Page 40 - Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation and Reporting in Ontario Schools. First Edition, Covering Grades 1 to 12. 2010

34
GROWING SUCCESS | assessment, evaluation, and reporting in Ontario schools
ASSESSMENT FOR LEARNING AND AS LEARNING
ELICITING INFORMATION ABOUT STUDENT LEARNING
Teachers use a variety of assessment strategies to elicit information about student learning. These strategies should be triangulated to include observation, student-teacher conversations, and student products. Teachers can gather information about learning by:
• designing tasks that provide students with a variety of ways to demonstrate their learning;
• observing students as they perform tasks;
• posing questions to help students make their thinking explicit;
• engineering classroom and small-group conversations that encourage students to articulate what they are thinking and further develop their thinking.
Teachers then use the information gathered to adjust instruction and provide feedback.
Homework tasks designed to help students practise and consolidate new learning can also provide assessment information that both teachers and students can use to adjust instruction and focus learning.
PROVIDING DESCRIPTIVE FEEDBACK
Feedback provides students with a description of their learning. The purpose of providing feedback is to reduce the gap between a student’s current level of knowledge and skills and the learning goals. Descriptive feedback helps students learn by providing them with precise information about what they are doing well, what needs improvement, and what specific steps they can take to improve. According to Davies (2007, p. 2), descriptive feedback “enables the learner to adjust what he
or she is doing in order to improve.”
Ongoing descriptive feedback linked specifically to the learning goals and success criteria is a powerful tool for improving student learning and is fundamental to building a culture of learning within the classroom. As the teacher provides feedback, and as the student responds to it, the assessment information gathered is used to improve learning as well as instruction. Multiple opportunities for feedback and follow-up are planned during instruction to allow for improvement in learning prior to assessment of learning (evaluation). The focus of the feedback is to encourage students to produce their best work by improving upon their previous work and, at the same time, to teach them the language and skills of assessment, so they are able to assess their own learning and that of their peers.