PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DEL PERU

ESCUELA DE POSGRADO
MAESTRÍA EN EDUCACIÓN
CURSO: EVALUACIÓN DEL APRENDIZAJE

ACTIVIDAD 4
Diálogo 1
Assessment FOR and Assessment OF Learning/
Evaluación PARA y Evaluación DEL Aprendizaje

The terms Assessment FOR Learning and Assessment OF Learning come from the Black and Wiliam study
reported in "Inside the Black Box". They continue to be important concepts today…

“If assessments of learning provide evidence of achievement for public reporting, then assessments for learning
serve to help students learn more. The crucial distinction is between assessment to determine the status of
learning and assessment to promote greater learning….Assessments of and for learning are both important.
Since we in the U.S. already have many assessments of learning in place, if we are to balance the two, we must
make a much stronger investment in assessment for learning…It is tempting to equate the idea of assessment
for learning with our more common term, "formative assessment." But they are not the same. Assessment for
learning is about far more than testing more frequently or providing teachers with evidence so that they can
revise instruction, although these steps are part of it. In addition, we now understand that assessment for
learning must involve students in the process.

When they assess for learning, teachers use the classroom assessment process and the continuous flow of
information about student achievement that it provides in order to advance, not merely check on, student
learning. They do this by:

• understanding and articulating in advance of teaching the achievement targets that their students are to
hit;
• informing their students about those learning goals, in terms that students understand
• becoming assessment literate and thus able to transform their expectations into assessment exercises
and scoring procedures that accurately reflect student achievement;
• using classroom assessments to build students' confidence in themselves as learners and help them take
responsibility for their own learning, so as to lay a foundation for lifelong learning;
• translating classroom assessment results into frequent descriptive feedback (versus judgmental
feedback) for students, providing them with specific insights as to how to improve;
• continuously adjusting instruction based on the results of classroom assessments;
• engaging students in regular self-assessment, with standards held constant so that students can watch
themselves grow over time and thus feel in charge of their own success; and
• actively involving students in communicating with their teacher and their families about their
achievement status and improvement.

Black and Wiliam reported that [these practices] "improved formative assessment helps low achievers more
than other students and so reduce the range of achievement while raising achievement overall." This result has
direct implications for districts seeking to reduce achievement gaps.”

Extract from: Stiggins, R. (2002). Assessment Crisis: The Absence Of Assessment FOR Learning. Phi Delta Kappan.
http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k0206sti.htm.

Para dialogar:
1. ¿Cuáles son las ideas claves de esta lectura?
2. ¿Cuáles son las implicancias de este extracto para la evaluación en el aula?
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DEL PERU
ESCUELA DE POSGRADO
MAESTRÍA EN EDUCACIÓN
CURSO: EVALUACIÓN DEL APRENDIZAJE

Diálogo 2
Improving assessment to improve learning/
Mejorando la evaluación para mejorar el aprendizaje

"Learning is driven by what teachers and pupils do in classrooms. Teachers have to manage complicated and
demanding situations, channeling the personal, emotional, and social pressures of a group of 30 or more
youngsters in order to help them learn immediately and become better learners in the future. Standards can be
raised only if teachers can tackle this task more effectively ...

... present policies [in the UK and the US] ... seem to treat the classroom as a black box. Certain inputs from the
outside -- pupils, teachers, other resources, management rules and requirements, parental anxieties, standards,
tests with high stakes, and so on -- are fed into the box. Some outputs are supposed to follow: pupils who are
more knowledgeable and competent, better test results, teachers who are reasonably satisfied, and so on. But
what is happening inside the box?

Teachers need to know about their pupils' progress and difficulties with learning so that they can adapt their
own work to meet pupils' needs -- needs that are often unpredictable and that vary from one pupil to another.
Teachers can find out what they need to know in a variety of ways, including observation and discussion in the
classroom and the reading of pupils' written work.

We use the general term assessment to refer to all those activities undertaken by teachers -- and by their
students in assessing themselves -- that provide information to be used as feedback to modify teaching and
learning activities. Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the evidence is actually used to adapt
the teaching to meet student needs ....

There is nothing new about any of this. All teachers make assessments in every class they teach. But there are
three important questions about this process that we seek to answer:

• Is there evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards?

In setting out to answer these questions, we have conducted an extensive survey of the research literature ....
The conclusion we have reached from our research review is that the answer to each of the three questions
above is clearly yes ....

.. we also acknowledge widespread evidence that fundamental change in education can be achieved only slowly
-- through programs of professional development that build on existing good practice. Thus we do not conclude
that formative assessment is yet another "magic bullet" for education. The issues involved are too complex and
too closely linked to both the difficulties of classroom practice and the beliefs that drive public policy."

Extract from: Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi
Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148.

Para dialogar:
1. ¿Cuáles son las ideas claves de esta lectura?
2. ¿Cuáles son las implicancias de este extracto para la evaluación en el aula?
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DEL PERU
ESCUELA DE POSGRADO
MAESTRÍA EN EDUCACIÓN
CURSO: EVALUACIÓN DEL APRENDIZAJE

Diálogo 3
Three assessment difficulties/
Tres dificultades de evaluación

"The most important difficulties with assessment revolve around three issues. The first issue is effective
learning.

• The tests used by teachers encourage rote and superficial learning even when teachers say they want to
develop understanding; many teachers seem unaware of the inconsistency.
• The questions and other methods teachers use are not shared with other teachers in the same school,
and they are not critically reviewed in relation to what they actually assess.
• For primary teachers particularly, there is a tendency to emphasize quantity and presentation of work
and to neglect its quality in relation to learning.

