), but honestly that never came into my consideration because I basically lived in lab. When performing biochemical and molecular biological experiments, I learned through peers in the lab, reading literature, and trial and error; there was no manual, no instruction, and total responsibility for my work. Dr. Gray had lab meetings once per week where she would sit with a notebook and rapidly absorb and assess where we were in our experiments and work—it was always an intimidating experience because she had high expectations for us and we were highly motivated to provide something useful in the group. That was her method of formative assessment because the quality of our work, efficiency, and level of understanding was exposed weekly in what we presented and how we answered her questions. Furthermore, we were constantly humbled by the little we really knew when she applied her wealth of professional knowledge to our child-like scientific minds—we respected her. The work was by far the hardest and most valuable period of my undergraduate degree. I engaged in the work to a nearly obsessive level because it mattered to me, because it was my own and because it was part of something greater than myself. My engagement was also tied to my respect for Dr. Gray and my peers in the lab; we were contributing to a body of scientific knowledge that would contribute possible solutions to the obesity epidemic and thus the work easily translated to the betterment of human emancipation. The summative assessment of my thesis was centered around my research proposal, the experimental work throughout the course, the final thesis document, and a final seminar where I presented my work to a panel of scientists with appropriate specializations. The onus of the research proposal was on me to create an argument that would permit me to even conduct research. The experimental works were my decisions, and the quality was what I judged to be good enough—after all I was the one who would be defining my work in the end. The final paper was my creation, my argument, my work, and my findings. Finally, my defense seminar was the manifestation of all the work I accomplished and the story it told transmitted through my personality in front of far more qualified scientists. The summative assessment was nothing like a written test, but an extremely high stakes judgement of a years’ worth of knowing, doing, and understanding in a guided framework full of autonomy and creative thinking.

The current BC curriculum, which I am being trained under, can be modeled as praxis if implemented appropriately. It is modeled around three concepts: Know, the content of which students are expected to know; Do, the curricular competencies of which students are expected to do; and Understand, the big ideas of which students are expected to understand. The core competencies are proficiencies developed for students to engage in deeper learning at an intellectual, personal, social, and emotional level. They include critical and creative thinking, communication, social and personal awareness, and responsibility competencies. The Big Ideas are the generalized principles that students will understand—the theory that can be applied to practice. And finally, the content is the stuff that students need to know but here, it is not centric to the curriculum as it was in my genetics class. I was fortunate to ask Dr. Christine Ho Younghusband how she would use the new curriculum when teaching something like adding and subtracting fractions (a content item I figured would be difficult to apply core competencies like critical and creative thinking to—how many ways can you creatively add fractions anyway…). Brilliantly, she said that the content—that is the fraction operation—was not the focus, but a vehicle for applying critical thinking. It made perfect sense after she said that because in the real world, we don’t go around collecting information (adaptations) that may one day come in handy for something; we go around encountering problems and adapt based on what that problem is. So, a problem is not the ability to learn fractions, the problem is a real thing that fractions can solve when critically and creatively applying them in the solution! With this model students can engage with their learning on a more personalized level and develop an education that is directly associated to things that matter like acknowledging relationships to place and community or why taking on responsibility has value in developing moral identity and purpose. Allowing students to discover and engage in their learning is what I experienced in my undergraduate honours thesis and it truly contained the element of human emancipation that is so central to curriculum as praxis. Having personal experience and understanding of how this model can potentiate learning gives me a framework for application as a future educator, and I must say, it’s exciting.