Assessment for Teaching

Learning Objectives

In this chapter you will learn to:

This chapter promotes the understanding of developmental learning, introducing hierarchies and taxonomies developed by Bloom and Krathwohl. Because almost everyone working in this mode will be beginners, we will concentrate on the most basic, those relating to cognitive and affective domains. Other taxonomies, including those by Biggs and Collis (SOLO) and by Dreyfus (Skills), are useful and important; the reader can expand their knowledge of these as they become more proficient in assessment. The chapter makes a distinction between the deficit and developmental approaches to teaching and addresses the implications of data use in these two models. The chapter shows teachers how to identify the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) following Vygotsky, and uses examples of student work to illustrate this concept. The implications of correct identification and the importance of differentiated instruction are also introduced in this chapter. The establishment of a strong link between teaching and assessment data provides the reader with a framework within which to operate as a teacher.

Introduction

Students accumulate skills and knowledge through a process of maturation and through engagement in learning activities. But the skills and knowledge accumulated by each student in the class or the year level almost certainly will not be the same. A teacher's role is to identify how best to facilitate this growth in each student. It is common to hear the description of the teacher's role linked to diagnosis in the context of teaching being a clinical practice profession. Although the word diagnosis has typically and traditionally been used to indicate that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, increasingly it is being used to identify individual needs in the educational context. The latter is exactly what teachers need to do, but it is important that we do not confuse student needs with student weaknesses or inadequacies. Students do not go to school to be fixed; they are not sick or in need of prescribed remedies; they go to school to grow socially and cognitively and perhaps morally.