Stefanie Corcoran

OBJECTIVES OF THIS PRESENTATION

 to adopt a new assessment model that is fulfilled by an HPL learning environment
so we may shift to a 21st century educational model.

What we will cover:

 Assessment model created around an HPL environment
 Learning theory that fulfills this assessment model
 Educational practices that bring this learning theory to fruition
 RECAP ON HPL
What is High Performance Learning (HPL) What is Student-Centered Learning

 Creating learning experiences that  An instructional approach in which

help each learner achieve students influence the content,
optimum potential given her/his activities, materials, and pace of
individual interests, capabilities, learning.
and motivations  Places the student (learner) in
 environment the center of the learning process.
 curriculum  The instructor provides students
 assessments with opportunities to learn
independently, from one another,
 engagements
and coaches them in the skills they
need to do so effectively.
 PHILOSOPHY OF AN HPL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
 Learning occurs best when students are self-regulated and engaged

 The time it takes for a student to perform mastery of a competency should be student-centric

 Teachers should act as facilitators, rather than experts filling “empty vessels”

 Knowledge is socially constructed and time should be given to collaboration and discussion

 Curriculum, instruction, and assessment can be designed around learning occurring anywhere at anytime

 Technology should support learning so we should harness its power

 Competency education must include well-designed competencies that measure the quality of learning

 Assessment should include formative assessments to help keep students on pace, performance-based assessments to
include opportunities to demonstrate mastery, and summative assessment to maintain quality control (Sturgis, 5).
THE PURPOSE OF ASSESSMENT
 High quality teacher-designed assessments provide insight on what and how students are
learning in time for teachers to modify or personalize instruction
 Allow teachers to assess a broader range of skills and abilities in addition to content recall
 Give students new roles in the assessment process that can make assessment itself a learning
experience and deepen student engagement in content.
 To assist student learning by allowing them to judge their own state of knowledge and
understanding
 Comparing what they know to a standard or competency

 To identify students’ strengths and weaknesses by identifying the demands of a learning task
 To assess the effectiveness of a particular instructional strategy.
 To assess and improve the effectiveness of curriculum programs.
 To assess and improve teaching effectiveness
 setting learning goals
 Engage in appropriate strategies that keep learning moving forward

 To provide data that assist in decision making

 ASSESSMENT MODEL
 Outcome based assessment
 educational theory that bases each part of an educational system around goals, or learning
outcomes, that students should master by the end of a lesson or unit.
 Clarity: Clear expectations of the outcomes gives purpose to what the teacher and the students are
doing.
 Flexibility: When planning curriculum, educators start with the outcomes and work backwards. When
planning instruction, teachers are free to teach using a variety of methods.
 High expectations: All students have the ability to learn, but they may learn in a different way and on
different days.
 Expanded opportunities: Students are able to demonstrate their learning in different ways. They also
have numerous opportunities to demonstrate this mastery. A failing grade is just another opportunity to
demonstrate mastery.
 Student Centered: Criterion referenced assessment that measures the work of the learner against a set
criteria that is independent of the work of other learners. (does not compare students to one another)

Variety of Outcome Based Assessments

Diagnostic  Formative  Summative

• Student Response Systems (SRS) • Portfolios

• Rubrics • Student self-assessment
• Performance Based assessment (PBA) • Peer-assessment
 1. DIAGNOSTIC BASED ASSESSMENT
 A pre-assessment that helps to provide instructors with information about a student’s prior knowledge or
misconceptions before learning an activity.
 Provides a baseline to what a student has learned once an activity is underway
 The facets of each individual student including their strengths, weaknesses, and needs are observed and
assessed
 “Assess the progress of all learners, ensure learners get constructive feedback, and to get feedback on my
teaching” (QIA pg 4).
 Provides a way for teachers to chart a course of action, or map out a route, using existing knowledge to build
upon.

Examples of diagnostic assessments include but are not limited to:

 Graphic organizers
 Journal Entries
 KWLs
 Pre-tests
 Student Response Systems (SRS)
2. FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT
 Goal is to monitor student learning by identifying students strengths and weaknesses during instruction
 Provides assessment-based feedback to not only students, but to teachers, by recognizing where
students are struggling.
 Based on student performance, teachers are able to provide additional practice opportunities,
restructure the pace of the lesson, provide intervention, or move ahead if mastery is achieved.
 The goal of formative assessment is improvement of knowledge by making adjustments while there is
still time to fix it.
 Formative assessment is a process, not any particular test.
 It is used not just by teachers but by both teachers and students.
 Is non-graded and considered low-stakes

Examples of formative assessments include but are not limited to:

