The assessment issue seems to be on a cycle of hotting up and cooling down! Currently on the ‘hot’ side is APP, and FFT. These acronyms are surprisingly related!

Oh well, what’s next to make me grumpy…?

Shameless plug for assessment book:

Well, finally, and so long has passed that I’d almost forgotten, and will have changed my mind lots, but OUP have sent me today a copy of my book on assessment, which means it must now be available. Full details at http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/music/series/musicineducationseries/omues/9780193362895.do?sortby=bookTitleAscend, and for a sneak preview

http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.com/pdf/13/9780193362895.pdf

I must say the concentration of focussing my thoughts has led me to some more questions, rather than any answers, and doubtless I’ll be sharing those on this site at some point!

Cheers for now

I want to advertise the fact that we have funding for a full-time PhD studentship in Music Education at KS3 at Birmingham City University. Details can be found on the website at www.bcu.ac.uk/researchbursaries . This is a rare opportunity, so if you know of someone who might wish to apply, please point them at this. Thanks. Martin Fautley - Reader in Music Education, BCU

Been a bit quiet on the blogging front, sorry. Been a bit busy with the proofs of my assessment book. Printer’s proof codes, now there’s an arcane area! (Sorry about the personal trivia, but it is a blog!) Anyhow, back on the more immediate assessment front, it seems ages ago now, but it was nice chatting to people at the NAME conference in York, and hearing about all sorts of issues that people are having in schools. I am developing a hypothesis that there is emerging a view from SLTs (or whatever they’re called this week) of second guessing Ofsted, and doing a little bit (or a lot) more. We are getting public rumblings now from QCDA about APP and assessment matters generally, and the following statement is becoming widely known:

 

“When to assess

Suitable timing for periodic assessment may be decided centrally as part of a whole school assessment policy or in consultation with colleagues. To carry out a periodic assessment a teacher needs to be confident that the learner has completed a wide enough range of work in different contexts to give a reliable picture of their overall performance. There also needs to be evidence that pupils can transfer the skills they have learnt. Periodic assessment should ideally be timed for when the information will be put to best use. This might be when the school requires teacher assessment judgements to be reported to parents, for example. Generally, periodic assessment is likely to be appropriate at two or three points in the year.”

Source: The (amazingly long so cut-and-paste) link is:

http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-stages-3-and-4/assessment/assessment_and_the_curriculum/day-to-day-periodic-and-transitional-assessment/Periodic/index.aspx?return=/key-stages-3-and-4/assessment/assessment_and_the_curriculum/day-to-day-periodic-and-transitional-assessment/index.aspx%3Freturn%3D/key-stages-3-and-4/assessment/assessment_and_the_curriculum/index.aspx%253Freturn%253D/key-stages-3-and-4/assessment/index.aspx

 

Yeah yeah yeah. That’s about as ferocious as a candy floss. SLTs will read that and say, “yes, but we go further, and….” And we’ll be back with too much. But it is very welcome nonetheless, and I'll be having laminated copies made for teachers to wave around in meetings.

My concern (this week) is that assessment is there to serve a purpose. Boud (2000) writes of assessments having to do ‘double duty’, when they serve more than one purpose, and in music I get the feeling that the primary purpose is to feed the data machine, and the secondary purpose is to improve pupils learning. I think that a key question that needs asking is “who is the assessment data for?” and from there the most appropriate assessments can be constructed. At the moment I fear we are in danger of producing inauthentic assessments, which have little validity.

 

A lot of people have accused me of being negative, or of being needlessly judgmental. I am concerned that all of the energies being funnelled into inappropriate assessments could be better spent elsewhere. If assessment was that obvious and straightforward we’d all know how to do it by now!

Anyhow, back to marking assignments!

Reference

Boud, D. (2000), 'Sustainable Assessment: rethinking assessment for the learning society', Studies in Continuing Education, 22 (2), 151-67.