The second issue is negative impact:

• The giving of marks and the grading function are overemphasized, while the giving of useful advice
and the learning function are underemphasized.
• Approaches are used in which pupils are compared with one another, the prime purpose of which
seems to them to be competition rather than personal improvement; in consequence, assessment
feedback teaches low-achieving pupils that they lack "ability", causing them to come to believe that
they are not able to learn.

The third issue is the managerial role of assessments.

• Teachers' feedback to pupils seems to serve social and managerial functions, often at the expense of the
learning function.
• Teachers are often able to predict pupils' results on external tests because their own tests imitate them,
but at the same time teachers know too little about their pupils' learning needs.
• The collection of marks to fill in records is given higher priority than the analysis of pupils' work to
discern learning needs; furthermore, some teachers pay no attention to the assessment records of their
pupils' previous teachers.

Of course, not all these descriptions apply to all classrooms. Indeed, there are many schools and classrooms to
which they do not apply at all."

Extract from: Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi
Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148.

Para dialogar:
1. ¿Cuáles son las ideas claves de esta lectura?
2. ¿Cuáles son las implicancias de este extracto para la evaluación en el aula?
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DEL PERU
ESCUELA DE POSGRADO
MAESTRÍA EN EDUCACIÓN
CURSO: EVALUACIÓN DEL APRENDIZAJE

Diálogo 4
The value of constructive feedback/
El valor de la retroalimentación constructiva

"A report of schools in Switzerland states that 'a number of pupils .,. are content to "get by" .... Every teacher
who wants to practice formative assessment must reconstruct the teaching contracts so as to counteract the
habits acquired by his [sic] pupils' ....

The ultimate user of assessment information that is elicited in order to improve learning is the pupil. There are
negative and positive aspects of this fact. The negative aspect is illustrated by the preceding quotation. When
the classroom culture focuses on rewards, "gold stars," grades, or class ranking, then pupils look for ways to
obtain the best marks rather than to improve their learning. One reported consequence is that, when they have
any choice, pupils avoid difficult tasks. They also spend time and energy looking for clues to the "right
answer." Indeed, many become reluctant to ask questions out of a fear of failure. Pupils who encounter
difficulties are led to believe that they lack ability, and this belief leads them to attribute their difficulties to a
defect in themselves about which they cannot do a great deal. Thus they avoid investing effort in learning that
can lead only to disappointment, and they try to build up their self-esteem in other ways.

The positive aspect of students being the primary users of the information gleaned from formative assessments
is that negative outcomes -- such as an obsessive focus on competition and the attendant fear of failure on the
part of low achievers -- are not inevitable. What is needed is a culture of success, backed by a belief that all
pupils can achieve. In this regard, formative assessment can be a powerful weapon if it is communicated in the
right way. While formative assessment can help all pupils, it yields particularly good results with low achievers
by concentrating on specific problems with their work and giving them a clear understanding of what is wrong
and how to put it right. Pupils can accept and work with such messages, provided that they are not clouded by
overtones about ability, competition, and comparison with others. In summary, the message can be stated as
follows: feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what
he or she can do to improve, and should avoid comparisons with other pupils."

Extract from: Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Phi
Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148.

Para dialogar:
1. ¿Cuáles son las ideas claves de esta lectura?
2. ¿Cuáles son las implicancias de este extracto para la evaluación en el aula?
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DEL PERU
ESCUELA DE POSGRADO
MAESTRÍA EN EDUCACIÓN
CURSO: EVALUACIÓN DEL APRENDIZAJE

Diálogo 5
Improving learning through self-assessment/
Mejorando el aprendizaje a través de la auto-evaluación

"Many successful innovations have developed self- and peer-assessment by pupils as ways of
enhancing formative assessment, and such work has achieved some success with pupils from age
5 upward. This link of formative assessment to self-assessment is not an accident; indeed, it is
inevitable.

To explain this last statement, we should first note that the main problem that those who are
developing self-assessments encounter is not a problem of reliability and trustworthiness. Pupils
are generally honest and reliable in assessing both themselves and one another; they can even be
too hard on themselves. The main problem is that pupils can assess themselves only when they
have a sufficiently clear picture of the targets that their learning is meant to attain. Surprisingly,
and sadly, many pupils do not have such a picture, and they appear to have become accustomed
to receiving classroom teaching as an arbitrary sequence of exercises with no overarching
rationale. To overcome this pattern of passive reception requires hard and sustained work. When
pupils do acquire such an overview, they then become more committed and more effective as
learners. Moreover, their own assessments become an object of discussion with their teachers and
with one another, and this discussion further promotes the reflection on one's own thinking that is
essential to good learning.

Thus self-assessment by pupils, far from being a luxury, is in fact an essential component of
formative assessment. When anyone is trying to learn, feedback about the effort has three
elements: recognition of the desired goal, evidence about present position, and some
understanding of a way to close the gap between the two .... All three must be understood to
some degree by anyone before he or she can take action to improve learning.

Such an argument is consistent with more general ideas established by research into the way
people learn. New understandings are not simply swallowed and stored in isolation; they have to
be assimilated in relation to pre-existing ideas. The new and the old may be inconsistent or even
in conflict, and the disparities must be resolved by thoughtful actions on the part of the learner.
Realizing that there are new goals for the learning is an essential part of this process of
assimilation. Thus we conclude: if formative assessment is to be productive, pupils should be
trained in self-assessment so that they can understand the main purposes of their learning and
thereby grasp what they need to do to achieve."

Extract from: Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom
assessment. Phi Delta Kappan, 80(2), 139-148.

Para dialogar:
1. ¿Cuáles son las ideas claves de esta lectura?
2. ¿Cuáles son las implicancias de este extracto para la evaluación en el aula?