Page 36 - Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation and Reporting in Ontario Schools. First Edition, Covering Grades 1 to 12. 2010

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GROWING SUCCESS | assessment, evaluation, and reporting in Ontario schools
ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING AND AS LEARNING
The use of assessment to improve student learning and to help students become independent learners requires teachers and students to acknowledge and enact a fundamental shift in how they perceive their roles in the learning process. In a traditional assessment paradigm, the teacher is perceived as the active agent in the process, determining goals and criteria for successful achievement, delivering instruction, and evaluating student achievement at the end of a period of learning. The use of assessment for the purpose of improving learning and helping students become independent learners requires a culture in which student and teacher learn together in a collaborative relationship, each playing an active role in setting learning goals, developing success criteria, giving and receiving feedback, monitoring progress, and adjusting learning strategies. The teacher acts as a “lead learner”, providing support while gradually releasing more and more responsibility to the student, as the student develops the knowledge and skills needed to become an independent learner.
The vast body of literature on assessment uses a variety of terms to describe the purposes of assessment, the nature of assessment for different purposes, and the uses of information gathered through assessment. In the present document, the term assessment is used to mean a set of actions undertaken by the teacher and student to gather information about student learning.
Terms such as diagnostic, formative, and summative, which are used to identify the nature of assessment, have recently been supplemented with the phrases assessment for learning, assessment as learning, and assessment of learning. As Harlen (2006) explains: “Using the terms ‘formative assessment’ and ‘summative assessment’ can give the impression that these are different kinds
of assessment or are linked to different methods of gathering evidence. This is not the case; what matters is how the information is used. It is for this reason that the terms ‘assessment for learning’ and ‘assessment of learning’ are sometimes preferred. The essential distinction is that assessment for learning is used in making decisions that affect teaching and learning in the short term future, whereas assessment of learning is used to record and report what has been learned in the past” (p. 104; emphasis added). In short, the nature of the assessment is determined by what the information is to be used for.
Table 4.1 summarizes the purposes of assessment, the nature of assessment, and the different uses of assessment information.