 Conferences
 Observations
 Question and Answer Sessions
 First Drafts / Quizzes
 Journals
Some Dimensions on Which Formative Assessment May Vary
1. Informal vs. formal
2. Immediate feedback vs. delayed feedback
3. Curriculum embedded vs. stand-alone
4. Spontaneous vs. planned
5. Individual vs. group
6. Verbal vs. nonverbal
7. Oral vs. written
8. Graded/scored vs. ungraded/unscored
9. Open-ended response vs. closed/constrained response
10. Teacher initiated/controlled vs. student initiated/controlled
11. Teacher and student(s) vs. peers
12. Process oriented vs. task/product oriented
13. Brief vs. extended
14. Scaffolded (teacher) vs. independently performed
5 STRATEGIES OF FORMATIVE
ASSESSMENT
1. Clarifying, sharing and understanding learning intentions and criteria for
success
2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that
elicit evidence of learning
3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward
4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another
5. Activating learners as the owners of their own learning

(William pg 46).
 3. SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT
• Forms an end point that sums up the performance or learning level of achievement.
• Provides a look at student performance as well as an opportunity to evaluate instructional
practices.
• Formal, often standardized, and typically administered at the end of a unit of instruction,
semester, or year.
• The primary purpose is to categorize the performance of a student or system
• Judgements are made with reference to the criteria set for the assessment tasks

Examples of summative assessment include but are not limited to:

• Projects
• Performances
• Final copies
• Exhibitions
• Tests based on learning progression
• Large-scale tests
© Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University, Grahamstown
 IMPLEMENTING OUTCOME BASED ASSESSMENT
1. Identify the specific outcomes that students are expected to demonstrate upon completion of the course, unit,
or lesson.
a. Students ability to translate knowledge learned into a tangible real world aspect.

2. Evaluate your current assessment model

a. The current assessment model needs to be broad and cover the range of outcomes needed for a diverse
group of students with different strengths and weaknesses.

3. Modify or expand current assessment models to create a more aligned set of outcomes.
a. If the current assessment model is heavily focused on summative assessment, introduce more formative
assessment opportunities.
b. Expand on the types of assessments being used to introduce varied assessment types

4. Negotiate specific criteria with the students in the context of their assessment tasks.
a. Students need to know what the learning outcomes are and what evidence they need to apply to be
proficient. Students should also be included in forming these assessment tasks.
b. Give students opportunities to inform them of their strengths and weaknesses

5. Constructing a criterion referenced marking guide

a. Let students know what is required of them to finish a task by understanding what is being assessed and
what is required to achieve competency of that task
© Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University, Grahamstown
CRITERION REFERENCED GUIDE
 Start with outcomes (work backwards)
 Design the assessment task
 What specific outcomes will be addressed?

 Identify appropriate sections of assessment task

 How deep do students need to learn (define, discuss, evaluate)?

 Set criteria statements

 What evidence is required to show that the learner is competent?

 Identify categories that requires evidence to be produced

 What aspects of a subject needs to be defined?

 Take each category and describe what a highly competent student would produce
 Complete a detailed description of what needs to be demonstrated to meet the criteria

 Take each category and describe what a competent student would produce
 What are the fundamental requirements of the task?
 What tasks must be omitted from a highly competent to a competent student?

 Take each category and describe what a not-yet-competent student would produce
 What aspects of the task has been omitted or what tasks has the student been inadequate in demonstrating?

© Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University, Grahamstown
ASSESSMENT TRIANGLE
 The assessment triangle shows three elements that are present in any
type of assessment:
 A model of student cognition
 describes how students develop competence in an academic domain and how they
organize their knowledge at different levels of development
 Observations
 tasks or activities in which students’ performance can be observed, scored, and evaluated
for the purpose of gathering evidence of learning
 Interpretation
 rationale for making sense of and deriving inferences from the evidence gathered

(Pellegrino et al., 2001, pp. 44–51)

CREDENTIALS OF ASSESSMENT
 Must be credible
 Purposes should be updated and negotiated frequently based on student needs
 Evaluations should filter activities, descriptions, and judgements in ways that encourage
participants to rediscover, reinterpret, or revise their understandings and behaviors
 Evaluations should be timely and appropriate in communication to the various audiences
 Evaluations need to be conducted to protect human rights and legal rights of the
participants and students in order to maintain dignity of all involved.
 Evaluations should be used to monitor, balance, and recognize the cultural and political
interests of individuals and groups. This includes taking into account the needs,
expectations, and cultural contexts of the individual students and how they will be affected.
 Evaluations should use resources effectively and efficiently
 Evaluations should yield sufficient dependable and consistent information that serve the
intended purposes
 Evaluation should have an adequate scope and guard against misconceptions, biases,
distortions, and errors
COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND ASSESSMENT
 Cognitive science calls for test developers to:
 Assess students on deep meaning from the most related information from the core concepts and
principles given in each subjects.

