Differentiation in Stage 6 Assessment

UNSW, where Ignite the Spark 2018 took place

About a week ago I attended the Ignite the Spark 2018 Conference. This Professional Learning was mainly focused on assessment in relation to giftedness but what was most interesting across the conference was that, underneath a rhetoric built around excitement for assessment and the need for teacher quality, the real subtext of most of the sessions seemed to be that the HSC Exams have become obsolete and that the requirements handed down from NESA and the DoE aren't represented by this increasingly irrelevant process.

But, like it or not, the HSC exams remain largely unchanged and this means that Stage 6 has become an increasingly challenging transition phase between all the requirements of 21st century learning covered by Years K-10 and the need to perform well in a 19th century-styled examination at the end of Year 12. 

Enter Lisa O'Neill, the Head Teacher of HSIE at St Mary's Senior High, who presented a brilliant seminar at Ignite the Spark that centred on how we can better meet the challenges set forth by the demands of the HSC in 2018 and beyond by differentiating our assessment of Year 11 and 12. In her presentation Lisa identified our tendency as teachers to focus on preparing students for exams, and the way that our assessment tasks lead towards the HSC exams, and questioned the capacity of these assessments in actually helping these students to learn. We can't eradicate the exam but there is a concerted need to shift our thinking so that students become more skill-focused. NESA seems to be acknowledging this through the mandating of only 1 formalised examination per subject, per year. There is an undeniable tension, though, between the push for assessment in Stage 6 to become less focused on preparing for the HSC exams and the HSC exam-focused culture that already exists in NSW schools.

Here are some things we need to consider:

• NESA syllabuses include a requirement that each KLA assesses their students using assessment as, of, and for learning. I've tended to interpret this as meaning that not all assessment tasks should be based on establishing data that assesses student ability (assessment of learning).
• About 60% of domestic university student enrollments from 2014-2017 were non-ATAR, which suggests that universities are becoming less concerned with the HSC examination when it comes to evaluating who they admit into their courses.

Getting back to Lisa O'Neill's Differentiation in Stage 6 Assessment presentation, she takes her lead from John Hattie in approaching differentiation as something that "relates more to addressing students' different phases of learning from novice to capable to proficient rather than merely providing different activities to different (groups of) students" (from Hattie's Visible Learning for Teaching). O'Neill also piqued my interest by using this to interpret the as, of and for dichotomy of assessment in a more holistic sense - that each individual assessment task should encapsulate all three of these forms of assessment. 

I think I'm down with that. 

Linking her work to the Professional Standards, O'Neill highlighted Standard 1, IE. 'Know Your Students', and clarified her interpretation of differentiation as having one broad task that allows access points for all students. In a nutshell, assessment:

• Should provide students with multiple ways to achieve.
• Can provide access points for students moving through a spectrum of novice to capable to proficient.

O'Neill presents on the Assessment Cycle of Love

 Here are some other recommendations made by O'Neill:

1. Use what she refers to as the 'Assessment Cycle of Love', a diagrammatic tool for designing assessment, to identify gaps in your tasks. Are the outcomes, marking criteria, feedback, and process of assessment all as per NESA advice? Are assessment as, of and for learning all functional within the task?
2. Staff evaluation should be an integral part of the process, with consideration of whether a task has allowed students to set learning goals, and what skills students were taught while undertaking the task.  
3. Know the data - use SMART, SCOUT, our own assessment tasks, and the Educator Calculator (a data tool for assessment that can be found at the DoE Centre for Education on Statistics and Evaluation).
4. Consider the need for access points in tasks so students don't become disheartened when an assessment task has shown them that they can't do anything in preparation for the HSC exams. They might be able to access a band in the marking criteria, but can they access a skill set?
5. Include feedback in the marking criteria. Feedback is pivotal for Stage 6 assessment and all criteria should be a form of assessment for learning (IE. What can teachers and students alike gain from reading this criteria in preparing for future learning?)
6. Can we shift the student mindset away from marks and towards skills? Have students make an appointment for feedback conferencing and use this time for students to annotate their own response. Identity their areas of weaknesses ahead of time and get them to look for these weaknesses in the task so that they can establish learning goals.

Some Useful Links

"Crunching the Numbers" - A report from the Mitchell Institute on the use and usefulness of the ATAR.
Student Conferencing and Feedback  - providing students with 1:1 feedback to facilitate personal growth.
Assessment For Learning - an alternative approach in using separate diagnostic assessment with students.