UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN
Grant Wiggins and Jay Mc Tighe
Chapter 7
Thinking like an assessor
“How do I know they really know?”
Well, another important task to carry out: To assess. As all of us know what assessment is, I’d like to start briefly defining this crucial and complex term. According to the author, assessment is “the act of determining the extent to which the desired results are on the way to being achieved and to what extent they have been achieved” (p.6). In other words, we need clear evidence of understanding and we are supposed to gather it somehow. We as teachers sometimes fear assessment and evaluation because we don’t understand it and, therefore, cannot gain control over it. Somehow we have to decide what students must know and how they are to demonstrate knowledge and understanding. And all this process leads us to wonder a couple of questions: How well are students learning? How effectively are teachers teaching? And more importantly, we as teachers must be clear about the following questions: To what extent do the assessments provide valid, reliable and sufficient measures of the desired results? What will students do to show me they understand? What is the most appropriate assessment(s) method? So as we can see, many questions emerge from this very “simple” word that must be crystal clear for us as teachers, and a very general definition of the purpose of assessment has to do with the documents we gather regarding the students’ movement from knowledge and skills to critical reasoning and communication and that it informs instruction and lesson design. Regarding this last word DESING, we teachers tend to be “activity designers” rather than “assessors”, which is crucial to be clear about. And here is a checklist to notice this difference.
Backwards design (assessor) vs. traditional design (activity designer)
Assessor’s design:
Ø Requires sufficient and revealing evidence of understanding
Ø Distinguishes between those who really understand and those who don’t.
Ø Has distinguishing work criteria
Ø Checks for predetermined misunderstandings
Activity designer’s design:
Ø Looks for interesting and engaging activities on topic.
Ø Identifies available resources and materials.
Ø Thinks about what students will be doing in and out of class and what assignments will be given
Ø Wonders if the activities worked – why or why not
We need to know the learner’s thought process along with their answers
Sorry, but I forgot to mention that this relevant checklist was found in a Wiggins' ppt and I posted it only to share information.
ReplyDeleteMy Dear,
ReplyDeleteYour questions reminded me about the final exams at school: as results were horrible in most of the subjects under that system (English, unfortunately, wasn't included)and what the school used to do, instead of doing a thorough analysis or do remedial activity to improve students' results was to lower the scale to 40%!!!! In this case, neither the assesors nor the activity designers performed well their roles, and there was not a further or deep analysis of what the main issue was. Furthermore, by the end of the year, the final average was bonused, i.e. those who obtained over 5.0 got extra points...
The actual understanding of those children was near (almost) non existant. A serious process of questioning and analysis the instruments they are using has to be analysed and thought through in order to make a standard evaluation into a tool which provides and assures long term learning and real understanding, in an objective test, and in a week with a different test every day. Would that be possible?
Angiers,
ReplyDeleteWe only need interest to achieve that, and as I mentioned in Paloma's blog, we need also to respect our students, and take into account their strengths, weaknesses, rhythms. Plan lessons, and not come and see what we're going to do on the spot. The loss of control of this just make you hesitate, be unclear, and not channel you students on a correct or expected way.
xxx
Claudio
Dear Angie,
ReplyDeleteTotally agree with you when saying we tend to be activity designers rather than assessors and it's quite sad, since we aren't commited in a long term process with our students. what we are doing is to work unit after unit as if they were loose pieces of information, therefore there's no way we make our students' life easy when trying to transfer those pieces to be able to use them.
It is a fact: we, teachers, regardless of the subject we teach, tend to be activity designers rather than assessors. But who is to blame? Certainly it is our fault if we fail to be good assessors, but in many universities undergraduates are not trained in assessment. Therefore, in our teaching practices we only worry about doing our best as designers. This should not be an excuse though, we have to think as assessors. What Wiggins offered us with his Backward Design is a chance to think about our final objectives and evaluation as a starting point.
ReplyDeleteDear Colleagues,
ReplyDeletePlease, let us don't be that demanding... yet! I agree with Claudio and Lorena, but I also believe we are learning little by little. Think of this; two years ago, some of us (count me in) knew nothing about these topics. One semester ago, we were learning (in Mary Jane's) to be very critical toward our own teaching practices, something that is difficult to do and now we are not only supposed to be critical teachers but also we have to behave as assessors... Too many concepts and ideas that may confuse us. It is better to taste, chew, and then swallow them so we can finally take them into practice.
Greetings!
Dear Angi,
ReplyDeleteClearly, assessment is an issue, moreover at the moment to put it into practice. As you say, we usually think as designers and not as assessors what makes the assessment issue even more difficult thus we are not accomplishing the whole task. Hard, don’t you think? “We need clear evidence of understanding and we are supposed to gather it somehow”. I totally agree we must have control over this practice otherwise it will be impossible “to what our students know”. To do so we must gather the sufficient and revealing evidence of understanding in order to contribute to the final goal: transferring.
Hi Angie!
ReplyDeleteI liked what you wrote about losing control. And here is the contradiction, because some teachers believe that using traditional assessment they have control on the situation; however, if we really dared to implement a backward design, we would be controlling many more variables than in the traditional method. When we have our goals clear, we are also clear about the expected outcome, and so, we plan in accordance. It is just a matter of logics.
I agree with your idea that we think like designers rather than assessors.
ReplyDeleteMost of us have focused only on the negative aspects of each chapter we have read, therefore this time I would like to be optimistic about our current scenario.
It is true that we don't think like assessors and our assessment concept is very limited, however we musn't forget that we have certainly made some changes in education, such as, thinking of innovative activities to motivate our students or, as Felipe mentioned, being critical toward our own teaching practices.
Do you remember how the Chilean Education was twenty years ago?
I remember it was horrible. Motivation was an unknown word, teachers never thought about their own practices and the classroom was a kind of military dictatorship.
So we should try not to be so hard on ourselves, we have to keep on moving forwards to achieve more improvements and changes.