‘If you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.’
The above words are attributed to Albert Einstein. His point is that we are all geniuses, but whether our genius is evident depends upon what is being measured. The traditional problem in schools is that we value what can be measured rather than measuring what we value. All learners, young and old, are complex beings with immense capacities, are extremely hard to evaluate and measure, and are all too likely to never reach their potential of learning in certain areas because they have decided that they are Einstein’s fish trying (and naturally failing) to climb the tree.
All of this is not to say that I, and we at L.I.S., do not value standardised assessment and the extremely complex task of deciding a student’s level of attainment measured against an internationally recognised benchmark of achievement. In fact, the very opposite is true. Having experienced the full range of attitudes and practices, from rigid testing and averaging of students’ marks to the refusal to undertake external assessments (until the IB Diploma, for which students were woefully ill-prepared) and even give grades on report cards, my family and I chose LIS because it offered the Cambridge Checkpoint tests in Grade 8, the IGCSE in Grades 9 and 10, and of course the IB Diploma in Grades 11 and 12. And our accuracy at LIS of prediction in these assessments for our students – the measure by which we can determine to what extent our teachers know the course content, the assessments, and the students – is by some distance the best of the international schools in which I’ve worked. It is just that the desire of teachers to prove objectively and beyond doubt to parents and to students themselves what level of attainment the student is reaching often undermines the primary purpose of assessment – to enable the student to learn and progress.
Take, for example, the traditional method of setting largely arbitrary percentage boundaries for different levels, designing tests to meet those boundaries (such a demanding task that full-time employees of global examination boards need to amend boundaries every year since they have been unsuccessful in achieving it), and then averaging student performance in those tests to determine what level (7-1) they have attained within that other spectrum of performance (100-1). Inevitably, students, parents and teachers get drawn into long discussions about whether or not they should be a 6 or a 5 based on the percentage breakdown, when in fact the teacher has a strong opinion not only using those three tests but also on all of the practice work, the discussion, the project work and the general appreciation of the subject at what level the student’s conceptual understanding is and at what level their skills are. In short, according to the descriptions of performance in our attainment criteria, the teacher is able to make a professional judgement using formal and informal, summative and formative pieces of data of the student’s level in just the same way as a doctor does for a patient. Our soon-to-be-published Assessment Policy Handbook explains how, in fact, examination boards such as IGCSE and the IB use criterion-referenced assessment and only introduce percentages at all because they lack the finer insight into a student’s abilities that a school and a teacher has. This explains why different subjects – and even the same subjects but in different languages, such as English and German Literature – have totally different level boundaries. At LIS, we assess students using a small number of larger assessment tasks throughout the year, awarding levels 7-1 for these tasks, but the overall calculation of a report card grade is not an average of these marks but a professional judgement of the student’s final consistent level, by the teacher, at the time of reporting.
The primary purpose of any assessment system must be for the continued learning of the students. Assessment is such an effective tool for learning; it has more limited (though still important) value as a judgement of current learning levels. These different types of assessment are often separated into formative assessment and summative assessment. ‘When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment; when the customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment’ (Paul Black). All too often, however, school assessment and reporting systems are designed around averaging a student’s performance over a given period of time rather than explaining clearly how they are doing consistently and what they need to do next to continue to learn and improve.
Consider this example: you are the head coach of a football team, and your chosen penalty-kick taker is practicing penalties during training in preparation for the match on Saturday. On Monday he takes five kicks and misses them all, on Tuesday he scores one out of five, Wednesday two out of five, Thursday three out of five, and Friday four out of five. On Saturday, after an excellent week of pressure-free practice and progress, his side is awarded three penalties and he scores them all. Using a traditional reporting and assessment system, his 13 out of 28 penalties would probably be a failing grade (perhaps a D) for his penalties for the week. However, the assessment has in fact allowed him to progress and, when it matters, he scores 100% of penalties and deserves an A* or Level 7 grade. Averaging grades in order to try to objectively prove a student’s level mathematically not only puts too much emphasis on (usually lower) outliers, but it penalises students for making progress and thus convinces many to give up trying. Also, it can often just not give very accurate information. Consider the student who is an excellent gymnast (the first P.E. unit) but a poor footballer (the second). They actually gain a Level 7 then a Level 3, but the information on the report card averages out at a 5, failing to give clear and accurate indication of performance level in any area.
On the topic of feedback, all too often when we give grades we believe that this is feedback enough: the student gained 15/25 in a test, so they need to look at what they did wrong, try to generalise the issue and the related conceptual understanding to be able to reapply it to something new, and do better next time. Marks and grades are proven to narrow the students’ focus away from the feedback on how to improve and force them to focus only on the judgement of how they’ve done – the very opposite of its purpose when it is being used effectively. Butler’s study as early as 1988 shows that students improve more quickly when they are given feedback without grades, and, when they are given grades even alongside the same high-quality feedback, they ignore the feedback and focus only on the grade. This is why this year at L.I.S. we are pushing towards a system with fewer large assessment grades, with an encouragement to give as few numbers on tests as possible allowing students instead to focus on the feedback, and will be sharing those few assessment grades and formative feedback comments with parents through the Open Gradebook facility twice per year on the Parent Portal. This way parents can see the authentic, target-specific feedback given by teachers to students to help them with their next-steps, allowing for open conversations and better insight for parents wanting to support the learning process at home.