Students who appear to have understood a concept in class through discussion sometimes reveal that the depth of their understanding wasn’t quite what you thought or that they don’t have confidence with the vocabulary. Most specifically, a test can tell you how well a student can express an idea in writing – especially if they have plenty of time time pressure does skew the quality towards the end of a test. That’s not a universal truth, but generally, it’s what I find. they want it to count, so they work harder during the test itself than they might if the same questions were just done as a class exercise. There is also the effect that students often commit themselves in a test situation. Learning in a class has a healthy and helpful social aspect as ideas are explored but ultimately this can mask the progress of individuals. In regular classwork and book work, students have the capacity to mask their real understanding and they often do, deliberately or inadvertently I find this quite a serious issue. I find that tests are the best way to reveal what each student can really do – without learning aids and without asking a friend. because as David Didau and others have discussed elsewhere, interleaving – or returning to ideas after a gap – actually helps with memory and recall. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve started another topic. The key to making tests working formatively is to build in time to give feedback after tests have been done and to make sure students act on it. As a ‘comments only’ devotee, I haven’t had a mark book for years. Logging test scores in a central departmental database is usually the only record I keep. In my experience, whilst marking has real value, it is the test that you can’t do without. Also, in evaluating the work, there is always the issue of being blinded or distracted by presentation issues. The books are a record of sorts in their own right but I try to make students see their books as being for them rather than for me. I find class discussion and tests much more useful for that. Routine book marking fills in the gaps, dealing with a range of micro-skills and work-management issues however, it’s not always the place to tackle actual conceptual understanding of science. If this is about 4/5 of the way through the topic it has most impact. Students compare notes and identify areas of common concern we focus there.īut after that, the most useful element is definitely a formative test. When I set homework – as I do religiously – the main feedback mode is to go over the questions in class. My normal pattern of marking and feedback looks like this:įor me, the immediacy and dialogic nature of classroom question-and-answer has greatest effect this dominates. The reason I’m including this here is because, as a science teacher, I’ve found that I value marking tests more than most other forms of marking. However, used formatively, tests provide an important source of detailed, individualised feedback identifying where each student needs to deepen their understanding and improve their recall of the knowledge they’ve covered. And obviously some students will actually know more than their test performance indicates. Left as a summative process, the students’ test marks merely become a record of their success at a point in time – without directly helping them improve. Typically tests are regarded as something given at the end of a unit of work often they mark the end point of a learning sequence and provide information about how much each student has learned – or not learned. A Science Test: Finding out what has been learned.Įver since the idea of formative assessment was expressed by Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black in ‘Inside the Black Box’, one of the practical strategies suggested has been the formative use of summative tests.
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