This free course, Assessment in secondary geography, is designed for people who are learning to be a teacher, are in their first few years of teaching, or who are working in an educational setting. It will explore some of the key issues around assessing geography in secondary schools to help you to reflect upon and develop your assessment practice as a teacher. You will also develop a greater awareness of how assessment can be used to help students to become more independent. This course is based on a learner-centred approach to teaching, which is underpinned by a constructivist view of learning – the idea that students will construct knowledge and understanding for themselves as a result of activities and experiences.
Now listen to an introduction to this course by Gary Spruce:
As you work through the activities you will be encouraged to record your thoughts on an idea, an issue or a reading, and how they relate to your practice. Hopefully you will have the opportunity to discuss your ideas with colleagues. We therefore suggest that you use a notebook – either physical or electronic – to record your thoughts in a way in which they can easily be retrieved and re-visited. If you prefer, however, you can record your ideas in response boxes in the course – in this case, in order to retrieve your responses you will need to log on to the course.
This OpenLearn course is part of a collection of Open University short courses for teachers and student teachers.
After studying this course, you should be able to:
articulate what it means to make progress in geography
outline a framework for assessing progress in geography
outline the differences between formative and summative assessment
explain some of the challenges related to assessment in geography
set out any personal views in relation to effective assessment of geographical learning.
As a teacher, it is your responsibility to help students to make progress in learning but what exactly constitutes progress?
Jot down your thoughts before reading on.
Taylor (2013, p. 302) notes:
Learning involves change in someone’s knowledge, understanding, skills or attitudes (and the meaning of each of those terms and the relationship between them is complex and contested), but a neutral idea of ‘change’ is not good enough. The change must be seen as valuable, as moving in a positive direction, as progress.
This raises the question: who decides what is valuable? The learner, the teacher, parents, schools, examination boards, government departments or regulators? Different stakeholders have different ideologies. In a subject as broad as geography, what is valued by one person might not be by another. The emphasis placed on knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes varies. Geography is also dynamic and continually under construction, so the valued elements also change over time.
Progression takes place over a number of timescales: across a sequence of lessons; a year; a key stage. You have to decide how to structure teaching and assessment over these timescales in order to support students’ progression in learning.
Progression can be considered in relation to the learning experiences planned by the teacher:
Progress will be apparent if students are ready for more demanding teaching and learning experiences. Progression can also be viewed in terms of student performance (achievement against mark schemes and grade criteria for specific units of work or GCSE or A Levels).
To help students make progress, you need to have a clear understanding of the learning that they need to do, where they are now and how best to help them bridge the gap. Assessment is, therefore, a key component of planning for progression. Individual students vary in the rate at which they progress, according to their individual interests and abilities, the learning and teaching styles employed and the nature and structure of the activity. Assessment should be designed so that all students have an opportunity to demonstrate their progress and so that you can plan to address individuals’ learning needs.
The following activity allows you to consider proposals from the Geographical Association (GA) for integrated planning for progression and assessment.
In England, the Geographical Association is concerned that an emphasis on locational and place knowledge, human and physical processes in the Geography National Curriculum (GNC) 2014 will erode notions of progression in curriculum and assessment planning. They have published a framework to address their concerns. The discussion of the proposals related to assessment and progression will be relevant to teachers whether they work in England or elsewhere.
If you want to know more about the context of assessment and progression in England prior to the introduction of the GNC in 2014, read Lambert’s (2010) think piece on progression, which has a short discussion and some useful appendices.
Download and save An assessment and progression framework for geography (Geographical Association, 2014a) and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation, Progression and assessment without levels (Geographical Association, 2014b). You will use these again in Activity 4.
Read the following sections: ‘A clear vision’ and ‘The framework’. Also look at the framework diagram on page 4. Read slides 1–12 and 28 in the PowerPoint presentation and the accompanying notes.
What does the Geographical Association see as possible benefits of the framework advocated here?
The Geographical Association says:
Emphasis is placed on the following:
There is no definitive definition of what progress in geography means. Often, progress is assessed in terms of student performance related to level descriptors and examination marking criteria. To support learning you might adopt a broader consideration of progress that focuses on deepening and securing knowledge and understanding, and making connections rather than encouraging students to ‘tick one box’ and move on to the next challenge.
