Self-Assessment: How effective are they?

experiences; • Enables the teacher to see things from the children’s perspective. (Chadwick & Webster, 2010, p. 95)

It is important to remind them what they are assessing and how to do this successfully. You can achieve this by displaying questions and prompt cards in continuous provision areas. They must be continually communicated and supported by adults to encourage children to enter into the process of self-review.

Self-Assessment: How effective are they?

Another way of tracking skills is by using self-assessment. Self-assessment is a useful life skill and can aid in the reflection and development of general metacognitive skills (Kennewell, Parkinson, & Tanner, Developing ICT capability, 2000). For senior primary in their final year, these assessments needs to include more detail than the formal teacher assessment record so that they know and understand what is expected. In doing so it will provide valuable information to the secondary school of their choice. I will discuss this in more detail later in Using Assessment Effectively. If you provide students with more freedom to use ICT in appropriate ways and make them responsible for recording their progress, then many of them are likely to be more motivated. In addition, by giving them an indication of the range of ICT techniques that they will need to demonstrate over a period of time will point them in the direction in which they need to be heading.

Self-assessment sheets will alert you to issues of which you may be unaware of. They should look professionally produced and be tabular in structure. It is important that the language and terminology you use be appropriate for the students involved. It has have spaces for the students to indicate that they have demonstrated the particular technique as well as space to show the activity that was involved. Furthermore, you need space to write comments and to confirm that the student has actually completed the task (Ager, 2003).

Ten tips to remember about how to use self-assessments (Higgins, Packard, & Race, 1999, pp. 84-85):

attained targets that the students will need to achieve; 2. Make these ‘can do’ statements; 3. Involve the students: tell the students what they are going to be doing and introduce them to the steps they need to take; 4. Make sure they can do it; 5. Agree on targets: very useful as you may find that your students are more capable than you think and you might have to set higher challenges like more difficult techniques or processes for them to achieve; 6. Make a record sheet for the students to complete: design an easy way for them to record these targets and when they achieve them; 7. Remind them of the targets; 8. Help students to decide success; 9. Did they get it right? : evaluate how accurate you think their judgements are; 10.Continue the process: continue this as a cycle of target setting and evaluation.

Using assessment to develop teaching strategies

The assessment of ICT capability is vital as it will allow you to track progress and to plan appropriately for children to achieve their capabilities. Proper assessment will provide you with real evidence and knowledge of where the children are up to. The data that you receive from this assessment will play a crucial role in helping you to look back on just how effective the teaching approaches have been to a particular ICT technique, routine or process. Here are ten help tips that Higgins, Packard and Race (1999, pp. 82-83) suggest might help might you develop more effective teaching strategies.

1. Look back at your ‘before’ and ‘after’ assessments:

Did the class make the sort of improvement you expected? Are there certain parts of the development that they demonstrated that are better than expected? Can you identify what it is was you said, or that they discovered, that might have brought about these improvements? If you can, you know what to stick with, and what you need to develop further.

children really know and understand. Knowing this will help you decide where to go next. It may help you identify opportunities for peer tutoring, self-help groups, and so on.

3. Ask ‘why’ questions:

This probes children’ understanding more and at the same time makes them more aware of what they understand. The more aware they are of what they know, the better equipped they are to help one another. Here, being able to talk about it, and reflect upon it is a good step towards more independent learning.

4. Get them to show you:

A demonstration of how to save or print a file on the computer either to you or to other children is a good way to assess how well they have been taught, and worthwhile consolidation for them, too.

5. Eavesdrop and don’t interrupt when children are collaborating:

When you barge into collaborative conversation, children will assume you know what they have been talking about all the time. Listen first. This is easier when children are sitting at the computer and you creep up behind them.

6. Identify student who can, and get them to support those who can’t:

Peer tutoring in pairs is one of the most effective means of support you can establish. In general, it is best not to have too great a difference of ability between the pair. A ‘most able’ student could help ‘middle range’ student as a pair, and ‘middle ranger’ can help a lower attainer.

7. Identify common errors, and talk about these to a large group of the class:

There are many common misunderstandings and errors in using the computer, in areas such as understanding word-wrap, or clicking several times rather than waiting patiently, or assuming that you click OK or YES to every dialogue box.