 Identify or develop tasks that allow students to demonstrate their understanding and skills versus simply
memorizing rote facts.

 Require tasks and questions to be significantly complex in order to understand how students pick and
choose what knowledge to use and how to organize it.

 Emphasize questions that pertain to students using their long-term, or working memory, rather than short-
term memory.

 Relate the test with the subject matter and learning tasks. For example, students should perform math
problems for a math test, instead of reading and writing

 Vary the type of assessment given so the assessment effectively aligns to the learning task that is to be
demonstrated.
VARIATIONS OF USING ASSESSMENT
 Rubrics
 Performance Based Assessments
 Portfolios
 Self- Assessment
 Peer-Assessment
 Student Response System
RUBRICS
 A tool to measure student learning usually in the form of a performance or product.
 Observation of a student performing an experiment
 Observation of a product that is the result of a student’s work like a finished report.

 Allow teachers to measure multiple dimensions of learning rather than just content
knowledge
 Provide a more detailed assessment of each student’s abilities instead of just a
number or percent correct.
 Can be used to involve students so they know how they will be graded.
 This creates buy-in, increases engagement, and fosters a deeper commitment to the
learning process.
PERFORMANCE BASED ASSESSMENT
 Assessing students on the higher order thinking skills developed through the act of
learning
 Content knowledge
 Work habits
 Application of real world situations
 Deductive/inductive reasoning
 Analyzing data to draw conclusions
 Evaluating the reliability of data
 Theorizing the impact of data

 Assignments become more authentic and more meaningful to students.

 Performance based assessment can take into account multiple measures of

achievement, and rely on multiple sources of evidence, moving beyond the standardized
examinations most commonly used for school accountability (Shepard, et al., 1995;
Wood, Darling-Hammond, Neill, & Roschewski, 2007).
PORTFOLIOS
 Portfolios show students cumulative efforts and learning over time.
 Can be used to see student improvement over a long term
 Ability to show mastery of a specific set of skills,
 Can see how the student is leaning over time
 Offers a way for students to save their work for the continuation of their learning
 In the assembly of a portfolio, students not only get to decide which work is graded, they
have the opportunity reflect up and evaluate the quality of those submissions. This type
of involvement fosters metacognition, active participation, and ultimately puts students at
the center of the learning process (McMillan & Hearn, 2008).
SELF AND PEER ASSESSMENT
 Students are able to see their work objectively by seeing what others have done on the same task.
 Helps fill in the gaps with what one student knows and what they other needs to learn and vice versa.
 Students are able to see themselves as judges upon the quality of a piece of work and who can give
advice on how to improve work. If students can see themselves as someone who can do that, then they
can start to be able to do that more successfully on their own work.
 Helps form a support group where everyone is offering help for the same task. Students of this “support
group” can then come together to feel more empowered and to feel a sense of community.

 Increase student responsibility and autonomy

 Strive for a more advanced and deeper understanding of the subject matter
 Shifts the students role from a passive learner to an active leaner
 involve students in critical reflection, collaboration, and communication
 develop in students a better understanding of their own subjectivity and judgement.

 During peer-assessment students are asked to be the actual evaluator offering feedback and
suggestions on how to improve their classmates’ work. When created collaboratively, many of these
assessments enable teachers and students to interact in a way that blurs the roles in the teaching and
learning process (Barootchi & Keshavarz, 2002).
STUDENT-RESPONSE SYSTEM
 Any system used in a face-to-face setting to poll students and gather immediate
feedback in response to questions posed by instructors.
 This can be used individually (SRS) or with the class (CRS)
 Can be used to making instructional choices based on the responses given
 Instructors can project response graphs overhead for the class to see, so students
can compare their own responses to those of their classmates.
 Can be used as a diagnostic, formative, or reflective manner
 Can discuss the responses in groups to collaborate on the best response.

 Can be non-technical (raising hands or cards) or technical using apps

 Apps are more beneficial since they can quickly graph the responses given

 Students like this form of assessment because of convenience and connectivity.

 Students can engage in learning in a way that feels natural and convenient to them.
LEARNING THEORIES
 Constructivism learning theory:
 based on the idea that learners must construct and reconstruct knowledge, in order to learn
effectively.
 This consists of a flexible learning pathway that favors outcome-based assessments.
 This learning theory also extends the idea of manipulating learning, or being an active learner,
is most effective because the learner is able to produce their own meaning out of experiences.