 

 

As is often the case, it was a remark by a colleague at work the other day (thanks Ted!) that set me thinking about progression (again). What is it that makes the music a Y9 kid produces different from the music of a Y7? They’ve had 2 (or 3) years more in school, after all, so we should be able to tell something! What this made me think back to was those units of work which said “these can be done in any order”, which were trendy when I was young(er). This assumes that nothing happens in those three years. It also gives rise to what I now think of as ‘lazy differentiation’, that is differentiation by outcome. I think this is lazy because it will always be true! All music projects will differentiate by outcome anyway, unless they’re so closed it’s not worth bothering about. Anyhow, back to the plot…what should/can/might develop over the three years of KS3 that means when we listen to a piece of music that a Y9 has composed…etc?

And, sadly, I must say that in many cases the answer is ‘not a lot’! I see KS3 programmes of study which look like a Cooks tour of world heritage sites, dashing from Indonesia (Gamelan, usually), via Africa (as an undifferentiated single type of music, even though Egypt, Botswana, and Nigeria are all different), thence to South America (Salsa and/or Samba), then a quick stop in C18 Europe (for theme and variations), before landing up on the shores of early C20 New Orleans for the Blues. This ‘Grand Tour’ approach to music learning is all very nice, and inclusive in a 'steel pans and samosas' sort of way, but it can end up being a bit like one of those awful travelogues in 60s Technicolor “…and as the sun sinks slowly over the swaying palm trees/pyramids/palaces/slums we bid a fond farewell to….” well, to any sort of progress really. Let’s now do all the things we’ve just done in a different culture/place/time. Which is all very well but when you’ve only got two xylophones and a tin can it all ends up sounding the same anyway.

So what can we do about it? Robert Bunting (elsewhere on this site) citing Ofsted has written about doing more of less. Maybe that’s an answer. Because whatever it is that develops during developmental education, it would be nice to hear it evidenced in musical results!

I suspect this will be the first of many musings about development…or maybe that should be grumblings. Is there a University in Tunbridge Wells…disgruntled of Perry Barr doesn’t have the same ring about it. (Perry Barr is in Birmingham, for the uninitiated, David Ashworth says he can tell where people are from when they peruse this site, so beware…!)

One step forward – one step back

It’s been a funny week! It must be because it’s near the end of the autumn term that everyone is tired, and so things seem to slip out unguarded! Thus I’ve read this week about formative assessment being totally confused with summative assessment, and being about telling pupils what NC level they are; I’ve heard teachers talking about formative assessment being demotivating; and then again I’ve had a conversation with a teacher about how important knowing what you’re looking for is when undertaking AfL. So, all in all, a funny old week.

So, I return to an earlier thought – is formative assessment really understood by all teachers? Maybe this needs asking carefully, as I don’t want to upset anyone! I’m not convinced that the NC levels haven’t got in the way of everything. Assessment managers asking for levels for this and that have clouded the issue. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have (for KS3) are NC levels, all assessment looks summative. (I know, I've used that metaphor, but it still needs hammering home [groan!])

This sounds like me banging on about more of the same, and maybe I need a holiday too, but whilst formative assessment is constantly being confused in this way, it does feel like paddling against the stream!

Oh well, only one week until the schools break up. Hopefully no-one will be asked to give their Carol Service an NC level!

Right, enough being grumpy for tonight!

Assessment – verb or noun?

I’m sure I’m going to get into trouble here with the linguists, but I have been thinking recently about assessment-as-process and assessment-as-subject. This isn’t a rehash of the old process-product dichotomy, because it’s a little more complex than that, I think.

The reason for this thought is that I often hear teachers say things like “we’re doing an assessment in 3 weeks time”. This has started to bother me, because: a) it implies that they never ‘do’ assessment otherwise, and b) that assessment has to planned for like a military campaign. I have ranted/wittered/worried about assessment in other blogs, so this one is going to be me thinking out loud, as it were, about this. As usual, I may exaggerate for clarity…!