This section considers how a range of purposes determines the focus and implementation of assessment and how you might plan to integrate assessment into learning sequences. The following activity will help you to consider your own experiences of, and ideas about, assessment.
Note down what comes to mind when you think about assessment. The following questions will help to prompt your thinking:
Make lists of what you think assessment should achieve from the perspective of the:
Which do you think are the most important purposes of assessment and why?
You may have thought of timed, written tests that were intended to sum up whatever you had learned over a course, the results of which determined setting and further study paths. Associated with these memories there may be feelings of anxiety or elation. As a successful learner you will have learned to cope with such assessments. You may have found them motivational. For those who find learning more difficult, or who had an off-day, however, assessment may impact on their self-confidence and self-worth, as well as their attitude towards geography and towards school.
The purposes of assessment are discussed on the next page.
More often than not, assessment in the past was done to students. Its main purpose was not to help improve learning; it was to find out what someone did – or did not – know. Learners were often simply given a mark or a brief comment (‘excellent’, ‘could do better’ and so on). Little help was given to learners regarding their particular difficulties or how they might improve their work. This is assessment of learning (AoL), which is also known as summative assessment.
The role of assessment in school today is thought about very differently – much emphasis is placed on assessment for learning (AfL, also known as formative assessment). Links between different types of assessment are summarised in Figure 1, and Table 1 distinguishes between AoL and AfL.
Figure 1 is a complex diagram that shows planning, teaching and assessment as connected activities. It is read from left to right and includes several loops. The first box is ‘Assess pupils’ current knowledge and understanding’. The arrow leads to the next box on the right, which is ‘Planning’. An arrow straight down from this leads to ‘Teaching’. It is a double-headed arrow to indicate that planning and teaching inform each other. The teaching box has three other linked boxes; ‘continual assessment of pupils’ learning’, ‘internal test (e.g. end-of-topic test)’ and ‘external examination’. All these loop back to the planning box to indicate that assessment informs planning. Even tests are used to inform planning and teaching although the externally set examination remains as a final assessment.
Assessment of learning | Assessment for learning | |
---|---|---|
Purpose | To find out what students know, understand and can do (skills) | To find out what students know, understand and can do (skills) |
Uses | Medium and long-term reporting to others (exam results) Judging school effectiveness Certification | Day to day and within sequences of lessons, assessment for and with students To inform planning (future learning objectives) To support students in making and monitoring progress (identify individual, evolving needs) To support teacher evaluation of the effectiveness of practice (check objectives against outcomes) |
Audiences | Parents School External agencies (e.g. inspections) | Students Teacher |
An over-reliance on AoL – focusing on grades rather than where to go next – can damage the self-esteem of low attainers, while high attainers become reluctant to take risks due to fear of failure. AfL approaches seek to avoid these pitfalls. The importance of AfL and the crucial role that it plays in enhancing teaching and learning is supported by a great deal of research. It is important to ensure that assessment is the servant of teaching and learning and not their master.
Can summative assessment be used formatively?
If assessment is to support learning, then how it is carried out is of prime importance. It is not simply what a teacher does but also how it is done that is important. To make AfL integral to learning try to:
Without the process of adapting teaching and learning, the assessment is not formative – it is merely frequent.
Revisit the files from the GA web page that you saved for Section 1 Activity 2.
The PowerPoint presentation includes some examples based on a tectonics unit. Look at slide 13 to pick out ‘what to assess’, using the age-related benchmark expectations from page 4 of the Framework pdf.
Think about how this will translate into ‘how’, using slides 23–26.
Thinking about the shorter term, read Sidhu (2011), Why use AfL? Dusting off the black box.
Identifying what you want students to learn
Integrating assessment into every lesson
While AoL has important roles to play in the education system, AfL can foster a sense of interdependence in the classroom and help to empower and engage students (Sidhu, 2011). In terms of how to assess, you need to have a long-term strategy to integrate AfL and AoL related to progression within the geography curriculum. Medium- and short-term assessment can then be devised to give all students the opportunity to demonstrate progress and give you the opportunity to respond to learners’ needs.
