D.Lambert | Seconday | Science
Watch this scene from a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy first. The rest of the blog won’t make any sense without it.
I love this video. One of the limitations of the scientific method is our inability to interpret results. I used to show this video as a mock example of this. The result says 42 but nobody knows what that is supposed to mean a.k.a. they cannot interpret the result. I stopped using the video when, for two years running, my fifth years would answer the question, “what is a limitation of the scientific method?” with the answer "42". Broke my heart too many times. But let’s stick with this video and explore how it offers us a way to understand the assessments we use.
My favourite definition of assessment comes from Dylan Wiliam, who I think he credits Lee Conbach for, but it is that assessment is a procedure for drawing inferences. When I heard him discuss this definition in The Filing the Pail Podcast with Greg Ashman it finally clicked with me that assessments are not “physical thing”. An assessment is a process and what the assessment gives us is information. What we choose to do with that information is what helps us decide how we proceed. Well it should...
What I rarely see in CPD, or in discussions with other teachers, is how we respond to the information we get from assessments. I attended CPD recently that focused on the importance of assessment in the everyday lesson. Not once was it discussed on how we respond the information we obtain from the student answers. This is what many fail to understand. You can assess all you like but unless you consider a) the quality of the assessment and b) the response to the information then ultimately you are wasting your time and the students’ time. Every example given to us on the day I thought was poor to bad. I wasn’t disagreeing for the sake of it, I was disagreeing because the example provided wasn’t an effective procedure for getting information from students and therefore I wouldn’t be able to respond effectively to that information. I need to know they know it, so I need to know how I know they know it.
If the people in the video asked the computer a cleaner question then maybe they would have gotten a cleaner answer than 42. They can’t interpret 42. It was the right answer to the question, but the question was poor. A student can get 100% on a project if they follow the success criteria to the letter, but doesn’t mean they know anything about the content. They may as well has said 42 to you as you can’t tell if that 100% means they know anything. 100% on a poster doesn’t make it clear on what they don’t know.
Assessment is too important to get wrong. Assessment should not be about variety of assessment types. Assessments should be about getting valid and reliable information as effectively as possible on the content at hand. This applies to all aspects of education, the sound decisions you make should be based on sound assessments. So next time you plan an assessment, or are exposed to a new assessment idea, just ask yourself, “will this tell me what I need to know or will this just tell me 42?”