Assessment for Learning

by Paul Black, Chris Harrison, Clara Lee

This book aims to give teachers, school heads, and others leaders and trainers in teaching, ideas and advice about improving formative assessment in the classroom. The ideas and advice are based on two years of work in a project which involved the team of authors at King's College working in close collaboration with thirty-six teachers in schools in Medway and Oxfordshire. This work was itself inspired by a review of over two-hundred and fifty research studies worldwide which established hard evidence that development of formative assessment raises students' test scores. This evidence has been confirmed by significant improvements in the achievements of the students in the project classes.

After a brief review of the research background and of the project itself, successive chapters describe the specific practices which teachers have found fruitful and the underlying ideas about learning that these developments illustrate. Later chapters discuss the problems that teachers encountered in taking on the changes in their classroom role that the new practices required and give guidance for school managements and LEAs about promoting and supporting the changes.

The book is illustrated throughout with quotations from the writing of the teachers involved which describe in their own words how they turned the ideas from the King's staff into practical action in their schools.

Genres: Education, Teaching, Nonfiction

135 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Gil Cowlishaw · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very useful but incredibly boring.

[Michael Loveless · Rating 3 out of 5]

Assessment For Learning is more academic than most books about pedagogy. The authors talk more about the research they did on formative assessment. In fact the whole book is about is base on a research study that involve a relatively small number of teachers from a few different schools that met together with each other and the researchers to find new ways to use formative assessment effectively. They focused on math and science teachers and later added English teachers. The book goes into considerable detail about how the study was organized and carried out. The review of literature points out an interesting paradox. The use of formative assessment has proven to have powerful, positive effects, and most teachers who try to use it don't see much success with it. These two facts suggest that when a school decides to focus on the use of formative assessment to improve learning, it's important that teachers have a time, support, training, and a high level of commitment.

The book suggests four basic methods of using formative assessment: questioning, written feedback, peer and self-assessment, and the formative use of summative tests. For questioning, the authors suggest more open-ended questions, more wait time, and encouraging students to respond to each other's comments. For written feedback, the authors suggest timely, specific feedback about the characteristics of student work - maybe without any letter grades at all. Peer and self-assessment can be done only if students have clear rubrics that indicate what quality work should look like. Finally, the authors suggest using summative tests for formative purposes by discussing questions missed and by allowing students opportunities to correct errors.

The book was a little dry and academic, but it's filled with good ideas to move kids past simple rote learning to deeper thinking.

[Nicholas Little · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really useful book for anyone in the teaching profession at any level, and one to keep for later reference. A nuanced book grounded in rigorous research.

[Bretbenesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fantastic introduction to assessment _for_ learning, a method of teaching that helps students learn in a much, MUCH more efficient way than what most people are already doing.

It contains enough concrete examples to get someone started---I am looking forward to implementing the ideas in my classroom this semester.

[Steve Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gem of a book.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in conjunction with the Black Box series. Taken together, it constitutes a great argument for formative assessment and the need to adopting formative practices.

[Annabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some useful ideas, but essentially just re-hashes and summarises studies. Useful if that's what you're looking for though