Evidence-based decision making:

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Evidence-based decision making Micro issues

• Rama Mathew
• Delhi University, Delhi

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Micro issues in evaluation

• Evaluation in education functions at two levels
• Macro level decisions about pass/fail,
  attendance, teacher-pupil ratio, mid-day meals,
  teacher qualifications etc.
• Product oriented, high-stakes, summative
• Micro level how are students progressing in the
  classroom? The kind of support needed based on
  feedback
• Process oriented, low stakes, formative

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Why we need to do FA

• FA supports and assists learning it provides
  feedback and correctives at each stage in the
  teaching-learning process
• FA can tell what students know and can do, and
  can do with some difficulty and therefore
  instruction can be modified accordingly

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Who is involved in FA?

• The teacher and students
• Because both are part of the teaching-learning
  process
• If students are to develop into lifelong,
  independent, self-directed learners, and take
  ownership of their learning, they need to be
  included. This way they will be motivated to
  learn.

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FA is assessment for learning

• Assessment for learning (AfL)
• Assessment of learning (AL)
• Monitoring learner progress is AfL

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What AfL is not

• More frequent summative assessments
• All testing a teacher does in the classroom
• Filling up forms on how good each student is on
  various dimensions
• Labelling certain students or excluding them from
  future learning experiences
• A test. FA produces not a score but an insight
  into student understanding
• Something that interferes with students learning

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What is learning?

• Learning occurs when students are thinking,
  problem solving, constructing, transforming,
  investigating, creating, analyzing, making
  choices, organizing, deciding, explaining,
  talking and communicating, sharing, representing,
  predicting, interpreting, assessing, reflecting,
  taking responsibility, exploring, asking,
  answering, recording, gaining new knowledge, and
  applying that new knowledge to new situations.
  
  Cameron, Tate, Macnaughton and Politano 1998,
  p.6)

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Definition of AfL

• Assessment for Learning is part of everyday
  practice by students, teachers and peers that
  seeks, reflects upon and responds to information
  from dialogue, demonstration and observation in
  ways that enhance ongoing learning.
• (AfL experts, Dunedin New Zealand, 2009)

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Keeping Learning on Track (ETS 2010)

• The idea is of students and teachers to use
  evidence .to adapt teaching and learning to meet
  immediate learning needs minute-by-minute and
  day-by-day

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Any assessment involves four activities

• Designing opportunities to gather evidence
• Collecting evidence
• Interpreting it
• Acting on interpretations

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Key strategies for doing AfL

• Sharing learning expectations (clarifying
  intentions, and criteria for success)
• Questioning (to engineer effective classroom
  discussions, questions that elicit evidence of
  learning and making inferences from that
  evidence)
• Feedback
• Self-and peer-assessment

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Processes involved in FA
self-/peer and teacher assmnt through spontaneous
and planned obsrvn of individual students/pairs/
groups, asking questions, maintaining records of
how students progress from one activity to another
Assess status of goals
Present state of learners
ability
Action taken by teacher/ learner to bridge the
gap
Set new goals by negotiating
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• Monitoring progress is research-based teaching
  (Stenhouse 1975141) and is the business of the
  teacher.

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Challenges and issues

• Assessment reforms would have to address all
  three components simultaneously, i.e. teaching,
  learning and assessment. A vision of a
  whole-curriculum reform should be conceptualised,
  concretised and supported.
• Physical and infrastructural facilities

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Challenges and issues

• Need for orientation in pre-service and
  in-service teacher workshops to the
  characteristics of FA and how it could be
  translated into classroom processes
• Teachers need time and space to develop a sense
  of ownership and to articulate and critique their
  own implicit constructs and interpretations.

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Future directions

• Case studies to be carried out that look closely
  at what strategies teachers adopt to monitor
  progress, students language learning processes
  and the kind of fine-tuned support they need,
  especially low-achievers.

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Future directions

• There are very few research-based, empirical
  accounts by teachers themselves of how they
  monitor students progress in their classrooms
  it is usually the assessment expert who does
  research.

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Can all learning be evidence based?

• Not everything that can be counted counts, and
  not everything that counts can be counted.
• Albert Einstein

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References

• Assessing ESL in South Asia. In A. J. Kunnan
  (Ed.) The Companion to Language Assessment,
  California John Wiley Sons, Inc.,2014, DOI
  10.1002/9781118411360. wbcla104.
• Monitoring progress in the classroom. In A. J.
  Kunnan (Ed.) The Companion to Language
  Assessment, California John Wiley Sons, Inc.,
  2014, DOI 10.1002/9781118411360.wbcla073
  (Co-author M. Poehner).

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Thank you mathewrama_at_gmail.com