8. Assessing group work with one computer is appropriate:

Planning a group task where the computer is a resource or a tool is an efficient way to use it. It is harder to assess the results of group tasks, but children can learn a lot from each other.

9. Assess individual work, too:

There are times when assessment of individual use of the computer may be needed. This can alert you to individual’s particular needs. For example, some children never seem to have an opportunity to hold the mouse and may need their confidence boosting so that can develop their fine motor skills.

10. Use you assessment findings to help children reflect on what they have done:

If you can find time to sit down with a child, or small group, and talk about what they have done and what that tells you about their abilities and development, it can have a significant impact on children’s motivation and progress.

How do I identify what I want the children to learn?

It is important to identify your learning objectives for every ICT activity and subtasks in terms of the routines (skills), techniques, concepts and higher order thinking. To best clarify this further, I will use an example from the Australian Curriculum (English) Year 1 and create an activity that may suit its criteria. This approach is adapted from Bennett’s (2007) detailed advice.

Year 1 English (Literacy Strand) Creating Texts Create short imaginative and informative texts that show emerging use of appropriate text structure, sentence-level grammar, word choice, spelling, punctuation and appropriate multimodal elements, for example illustrations and diagrams.

Construct texts that incorporate supporting images using software including word processing programs.

Activity/Project: Students are to recreate a page of a story they have read using a word processor.

By the end of this activity, students will be able to achieve the following:

• Routines/Skills: Enter text with a keyboard; embolden headings; save and print their page; • Techniques: Import images and position them appropriately for the text; enter, format and edit text

to conform with their section of the story; • Concepts: Explain how text and images can be used to communicate an episode or event in a story; • Higher order skills: Decide which image(s) from a limited section could best illustrate an event; choose the most appropriate font styles for text to convey meaning (e.g. bold to indicate shouting, italic for emphasis).

Using assessment to develop teaching strategies

The assessment of ICT capability is vital as it will allow you to track progress and to plan appropriately for students to achieve their capabilities. Proper assessment will provide you with real evidence and knowledge of where the students are up to. The data that you receive from this assessment will play a crucial role in helping you to look back on just how effective the teaching approaches have been to a particular ICT technique, routine or process. Here are ten help tips that Higgins, Packard and Race (1999, pp. 82-83) suggest might help might you develop more effective teaching strategies.

1. Look back at your ‘before’ and ‘after’ assessments:

Did the class make the sort of improvement you expected? Are there certain parts of the development that they demonstrated that are better than expected? Can you identify what it is was you said, or that they discovered, that might have brought about these improvements? If you can, you know what to stick with, and what you need to develop further.

2.Ask students lots of questions:

You will get a good idea from their answers what the children really know and understand. Knowing this will help you decide where to go next. It may help you identify opportunities for peer tutoring, self-help groups, and so on.

3.Ask ‘why’ questions:

This probes students’ understanding more and at the same time makes them more aware of what they understand. The more aware they are of what they know, the better equipped they are to help one another. Here, being able to talk about it, and reflect upon it is a good step towards more independent

4.Get them to show you:

A demonstration of how to save or print a file on the computer either to you or to other students is a good way to assess how well they have been taught, and worthwhile consolidation for them, too.

5. Eavesdrop and don’t interrupt when students are collaborating:

When you barge into collaborative conversation, students will assume you know what they have been talking about all the time. Listen first. This is easier when students are sitting at the computer and you creep up behind them.

6. Identify student who can, and get them to support those who can’t:

Peer tutoring in pairs is one of the most effective means of support you can establish. In general, it is best not to have too great a difference of ability between the pair. A ‘most able’ student could help ‘middle range’ student as a pair, and ‘middle ranger’ can help a lower attainer.

7. Identify common errors, and talk about these to a large group of the class:

There are many common misunderstandings and errors in using the computer, in areas such as understanding word-wrap, or clicking several times rather than waiting patiently, or assuming that you click OK or YES to every dialogue box.

8. Assessing group work with one computer is appropriate:

Planning a group task where the computer is a resource or a tool is an efficient way to use it. It is harder to assess the results of group tasks, but students can learn a lot from each other.

