I always have the impression – I know not why – that people who educate their children at home (known as “homeschoolers” in the USA) are somehow not regarded as “proper” teachers. Yet if you think about it, they potentially have much less of a support network than teachers in a school, and less guidance on how to do things. If I am correct in such sweeping assumptions, perhaps there is something the rest of us can learn from them in certain areas? I mean, if they have had to do a lot of figuring things out for themselves, to find out what works and what doesn’t work in their particular context, it would be a wasted opportunity to not benefit from that in some way.

A case in point is assessing youngsters’ understanding of ICT. It’s a notoriously difficult thing to do. Without going into a lot of detail now (see this article for more, although it needs some updating), the chief issues are the following:

• Is the assessment valid, ie does it measure what it purports to measure? You could be measuring literacy, for instance.
• Is it reliable? That is, if you applied the same test to similar pupils elsewhere, or the same pupils tomorrow, would the results come out more or less the same?
• Are you assessing the pupil’s own work, or a joint effort? How do you know what the pupil has done by themselves?
• The nature of the assessment can itself affect the result. If the pupils have learnt something using technology, testing them with a pencil and paper test is not likely to be appropriate. It will almost certainly yield a different outcome than if you used technology for the assessment. Similarly, if the pupils have been learning through scenario/problem-based learning and are tested through multiple choice, there is likely to be a question about validity.
• Rubrics: I am not sure they are ever really valid, and think they tend to be either too “locked down” or not objective enough.

So I was interested to read Ashley Allain’s views on assessment. Ashley, a homeschooling mother of four who contributed two fantastic case studies to the Amazing Web 2.0 Projects Book says:

To coin a phrase from Howard Gardner, I want to know if our children are reaching a level of "genuine understanding".  In other words, I want to see if they have moved beyond basic mastery of the material towards a deeper, richer level of understanding.

This resonates with me. I sometimes meet people who know a lot of stuff and yet have no clue how to apply their knowledge in a real situation. It’s as if they know, but do not truly understand.

Ashley goes on to say that the usual sort of testing regime had unfortunate side effects:

As a matter of fact, our then second-grader, directly associated her daily mood with how well she performed on a given test.

As a consequence,

We take a more organic approach versus a rigid, test-driven curriculum.  Assessment is often done through formal discussions, projects, and portfolios.

Have the pupils fared badly in compulsory tests? Quite the opposite. Ashley’s inspiring post (do go to it and read it in its entirety) suggests that if you can drag yourself away from checkboxes, point scores and all the rest of it, assessment can be both enjoyable and reasonably accurate.

Three reasons why this is good news, three reasons it worked for me, and two necessary preconditions.

In one of those all-too-common moments in which the future catches up to the past, Angela McFarlane, revealed recently that audio comments by teachers on their students’ work is proving very effective. So what, if anything, is significant about this? Plenty.

Professor McFarlane was speaking at the Naace 2009 Conference, and by ‘audio comment’ she was referring to a spoken message by the teacher. This worked, apparently, because students interpreted it as showing a lot of interest in them personally. I suspect it also worked because students tend not to read comments unless you specifically ask them to, for instance when you give them their work back.

Useful feedback?Now, I think the news about the audio comment is good, for three reasons. First, the whole point of commenting on a student’s work is to get them to act on it in some way. If they’re not reading your comments, what’s the point? So it’s good that they actually listen to audio comments.

Second, there’s a teacher workload issue. If you can talk faster than you can write, then why not record your comments? Makes perfect sense to me.

Third, it vindicates (after all these years) my own practice when I was a teacher, which was as follows. I took the view that it is difficult to always give copious high quality feedback on 30 pieces of work for each of 10 classes at least once a week. So what I tended to do was write short notes on most of the work most of the time, but I would supplement that by having in-depth discussions with each student during the lessons themselves. I worked on the basis that if I saw 6 students a lesson for these talks, I could see each one twice over the course of a term.

This worked really well, for the following reasons:

1. The students appreciated the fact that they were getting quality attention.

2. The process helped me get to know each student, and their strengths and weaknesses. Twice a term may not sound like a lot, but that equates to 6 quality interactions a year in addition to the normal classroom discussions and comments on their work.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is what assessment for learning, and assessing pupils’ progress, are all about. However, for audio comments to be effective, two things have to be in place:

1. The teacher needs a good record-keeping system in order to be able to remember what she said to whom. There’s no point in an in-depth conversation with a student if the next time you meet you can’t remember what you talked about. You need to be able to say things like, “I can see from this piece of work that you’ve been working on the research side of things that we talked about last time.”

2. The student needs a good way of recording what your feedback was, otherwise it’s ephemeral and all but useless. I used to ask them to write down the key points in their school or homework diaries. In the course of evaluating or inspecting schools’ ICT provision I’ve come across effective variations of this, whereby students are given a template, or a cover sheet, in which they fill out boxes with headings such as “Things I did well”, and “Things I need to improve.”

In other words, I don’t think one can escape the written word entirely when it comes to marking students’ work, but an arrangement in which spoken and written comments support each other can be most effective.

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