by Kelvin Tan
2020 has often been punned as the year of perfect vision. Yet, our 2020 annus horribilis gave us a world wide crisis that no one could have envisioned. All our planning and contingency plans could not work, initially, for a scenario no one had predicted. Perhaps it challenges our assumptions about how and whether we can design and ensure long term learning into the future.
How can we prepare for something that we cannot predict?
For a start, what we can do is examine how we have lulled and constrained our learners to unduly privilege and be dependent on certainty and predictability in schools. Assessment would be a logical place to begin examining this in education. Many assessment practices prioritise and reward certainty and replicability. For example, should marking schemes for exact anticipated answers be relooked? And should predictive validity matter so much?
The COVID-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon that has disrupted or even damaged lives and livelihoods. The ensuing changes have drastically altered the foundations and fundamentals of every country’s socio-economic-political systems, and Singapore is no exception. Much of the focus in many countries turned to providing alternatives for large scale and high stakes examinations. The use of algorithms to derive comparable student examination scores from previous school based assessments did not seem to inspire pubic trust and confidence in several countries. Instead, the consequent derived scores reflected vast disparities in student achievement according to socio-economic demographics.
A needful and urgent response is to prepare and provide alternatives to large scale examinations that is reliant on physically proximal invigilation. But addressing examination security is perhaps symptomatic of a deeper chronic issue. Why is society so reliant on examinations despite its obvious limitations? And by identifying (only) large scale national assessments to be ‘high stakes assessment’, do we imply that little or nothing is at stake in all other assessments?
What is at stake in assessment beyond examinations, and what is at stake in Assessment for Learning for our learners? There is no better time to ponder how and how well assessment, especially Assessment for Learning, has been supporting and serving our learners. It should not be enough for assessment to generally (or worse vaguely) support learning. Nor should it be good enough for enacting practices ‘in the spirit of formative assessment’ without ensuring that learners have been helped to achieve desired learning outcomes. And because assessment serves different and sometimes conflicting purposes, it would not suffice for discrete instances of assessment to serve a single purpose.
In this issue, we are pleased to feature research and educators who have sought to understand and use assessment to serve all learners. For Assessment to be fit for all learners, we would have to understand the diversity of our learners, be strategic and selective in our choice of practices, be patient in our implementation and approaches, and be encouraged by the great many educators in Singapore who have worked tirelessly for all their learners.
We begin with a current research on assessment feedback in secondary schools that reveals how students engage with written feedback. We learn that feedback should engage our learners cognitively, behaviourally and affectively in order to optimise their reception and responses to feedback. Following that, Rachel Goh outlines, with feedback artifacts, three big ideas for assessment to support and develop all learners in their learning gaps, and beyond.
Of course, teachers’ assessment literacy is important as well, and recognizing teachers as learners goes a long way towards equipping educators with the means and the community to learn about assessment. Riverside Secondary School’s journey in 2020 describes a bespoke and strategic approach that focused on using AfL to pursue and ensure evidence of students’ learning outcomes.
However well intended our efforts to teach all our charges, we will inevitably come across students with rather different, perhaps even special, learning needs. Siti Asjamiah’s observations of dyslexic students’ reception and responses to home based learning and feedback is instructive and insightful. It challenges us to broaden our skill set and deepen our pedagogical patience and compassion for students who learn in very different ways.
Likewise, Michelle Yap explains in her video how AfL in Music should be tailored for students, whilst Karima Syahirah and Adeline Wang argues for AfL and student feedback literacy in secondary and primary schools respectively. How do we know if our assessment is fit for learners? One way is to hear what our learners have to say about our efforts in their own voice.
In that context, it is our pleasure to kick off our special issue of AFAL on “Assessment fit for Learners” by featuring a video on two special learners, Heather, now a Primary 3 student from Chua Chu Kang Primary School, and her teacher Mrs Karyn Hon.
We want to recognize you, our readers, as fellow learners in AfL too. That means we are interested in engaging with you beyond the content of our bulletin, and hearing your thoughts and questions. A good way would be for you to zoom with the contributors of this issue on 1 April 2021, from 3-4pm. Please register your interest here, and let us know if you would like to meet any of our contributors in particular.
Finally, let me share something to encourage all of us in this exciting and challenging year ahead: “If you do not make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness”. Please do everything you can to ensure your well being as a learner, so that you can discharge your complete capacity as a teacher. Don’t continue on a depleting tank until you find yourselves running on empty. May you find within this bulletin stories, ideas, and encouragement that is fit for you in your capacity as a learner.