9. Assess individual work, too:

There are times when assessment of individual use of the computer may be needed. This can alert you to individual’s particular needs. For example, some students never seem to have an opportunity to hold the mouse and may need their confidence boosting so that can develop their fine motor skills.

group, and talk about what they have done and what that tells you about their abilities and development, it can have a significant impact on children’s motivation and progress.

Sharing Perspectives across Schools

Effective and efficient assessment of ICT capability plays such a significant role in the development of a student’s capability with ICT. It not only ensures that your planning is on target, but other teacher’s too, and not just at your school but also other schools as well. Already I have discussed how important record keeping can be for you. Record keeping also plays a big role in enabling progression and continuity of student capabilities to occur. The problem is that there can be a large amount of information stored in these records and that means the chances of vital data being ignored or overlooked is high.

What is important for you to do is to ensure that the information is condensed in some way in which you will be able to get all of these significant data across that contains key elements pertaining to a student’s ICT capability.

There are three suggestions offered by Kennewell et al. (2000) claims will help schools to decide the best way to move forward:

• Portfolio of work – use teacher annotations and comments to provide a comprehensive picture of an individual’s capabilities. Avoid being selective as to what to include and provide the secondary

ICT coordinator with three portfolios from each contributing primary school. Each would represent the work considered to be at level 3, 4 and 5. In doing this, you will be giving the ICT coordinator a better picture of the level of attainment along with the other data that would be very useful for planning; • Record Cards – These contain the minimum amount of data and this may be what your school prefers. The result is that the students will be placed against the Australian Curriculum ICT Capability Learning Continuum attainment level. These statements need to have a focus on the processes and concepts learnt as opposed to the typical detail on ICT techniques that would only represent one component of ICT capability.

In addition, focusing on higher order skills would

only provide valuable data for monitoring across the curriculum if it was implemented across all Learning Areas rather than being specific to ICT.

The statements need to be tailored to the particular schemes of work implemented at the school.

This is not to say that you should not include information about generic ICT techniques to monitor the development of routine skills. • Student Self-assessment – see Student Self-

Assessment.

Creating a careful combination of criteria

When coming up with criteria to help you judge the ICT capability of students it is important to remember that it the decisions made by students in order to create a finished product that needs to be judged. In other words, their higher order skills! The judgement you make will depend ultimately on the appropriateness of the outcomes from the task or activity, the ICT techniques and processes, the strategies observed, the resources available, the time taken and the support provided (Kennewell, Parkinson, & Tanner, 2000).

Remember not to assess other subject knowledge and as Kennewell et al. (2000) points out don’t aim for a level of precision that is not reachable by the students and unnecessary. Begin lessons by having an initial whole class discussion and intervene to help them design features of products. For example, if they were working on a poster to encourage young children to eat healthful foods you could intervene to help them design features for this. However, if they were unable to choose inappropriate foods for their illustration, you would need to consider whether this is because:

• They have not understood the requirements of the task; • They have misunderstood the nutritional content of the foods; • The clip-art available is limited; • They are unable to locate or insert the appropriate images.

According to Kennewell et al. (2000) the first three would have no effect on the assessment of ICT capability. However, by having a plenary evaluation at the end of the ICT activity you will be able to help

Coordinating Assessment

Throughout this work, I have discussed the effectiveness of formative assessment in ICT capability. Despite some teachers in schools preferring to use summative assessment in my view this is the best way to determine attainment. If your role at the school is also the ICT coordinator, then it is also your job to ensure that your colleagues are able to carry this out. In Australia, the ICT Capability Learning Continuum assessment process should provide you and support you with the level of capability for the years ending Foundations, Years 2, 4 and 6 by the end of Primary. To use as an example, a study in the United Kingdom (Kennewell, Parkinson, & Tanner, 2000) conducted at school found that the coordinator had listed each of the expected level attainments using terms that other teachers would find easy to recognise and use. The result was that all teachers were able to determine what progression was expected.