I think that AfL is an ongoing process, and that teachers are doing it all the time, and they don’t need to save up their energies for 3 weeks time. I also think that many of the ‘assessment lessons’ I have seen are an utter yawn for many kids, as they involve them in not doing anything for most of the lesson, apart from their 5 minutes in the spotlight. What happens after their spotlight moment is often a sort of auction, as the teacher the says ‘good, that was a level four-point-five performance, and the kids then argue and say it was at least a 4.8, and then after some argy-bargy they all compromise on a 4.6, or whatever. It feels like “who’ll raise me a 4.6, going once….”. Then the kids go back to being bored, until about 30 minutes into the lesson when they need tying into their places to keep them there, whilst others go throught the same routine.

Why does it have to be like this? Because assessment has become the subject of the lesson. The music teacher feels they have to prove they are 'doing' assessment, and so they ape other subjects where this is the norm; the schools says, as I have heard, 'assessment can only arise from assessment tasks (or tests)'; or the teacher feels that they have to provide fodder for the data-gatherers. Is this assessment as noun? It is, I think, assessment-as-subject.

Assessment as process happens far less visibly, and whilst there is nothing wrong with celebrating the end of a unit with a performance, this has not become the raison d’etre of the learning. This involves teachers assessing as they go along, in order to help things get better in the future, this surely is what Assessment for learning is all about. Is this assessment as verb? Dunno. But it is a process, which happens over time.

So, that’s one of the many assessment themes that’s been worrying me this week!

Bye!

Jenny Farn has posted some interesting and thought-provoking comments in her response to my blog on assessment managers. Essentially I think there are four issues from her comments that I would like to address. These are:

1. The place of AfL in music
2. The nature of AfL (in music, and generally)
2. The ubiquitousness of NC levels
3. The role of external agents

In a way these are probably too many for one blog posting, and it’s been a long week (including discussions with the TDA about AfL!), so I’ll just ‘do’ the second of these now. (I’ll point out that this is a blog, not a journal article, so I will deliberately, and provocatively, oversimplify for simplicity.)

I’m starting with the second because … I feel like it!

I wrote about AfL in my previous posting, and I think, in many cases, that the situation has been compounded by what I think of as the misunderstanding of AfL. This is because AfL has been confused with AofL, and the two have become conflated in the minds of many people, including those in very senior positions.

What has happened is that teachers have moved away from the early guidance on formative assessment, where it was about improving pupil learning, to a position where formative assessment means giving something a level, ie a summative assessment, and then telling (yes, I mean telling) the pupil how to get better. This goes against the Key Stage 3 strategy’s own guidance, where it states that assessment for learning should be  “…embedded in a view of teaching and learning of which it is an essential part” (DfES, 2002). What we are seeing here is teacher conceptualisation of formative assessment which manifests itself solely as a series of summative assessments. In other words teachers have changed “…their own on-going assessment into a series of ‘mini’ assessments each of which is essentially summative in character” (Harlen & James, 1997, p365).

This is not necessarily surprising, The only currency that matters in schools is summative data – is NC levels. To pursue the metaphor, It’s no good holding Euros if the local currency is Dollars. Or, to switch metaphors entirely, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything gets treated like a nail. This is what happened. It’s NC levels that matter for our league tables, NC levels are assessment, so assessment produces NC levels, so AfL (because it has assessment in the title) must produce NC levels, so these are what we want, therefore AfL should be used to get better NC levels. See the slippery slope, the weasel words?

I’ve recently been evaluating creative learning projects, and these are exactly the dilemmas teachers had, the same as music teachers face daily. NC levels (nails) weren’t meant for complex engineering projects (even meccano sets didn’t have nails!) so it’s no wonder they can’t cope! The NC levels were meant to summarise (hence summative) attainment at certain key points. To use them for anything else is unhelpful.

Anyhow, I think that’s enough words for bit of bloggage! Well, a bit of a rant really, more doubtless to follow!

And, because I am true Academic at heart, even my rants have to be referenced properly:

DfES (2002) Training Materials for the Foundation Subjects, London, DfES.
Harlen, W. & James, M. (1997) Assessment and Learning: differences and relationships between formative and summative assessments. Assessment in Education, 4, 3, 365-79.