|
|
Keynote Address
by Dylan William: The Role of Formative Assessment in
Raising Student Achievement
Julie Moore
|
|
Last week, a group of faculty
members attended the State Assessment Conference in
Vancouver, WA. This conference allows educators from
Community, Technical, and Four-year colleges around the
state to gather and discuss issues around teaching and
learning. There were many interesting sessions during this
two-day conference. One highlight was the keynote speaker.
Philosophy Instructor, Jeff Clausen, who attended the
conference, has the following to share about this keynote
address. The Learning Outcomes Committee hopes you can use
some of this information as you work with students at
Green River C.C.
Keynote Address by Dylan
William: The Role of
Formative Assessment in Raising Student Achievement
This was just a lot of fun
and very informative as well. An overview of his lecture,
which was published in the conference program, reports,
“Dylan William will outline the research evidence that
shows that effective use of formative assessment raises
the achievement of students, across all subjects and ages
. . . [and will] provide a framework for critically
evaluating assessment practices in schools . . . [and
will] conclude with suggestions on how teachers can begin
the process of developing and implementing these
strategies in colleges.”
I will add to this by
writing down some of his comments that I found
particularly interesting and important for us as
educators:
Though there are
general principles, we need to be very sensitive to
the context or situation-the best teachers are
constantly making decisions based on contingency.
Administrators, other
instructors, and staff need to recognize that teaching
can take on a variety of modes. It isn’t necessarily
lecturing. Often teaching is comprised of student
discussions with very little if any lecturing by the
instructor.
We need a shift from
assessment of to assessment for learning.
We need to look at
teaching as engineering learning environments.
Everything your
students do is intelligent-intelligent within their
frame of reference.
Your students know
where they are; they don’t need to be told over
and over. The best thing for their improvement is
feedback that tells them what they need to do
and tells them how to go about doing it.
IQ provides a fixed
view of ability, while success is determined by
unstable internal causes. For example, the SAT is a
bad predictor of college grades. In any meaningful
sense, all abilities improve with age. Consider the
following story told by someone’s son: “When I was 15,
it surprised me how dumb my dad was, but when I was
25, I was amazed how much he had learned in 10 years.”
|
|
For questions about the content of this site,
please contact Julie Moore.
For Web related queries, please contact
Web Manager. |
Contact
Site Map