Me and Mr Tong TM attended a conference in Singapore on 20th June,2011. The conference is titled: Assessing science in education. It was co-hosted by UNSW ( UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES) and Hwachong Institution.
Though the conference’s name already suggested that the assessment is on science education, the whole conference was overwhelmed with the question of how to make use of education technology to make the implementation of assessment easier and more effective. The assessment on 21 st century skills was also a big issue all through the conference.
What is meant by good science assessments then?
Frans boot in his keynote defined a good assessment as one that measures knowledge, skills and attitudes. It should also provide feedback as we should never underestimate the Impact of assessment.
A well designed assessment would bring benefits to all parties. It should empower teachers to write good quality papers. It would even allow teachers to understand the students more. And very often, the reputation of the school would also be promoted if the reporting is done in the right way.
So features of quality assessment come into place.Validity and Reliability are crucial. But content is as important. Test specifications would then have to be precise. In order to look after the skills area, there should be at least one open question to each test. More open questions would enable you to know more about your students.
People always argued on which was the best mode of assessment and what an authentic assessment was. Dr Tan kok kim in the conference stressed that the authenticity of an assessment lies on whether students can put the essential skills and knowledge on real practice. When we talk about skills, we of course would have in mind the21 st century competencies/ core values.
What assessment can do the job? Dr Tan suggested an eportfolio. Students are engaged and able to perform real world task and apply critical thinking skills in doing the reflections.
What is a science e portfolio? It is more a performance type of assessment where students can record their learning process through different types of media, like YouTube. It could be a Visual diary, recording voices of their ideas. Their confidence could also be boosted as they are showing what they hv achieved. Students would be encouraged to access information, carry in their exploration of further knowledge. They can then develope critical viewpoints and metacognition, thinking about thinking through their excursion and experiments. Teachers could also have a showcase of students work easily.
You may ask: Why electronic? Surely that’s our task to develop students’ basic technological literacy. Secondly, we can Save the trees and do editing easily. Last but not least, it would be learning without borders. Everyone can access to it any time and anywhere.
Students may still consider these portfolios as part of work and may not like that but if we are sure about the benefits of these types of assessment, we should let students know that this is how they should learn. Well, no students like exams or tests anyway.
So much has been said about eportfolios, where do we go from there? Perhaps teachers could provide students with more guiding questions to facilitate the building of the portfolio and how them more samples of good science eportfolios. Performance based assessment should gain more of its stance than single written test.
Another highlight of the day is the session: From data to direction : leveraging school datasets to improve education programs by Matthew obrien and Barry dean from Brisbane boys college. They showed the audience how to make use of the Internal and external data (ICAS data) to identify strength and weakness of students’ performances and in the end identify time for intervention and share with parents. They also make use of the software from http://www.analyze-it.com and EXCEL to show how different data could be retrieved and compared. That is important for various stakeholders in the school. Principals can see what programs to design for the whole school in particular areas. Teachers can see whether students have misconceptions in their learning. Students can find out areas to improve and parents know how to cooperate. All these come into place if teachers could know how to make use of the data in the report given by ICAS. Of course, the more structured the internal mark system, the netter correlation one can draw from the data.
Important for leaders of the teams
It may be easy too to draw up profiles for individual subject, learning items, individual class or individual student. Isn’t that fantastic? During parents -teachers interview, we can also give students an parents an idea of what they are like and what performance they are having un various areas. This is extremely helpful in S3 as an overall analyst for each individual student would be very useful for subject selection.
Workshops taking the above concepts and ideas into practice were held on the next day(21/6). The audience had more hands on experience on the use of data analysis in schools.
But before the workshops, Dr Saw choo teo form the university of NSW, a consultant in language n education brought us to the attention of Assessing science through the medium of language: implications for validity. To make it simple, his speech was basically about what we are testing our students? Are we testing the subject knowledge, only science knowledge? Or are we testing them subconsciously the language as well? Sometimes, are we even distracting students by the language in a science test?
Dr Saw even suggested we should take into consideration the context, the register and even the test takers’ competence in decoding language , when we setting our assessment items. We should then pay more attention when we are deling with second language learners. Their lines of thoughts are very often affected by their first language.
Principles of good assessment should be the Relevance of the measurement; is the test relevant to science? Backwash effect on teaching should also be highlighted and so after test analysis would be of paramount importance.
This idea was echoed by a teacher in Hwachong who advocates the use of concept maps in assessing biology. She thinks that it helps so much in understanding students’ learning in the subject. It also makes assessment more authentic as this is not asking for rote memorization but more on inter-relationship among topics and topics. She suggested teachers using that for
formative assessment. Soft ware she used is the CMapTools
All in all, this conference demonstrated how assessment can take place in different modes for formative and summative purposes. By using various technological tools, we can make life so much easier and analysis more efficient and meaningful. Teachers should be thinking of more authentic assessments for formative asssessmeng. Teachrrs shoukd not be doing their cut and paste from past papers or just draw out items from question banks for tests and exams.
Assessment should be for learning and when assessment is done for summative assessment,data should be interpreted meaningfully and used for school improvement.
Ms Lancy Tam
