Digital Learning

Assessment for the digital generation

Assessment is being forced to change by the government’s ‘Assessing Pupil’s Progress (APP)’ strategy. Dr Sue Horner, head of standards and assessment policy at the QCA, discusses how ICT can make skill-building fun.

There’s a growing feeling that assessment should be more flexible, focus on progress and reflect the needs of each learner. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), talking to teachers and school leaders, has developed four principles to support schools when talking about assessment.

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      string(381) "... snever been a better time.●●●Dr Sue Horner is the head of standardsand assessment policy at theQualifications and Curriculum Authority(QCA). For more information, pleasevisit nationalstrategies.standard.dcsf.gov.uk/node/157533The digital generation needs a new method of assessmentELT_Assessment Matters_Assessmen31 31 20/5/09 16:27:29"
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      string(3599) "on their learningas it’s happening. They also enable you toadjust your short-term planning in line withthe learners’ needs.Periodic assessment: Every so often, it’simportant to look at the learner’s overallprogress in a subject or aspect of learning.This allows you to draw on a broad rangeof activities and evidence – includinglearners’ contributions in group work ordiscussions. This conversation will helpa learner to identify their strengths andareas for development in general, ratherthan in the last piece of work or topic theycompleted. In turn, the conversation willgive you a clear sense of whether the learneris able to transfer the knowledge, skills andunderstanding they have developed anduse them in different contexts. This sort ofassessment can also inform your mediumand long-term planning and provideevidence to link the learner’s attainment tonational standards.Transitional assessment: Transitionalassessments are judgements that are meantfor a wider audience and will oftenbe made at the end of a year or keystage. They draw on the full range ofassessment information and provide a formalrecognition of achievement and valuablebaseline information for the next teacher.The new national approach to assessing ICT– Assessing Pupils’ Progress (APP) – supportsthese changes to school practice. APP notonly provides a link to national standards,but also contributes to the other principlesof assessment by building a more well-rounded profile of learners’ achievements●●●that highlights their strengths and areas forimprovement. The materials are free and areavailable at nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/157533.The information APP provides will help youtailor your planning and teaching, and cansupport productive discussions with learnersand parents.The APP approach is straightforward. Theassessment criteria for ICT has three focuses:Planning, developing and evaluating workusing ICTHandling data, sequencing instructions andmodellingFinding, using and communicatinginformationWhen you’re ready to make a per iodicassessment, you review the evidence of thelearner’s achievement using the guidelinesand build a profile that can track progresswithin the level. As a basic principle, the workreviewed in each periodic assessment shouldcover a range of areas of ICT and at least oneterm’s progress. APP provides a robust level-related judgement as well as giving a range ofdiagnostic information that will help learnersprogress and improve.Changing assessment systemsMore and more schools are taking theopportunities provided by the new secondarycurriculum to think in new ways aboutwhere assessment fits into the bigger pictureof the curriculum. To support this, the DCSFis investing £150 million in continuingprofessional development through its Assessmentfor Learning (AFL) strategy over the next threeyears. This will help schools make effective useof tracking and assessment for learning toolsand techniques, such as the APP materials.A fresh look at your assessment systems nowcould make a real difference to your learners’commitment and progress in the future. There’snever been a better time.●●●Dr Sue Horner is the head of standardsand assessment policy at theQualifications and Curriculum Authority(QCA). For more information, pleasevisit nationalstrategies.standard.dcsf.gov.uk/node/157533The digital generation needs a new method of assessmentELT_Assessment Matters_Assessmen31 31 20/5/09 16:27:29"
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Adaptive Technology