In this section you will consider the roles of questioning and feedback, and how involving students in the assessment process supports them in becoming independent learners.
You may ask students questions to develop a narrative of the lesson or to reinforce instructions and learning intentions as a key management tool. Other questions are intended to assess knowledge, understanding and skills. These assessment questions may range in their cognitive challenge and may be either closed or open (Figure 2).
Figure 2 shows a diagram with two axes. On the horizontal x axis an arrow labelled as ‘increasing attention to pupils’ thinking’ goes from left to right. On the far left of the arrow relatively little time for thinking is equated with closed questions, for which there is one acceptable answer. On the far right of the x axis more time for thinking is equated to open questioning, in which there will be many acceptable answers.
On the vertical Y axis the scale goes from low to high levels of cognitive demand made on pupils. There are five categories from recall of knowledge at the bottom, to comprehension of data, analysis of data, synthesis and finally evaluation at the top of this scale.
There are four examples of closed questions to make increasing cognitive demands on pupils. They are arranged on the left-hand side of the diagram in text boxes. At the bottom for recall of knowledge is ‘This feature is called an e… ?’ The intended answer is escarpment. For comprehension of data the question is ‘Look at the graph. What is the temperature for April?’ For analysis of data the question is ‘Which three factors were important for the location of this industry?’ Finally, at the top for evaluation, the closed question is ‘Which of these three sites should be used for a hypermarket?’
There are five examples of open questions to make increasing cognitive demands on pupils. They are arranged on the right-hand side of the diagram in text boxes. At the bottom for recall of knowledge is ‘What do you remember about the urban areas shown in this film?’ For comprehension of data the question is ‘In what ways do these average temperature figures not give the full picture?’ For analysis of data the question is ‘What would be the most important factors to take into account in planning a new residential estate?’ For synthesis the question is ‘How would you measure how fast a glacier is moving?’ Finally, in the top right-hand side the open question for evaluation is ‘Do you think this pedestrianisation plan should go ahead? Justify your opinion.’
Aim to make your questioning inclusive. Planning questions before teaching a lesson and tailoring these questions to students within your classes can build student motivation. Remember there are different types of question that elicit different types of response. Try to stretch and challenge all of your students. Try not to put a ceiling on what they might be able to achieve with a little support (or scaffolding).
Print Figure 2 and annotate the diagram to show your ideas on:
For a lesson you are planning, or using the Year 12 lesson plan, devise a series of questions that you could pose, which vary in terms of cognitive challenge and closed/open nature. Try to list a minimum of twelve questions and then categorise these questions using Bloom’s revised taxonomy (Figure 3).
This diagram describes six sets of thinking skills. The title for each set of thinking skills is followed by a list of relevant actions. The titles of the six sets of thinking are listed here in order from the bottom of the diagram to the top, followed by the related actions. A wide arrow can be seen behind the text starting at the bottom and pointing upwards beyond the top of the text.
First, there is ‘remembering’, which includes recalling information, recognising, listing, describing, retrieving, naming and finding. Then there is ‘understanding’, which includes explaining ideas or concepts, interpreting, summarising, paraphrasing, classifying and explaining. Thirdly, there is ‘applying’, which includes using information in another familiar situation, implementing, carrying out, using and executing. The fourth set is titled ‘analysing’ and includes breaking information into parts to explore understandings and relationships, comparing, organising, deconstructing, interrogating and finding.
Fifth is ‘evaluating’, which includes justifying a decision or course of action, checking, hypothesising, critiquing, experimenting and judging. Finally, ‘creating’ might involve generating new ideas, products or ways of viewing things, designing, constructing, planning, producing and inventing.
To the left-hand side of the hierarchical list is a bracket around the top three sets of thinking skills: creating, evaluating and analysing. These are described with a label that reads ‘higher-order thinking skills’.
Practical strategies for effective questioning for AfL include:
Significant amounts of time and effort are expended on teacher and peer assessment to provide oral and written feedback comments – the challenge is to make this feedback effective (specific, encouraging, clear) and to engage students in a dialogue about their work.
Weeden (2005) suggests prompts should encourage immediate improvements. Can you think of some examples?