In the case of using summative assessment, it is advised that you use exemplar portfolios which “contain a set of from a particular student for whom there is general agreement about the level of attainment” (Kennewell, Parkinson, & Tanner, 2000, p. 80). A portfolio such as this will enable you to compare the performance of other students and thus develop a common understanding of expected standards. It is important that you ensure that your colleagues consider the process of producing the task outcomes as well as the affordance of the learning environment available to students. The portfolio should contain:

• The task context and objectives; • The process of development for the work – plans, drafts, comments on decisions made etc.; • The resources available; • The help given by teacher and peers concerning ICT (not concerning other subject matter for which the student might have required assistance).

should always be discussed during staff meetings. Kennewell et al. points out that (2000, p. 81) it is a great also to meet with the non-specialist teachers at your school and “discuss with them the features of the work which characterised progression from earlier attainment as well as the degree of independence shown by each student in the process of achieving the outcome.” Remember, as mentioned earlier, it is essential that all assessment approaches are designed to support the teaching approaches to ICT capability development.

Effective judgement on student ICT capability has to consider:

• The quality of student’s response to a task in terms of the choices made and techniques used; • The complexity of the task; • The way the task was achieved; • The help students were given and; • The matching of evidence of a student’s performance to one of the level descriptions in the ICT capability Learning Continuum.

If you work at a P-12 school, there are three approaches that studies have indicated have been successful and are based on curriculum organisation (Kennewell, Parkinson, & Tanner, 2000):

• Discrete model: This is where ICT is treated as every other subject and the ICT department has its own scheme of work and assessment procedures designed to encourage progression and continuity in discrete lessons; • Cross-curricular: ICT learning and assessment is integrated across all Learning Areas in the curriculum context. Here the coordinator’s role was to map the plans of the other subject coordinators, negotiate adjustments to ensure progression and continuity in ICT for students, and advise other teachers on how to assess ICT capability in their subject context; • Core Skills: The module of ICT teaching is followed by an application in a subject context. Plan it jointly with a representative of the subject department to ensure that the task specific criteria for assessment is agreed upon.

There are three levels at which assessment, recording and reporting of ICT capability should be carried out. These are lesson-based, Activity-based and Term/Year-Based assessments (Stanley & Tanner, 2003, pp. 119-120). You need to give advice to class and subject teachers about your expectations of students. In addition, provide them with a recording framework with task specific prompts. Do not make the assessment process just a box-ticking exercise though.

Lesson-based Assessments

Purpose: To monitor the progress of individual students, to evaluate the effectiveness of the lesson, and to plan specific oral feedback to students for the next lesson.

1. Identify the learning objectives for the lesson; 2. Devise opportunities for students to engage with the objectives; 3. Set the criteria for success in terms of processes and outcome; 4. For each student, note whether success was achieved independently, with some help, with much help, or was not achieved; 5. Note the applications for the next lesson.

This process does not require detailed records for each student. Having a lengthy checklist would not be suitable.

Activity-based Assessments

Purpose: To ascertain the National Curriculum level of student’s work and to provide written feedback on their skills for development.

1. Identify the purpose of the activity outcome (e.g. poster to advertise a school concert); 2. Determine the features required for (Learning Continuum related) levels, marks, grades in terms of particular aspects of the process and the outcome; 3. Review each student’s response to the activity, together with lesson-level assessments, to produce a level, mark or grade; 4. Give feedback to the student in the form of suggestions for improvement (process and outcome) as well as a level, mark or grade.

Term/Yearly Assessments Purpose: To provide a summative report on the student’s strengths and weaknesses in relation to expected progress.

1. Review records of activity-based assessments (and possibly the complete folder of each student’s work); 2. Decide the overall Learning Continuum level as the description which best fits the student’s attainment; 3. Summarise the comments made about the activity process and outcome during the year for this student.

Remember what I mentioned earlier about the needs of the parents and using a terminology that they will understand. Ensure that there is a balance between being informative and being brief.

Conclusion

Teacher observation is the most proficient way to assess child’s ICT capability in the classroom. However, without teachers acquiring and developing their own knowledge of the ICT tools and resources or in other words, improving their own ICT capability, such methodology would be considered useless as there would be no strong foundations of ICT knowledge and capability to support the progression of students in their learning.

Record keeping needs to be used wisely in a supportive role to provide strong evidence of student progression. It is vital that is conducted in a professional and proficient manner that you can accurately record progress in a timely way. These capabilities recorded can also be used to determine the position of a student in relation to their progress in capabilities as recognised by the ICT Capability Learning Continuum.