 Social-cognitive theory:
 Learning occurs in a social context and that much of what is learned is gained through
observation.
 Learning is affected by students' own thoughts and self-beliefs and their interpretation of the
classroom context.
 Students have an agency or ability to influence their own behavior and the environment in a
purposeful, goal-directed fashion (Bandura, 2001).
 learning involves not just the acquisition of new behaviors, but also of knowledge, cognitive
skills, concepts, abstract rules, values, and other cognitive constructs.
LEARNING THEORIES CONTINUED…..
 Connectivism learning theory
 Learning occurs through connections within networks.
 Uses the concept of a network with nodes and connections to define learning.
 Learners recognize and interpret patterns and are influenced by the diversity of networks,
strength of ties and their context.
 Transfer occurs by connecting to and adding nodes and growing personal networks.

 Self-determination theory
 Need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy.
 We want to know the results/consequences of our actions
 We want to interact, be connected, and experience caring for others (We want to belong)
 We want a sense of free will when acting on our own interests.
THEORISTS OF HPL
 John Dewey
 In order for education to be most effective, content must be presented in a way that allows the student to relate the
information to prior experiences, thus deepening the connection with this new knowledge.
 Advocate for Hands on learning and experiential education

 Jean Piaget (Cognitive Theory)

 Emphasized the importance of schemas in cognitive development. A schema was defined as the building blocks of
knowledge in which we would store and apply when needed.
 Viewed intellectual growth as an adjustment to the world
 Piaget believed that children go through 4 universal stages of cognitive development. This cognitive development was
based on the constructed mental model of the world.
 Lev Vygotsky (Social Development Theory)
 Social interaction plays a vital role in cognitive development where social leaning precedes development
 Focused on the connection between people and the sociocultural context in which they shared experiences
 Teacher and students collaborate in order to facilitate meaning and construction (students play an active role in their learning)
 Introduces the zone of proximal development which is the difference between what a student can do with and without help (scaffolding).

 Carl Rogers (experiential learning)

 Learning takes place when the subject matter is relevant to the personal interests of the student
 The student has control in the learning process including its nature and direction
 Leaning takes place best when it is practical, social, and personal
 self-evaluation is the principal method of assessing progress or success.
 "significant learning is acquired through doing"
FURTHER INSIGHTS TO HPL PHILOSOPHY
 What is needed is a culture of success, backed by a belief that all can achieve.
 Pupils can only assess themselves when they have a sufficiently clear picture of the targets
that their learning is meant to attain.
 The dialogue between pupils and a teacher should be thoughtful, reflective, focused to evoke
and explore understanding, and conducted so that all pupils have an opportunity to think and
to express their ideas and understanding.
 Individualized
 Focused on learning and growth
 Motivating
 Open to actively engaging students in the regulation of their own learning
 Informative and useful to a variety of audiences.
 Involves students throughout the assessing process. Involving students in the creation of
assessment criteria, the diagnosis of their strengths and weaknesses, and the monitoring of
their own learning, transfers the locus of instruction from the teacher to his or her students
(Nunes, 2004).
PEDAGOGY
 Teachers need to establish a set of learning goals made explicit to students in the lecture
keeping in mind their cognitive realities
 All exam and quiz questions should be labeled with the corresponding learning goals to
emphasize the alignment of learning goals and assessment.
 Teachers should then place an increased emphasis on formative assessment by
integrating assessment components into activities so that students would receive
feedback designed to improve their performance
 These weekly quizzes will provide regular feedback on student performance in a “low-
stakes” assessment environment and encourage students to keep up with the material on
a regular basis.
 Instructor encourages students to use peer and self assessments routinely
 Instructor offers students many opportunities to learn from their mistakes and then
demonstrate mastery
 Instructor encourages students to justify their answers when they do not agree with those
of instructor
 Instructor and students mutually agree on timeframe for feedback and proceeds to follow
this timeframe
 Instructor uses authentic assessment throughout the course
 PEDAGOGY
 Learner-centered teaching engages students
 Teachers have taken on too many responsibilities resulting in the teacher working harder than the
students. Students will only develop learning skills with practice and in most classrooms the teacher
gets far more practice than the students.
 Learner-centered teaching includes explicit skill instruction.
 An HPL learning environment teaches students how to think, solve problems, evaluate evidence, analyze
arguments, and generate hypotheses. We as teachers need to teach these skills along with the content.
 Learner-centered teaching encourages students to reflect on their learning
 Teachers need to challenge student assumptions about learning and encourage them to become aware
of themselves as leaners and taking responsibility for developing learning skills. In an HPL
environment, teachers need to include assignments where students are able to reflect, analyze, and
critique what they are learning and how they are learning.
 Learner-centered teaching motivates students
 Teachers need to give up some of their control to their students especially when making decisions in
their learning. By giving students the power to make decisions, including choosing what assignment to
complete or a voice in classroom policies, you are increasing their motivation to learn.
 Learner-centered teaching encourages collaboration.
 A classroom is a community of learners whether inside four walls or online. The more that students
collaborate with each other, the more they can bounce ideas off each other. Teachers need to develop
structures that promote shared learning.