You can look for examples of these and other prompts in the next activity, which focuses on the feedback students receive from a teacher.
Watch the ‘Group work and feedback’ video. (Alternatively, you can read a transcript.)
Note any issues that are relevant to your own practice or tips that you could develop in your own feedback.
For example:
Improving learning through assessment requires students to be involved in their own learning, assessing themselves and understanding what they need to do to improve (Black and Wiliam, 1998). This can be achieved through:
Peer assessment is an important tool in enabling students to develop as independent learners. Independent learners are able to self-assess effectively and to use metacognitive skills to decide how to move forward, developing self-regulation and self-efficacy. Engaging with criteria and giving feedback in peer assessment will help students to assess their own learning. They will also become more engaged in their learning, and will build their confidence in discussing work with peers in a reflective, collaborative process. To facilitate self and peer assessment you need to commit to learners having control over the process, being able to discuss learning and developing effective student feedback.
Open the geography self-assessment sheet.
Adapt the sheet for a contrasting topic of your choice.
Note the incorporation of targets in this self-assessment sheet.
Watch the video at ‘Secondary AfL – geography’. (Alternatively, you can read a transcript.)
Observe the variety of support provided to different year groups for peer assessment.
The example includes AfL that is very directly related to AoL, tied to mark schemes and model answers. Can you see any limitations in this approach?
Listen to Dylan Wiliam review some of the benefits of self and peer assessment as a key component of effective learning
Student involvement in setting ‘next steps’ and providing feedback aids their learning about geography and about the skills involved in learning. However, be aware that:
You will need to consider issues like these as you support student self and peer assessment.
The type of assessment used influences the type of student learning: a focus on formulaic testing can encourage ‘teaching to the test’ to maximise performance and may result in shallow learning. The intention of AfL is to facilitate geographical learning that is deep and advances student understanding as well as skills and independence (Weeden, 2013, p. 149).
The preceding sections in this course have already alluded to some challenges related to assessment in geography, including differing definitions of progress and purposes of assessment; an accountability culture that focuses attention on AoL and piecemeal adoption of AfL techniques.
This section will focus on the challenges related to reliability and validity of assessments and to differentiation.
When considering whether assessment is fair to all students, two issues are important: validity and reliability. Validity asks whether grades generated by a testing system represent a student’s achievement in the whole of geography. Can a series of timed, written tests at the end of a key stage assess all those things we think are important for students to learn about in school geography? Butt (n.d.) describes AoL as generating ‘high stakes’ results. By contrast, he describes teacher assessment outputs as ‘low stakes’. Teacher assessment is often seen as being of lower status than the results of tests even though it is more likely to be valid in these terms.
An over-reliance on test results may lead teachers to make generalisations and judgements about a student’s capability in all aspects of geography, based on the formal testing of a subset. For example, a grade ascribed on a short answer test says nothing about a student’s problem-solving or creative capacities in geography, nor about their ability to work in groups or engage in extended tasks. Perhaps all that can be said is that the tests simply tell us about the capabilities of students to answer questions at a particular time and of a particular type (and in the conditions and circumstances of the test) – no more and no less.
Reliability asks whether a student’s performance changes (or not) depending on the particular questions that are set. Ideally, assessments should give every student an optimal opportunity to demonstrate what they know. In practice, however, tests have been found to be biased against students from particular backgrounds, socio-economic classes, ethnic groups or gender (Pullin, 1993; Cooper, 1998). Equity issues are particularly important when assessment results are used to label students or deny them access to courses or careers in the future.
Research shows that working-class children:
… go into lower sets …
… are set less challenging test items …
… and therefore they have to answer more ‘realistic’ test items …
… so they achieve lower test results than they deserve …
… so they are confirmed as being appropriately placed in lower sets …
… so they may experience a less rich curriculum, and will learn less content …
… which restricts their opportunities to get high grades in examinations at the end of their schooling …
… which restricts their career opportunities …
… which means they and their family may be locked into a cycle of underachievement.
As you set assessments look for bias that might disadvantage different groups of students. Avoid setting a ceiling in terms of what students can achieve.
Are tests used fairly?
Differentiation is planning to ensure that all students in the class can understand and make progress in their learning. It includes tailoring assessment and feedback to the needs of individual students so that they can make progress and will help to address some of the concerns about reliability and validity of assessment.
Hattie (2012) identifies the following five characteristics of effective differentiation, all of which are relevant to assessment:
Planning assessment that offers all of these five characteristics is not easy and requires experience and knowledge of what works. However, that should not stop you working to achieve effective differentiation. Using AfL will enable you to find out who is or is not making progress so that you can use assessment to support the learning of all students.
How could geographical assessments discriminate against working class students?
You might consider a range of learning and assessment activities, experiences outside school or access to resources.
How can you effectively differentiate to avoid such discrimination?
There is a wide variety of possible discrimination. Some teachers will adopt a ‘deficit model’ in relation to the experiences, aspirations and abilities of working-class students. Such assumptions may affect the challenge and the type of assessments used.
At the other end of the scale, some teachers are oblivious to potential barriers to learning related to the socio-economic situation of students. Limited access to resources and family support may disadvantage some students.
The key to differentiating to avoid discrimination lies in getting to know the students. It is important not to label working-class students as a homogeneous group.
Read each of the short student profiles below. For each student, write notes about how you might recognise their specific needs related to AfL in geography lessons.
Ash has cerebral palsy, which causes difficulty with coordination. He also tires easily.
Winston has Asperger’s syndrome. He is fascinated by studying different places but has communication difficulties and finds it difficult to be creative.
Nina came to Britain with her parents following a war in her own country. Her parents have since divorced and Nina lives with her mother. She is experiencing emotional difficulties, which impact on her social relationships and her ability to concentrate.
You may have considered:
Assessment of the physical environment would be crucial if you were working outside the classroom with Ash.
What other factors might you consider when planning inclusive assessment?
List a range of factors, explain their relevance and suggest effective responses.
A wide range of disabilities and special educational needs of students will affect their assessed work in many ways. Considering the needs of individual students, rather than labelling all students with a condition as being the same, is key to designing and implementing inclusive assessment.
Some students have different preferred learning styles. The format of assessments may affect their performance and progress, so including a variety of assessment formats (perhaps giving students choices) will be more inclusive.
Students with poor recall or poor attendance may be unable to demonstrate higher-order thinking skills if factual information is not provided. Including resources in assessments can help these students to exhibit skills such as analysis, evaluation and synthesis.
When planning for assessment for learning and assessment of learning, keep issues of validity, reliability and inclusivity in mind. Maintaining a focus on these will help you to integrate assessments that will inform your teaching and help students to make more progress.
Through considering the issues raised in this course, you will have realised that some people assume assessment of geography is straightforward and easy. They often have a narrow view of what geography is and may see learning geography as a matter of learning place names and facts. As more people see geography as a way of thinking about the world, identifying patterns and relationships and understanding complex problems, so assessing students’ progress will be seen to be more complex and multifaceted.
You should now also understand that assessment rarely means using a test or short questions, unless you need to assess the ability to take a test. Assessment should involve getting to the heart of students’ understanding, and hence requires activities that explore and challenge this. AfL involves students as they are the ones who are doing the learning. It should be continuous and integrated into learning activities so that students have the opportunity to act on feedback and you can adapt teaching and learning activities to more effectively support your students.
This free course was written by Paula Addison-Pettit.
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‘Progression, Think Piece’, Lambert, D., 2006, © The Geographical Association / www.geography.org.uk/
‘An assessment and progression framework for geography’; © The Geographical Association 2014 / www.geography.org.uk
‘Progression and assessment in Geography Summer 2014’, © The Geographical Association / http://www.geography.org.uk/
‘Why use AfL? Dusting off the black box’; Sidhu, R., Teaching Geography, Summer 2011, © The Geographical Association 2014 / www.geography.org.uk
Figure 2: ‘Two dimensions of questioning’; (Lambert and Balderstone, 2010, p. 105)
Figure 3: Bloom, B., Blooms’ Revised Taxonomy, taken from http://www.slideshare.not/ castanlucy/ blooms-taxonomy-457128
Figure 4: Catherine Yeulet, iStockphoto.com
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