Assessment for the digital generation

24 Jul 2009

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      string(263) "Video games hook students in, provide challenges and keep them engaged for hours.  Former teacher Paul Carter, now head of learning content at Mangahigh, offers advice on how teachers can learn from the psychology of games to develop student perseverance in class"
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      string(327) "... praise and a sense of achievement.Often, in order to get these positive rewards, we need to put in a lot of sustainedeffort. However, the digital generation is accustomed to short-term, butconstant rewards – the type they get in video games. As soon as they experiencefailure, they are rapidly moved ..."
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      string(5566) "Algebra year 10The Covid-19 outbreak led to a huge shift towards online and remote learning but the transition was fraught with challenges for both students and teachers alike.The use of edtech increased dramatically to accommodatethe move to distance learning. However, students’ attainment throughout lockdownhas remained inconsistent with many struggling to focus in their new environment,as well as finding it difficult to get to grips with the technology they maynot have used before. Additionally, a large number of students across thecountry struggled because they were unable to access the necessary technology,resources and equipment to be able to successfully study from home. Providing students with access to the equipment theyrequire to learn remotely is key to bridging the gap between the classroom andhome learning. The next step is to ensure that when using these resources, studentsremain effectively engaged. We know that when students persistently get wrong answersit affects their confidence. Some respond by giving up, thinking, ‘This is toohard for me,’ while others accept that it is a challenge and find ways to bettertheir scores. Educationalresearcher Carol Dweck coined the terms ‘fixed mindset’ and ‘growth mindset’.Now more than ever we need our students to grow and to become resilient independentlearners who will persist even when the going gets tough.The psychology of gamesGame-based learningis one way to make this happen. It uses technology students are familiar withand sets tasks that will keep their focus. Time and time again, they trydifferent approaches until they find the winning formula that allows them toprogress to the next level where there are new and harder challenges.In the virtual worldthey are engrossed for hours, undeterred by failure. They are using logic andproblem solving skills and the main reward is a score and a sense ofaccomplishment. Why is this?Most well-designedgames give us pleasure and make us want to return for more. To understandthis, we need to know a little about how the human brain works in terms of positiveand negative feelings.We are programmedto seek rewards whether that is food and shelter or praise and a sense of achievement.Often, in order to get these positive rewards, we need to put in a lot of sustainedeffort. However, the digital generation is accustomed to short-term, butconstant rewards – the type they get in video games. As soon as they experiencefailure, they are rapidly moved on to the next part of the game where they canwin. Even when theyfail, their motivation remains high because theyknow they will soon be rewarded – so long as they persevere.Another key factoris that thehuman brain does not differentiate between real-life and artificial rewards,which explains the motivating effect that video games have on people. We allwant to keep trying because we know we will eventually be rewarded even if weget just a little further in a level, by getting a higher score for example.On the flip side,there’s the expectation of failure when it comes to gaming. When we start alevel, we know we might not succeed at the first attempt, especially as we progressto different stages and the level of difficulty gradually increases. Games are designed forgraceful failure and to motivate players to try again. Graphing in action KS4Often in games,especially the ones designed for children, failing a level does not have any consequencesother than having to start over again. This relieves the pressure which in turnfeeds the motivation to try again. So, it is easy to see why these motivatinggaming concepts can be applied learning.How growth mindset connects to gamingTo start, let’slook at what growth mindset is exactly. Growth mindset goes further than justsaying, ‘Nice try!’ when a student fails to answer a problem correctly. It’sabout encouraging students to try again, perhaps with a different approach, andcontinue trying until they find a way to solve the problem correctly. Carol Dweck explains:‘The growth-mindset approach helps children feel good in the short and longterms, by helping them thrive on challenges and setbacks on their way tolearning. When they’re stuck, teachers can appreciate their work so far, butadd: ‘Let’s talk about what you’ve tried, and what you can try next.’ The focusis on progression and trying new approaches until the student finds one thatworks for them and helps them to master the topic.’Thatdrive to try again, to persevere, could be frustrating for students which inturn could affect their motivation. But, as we’ve seen, video games are builton this concept. Alternating failure with success is the core concept at theheart of many video games, which is why growth mindset and games go together sowell. It’s about being driven to try again, by maintaining the child’s interest,by keeping the activities fun with positive results and improved scores.A key pointto remember is that encouraging a growth mindset has a huge positive impact ona student’s motivation and even lowers their maths anxiety levels.  ResearcherJo Boaler has undertakenextensive research on the effects of applying a growth mindset approach in theclassroom:’ Instead of giving students damaging fixed mindset messages abouttheir potential, teachers can take the opposite approach and offer students a growth mindset pathway […]Insteadof measuring each step as an end point, a final assessment, they see it as astep on a journey and so the yare motivated to"
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Digital Assessment

How to Develop a Growth Mindset with Game-Based Learning

13 Jan 2021

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      string(311) "... ethical AI is what we build and use. And then there is the real technical understanding of AI that we need to build the Next Generation of AI system. Again, a small percentage of the population will need this kind of expert subject knowledge. AI and the Fourth Industrial RevolutionFinally ..."
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      string(5605) "in an AI-enhanced world. This is not coding, this is understanding why data is important to AI and what AI can and cannot achieve. We also need everyone to understand the basics of ethics, but we need a small percentage of the population to understand a great deal more about this so that they can take responsibility for the regulatory frameworks that will be necessary to try and ensure that ethical AI is what we build and use. And then there is the real technical understanding of AI that we need to build the Next Generation of AI system. Again, a small percentage of the population will need this kind of expert subject knowledge. AI and the Fourth Industrial RevolutionFinally, we come to the third category of ways in which AI impacts upon education, and that is the implications that AI is bringing to the workplace and our lives through what is sometimes called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These implications that mean the automation of some jobs and the changes in some jobs, because AI can do some of what humans have been doing brings the need for changes to our education systems. Many people and organisations, including the World Education Forum, are telling us that we are now entering the Fourth Industrial Revolution—the time when many factors across the globe, including the way that AI is powering workplace automation, are changing the workplace and our lives forever. Not everyone is as optimistic, and there are an increasing number of reports that consider the consequences for jobs of the increased automation taking place in the workplace. A report called ‘Will robots really steal our jobs?’ published in 2018 by PWC illustrates that transportation and storage appear to be the areas of the economy where most job losses will occur. Education will be the least prone to automation. We could interpret that as meaning that education will not change. However, I believe that education will change dramatically. It will change as we use more AI, and it will change as what and how we teach changes in order to ensure that our students can prosper in an AI-augmented world. Reports such as this also make it perfectly clear that the impact of AI, automation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution will not be felt by everyone equally. Of course, those with higher education levels will be least vulnerable when it comes to automation and job loss. We therefore need to provide particular support for those with lower levels of education.Personally, I do not think all these reports are that useful, interesting as they are. We humans are rather poor at prediction and the differences of opinion across the different reports indicate the complexity of predicting anything in such fast-changing circumstances. Trying to work out what to do for the best in a changing world is a little bit like driving a car in dense fog along a road that you don’t know. In these circumstances, a map about the road ahead has limited use. What we really need is to know that we have a car that is well-equipped, we have brakes that work, lights that work. We want to be warm and we want to know that as a driver, we understand how to operate the car, we understand the rules of the road, we have eyesight that’s good enough to help us to see in the limited visibility ahead and we can hear what is going on so that we can respond to impending danger that may indicate its presence by being noisy—a huge truck thundering towards us, for example. A New Model of IntelligenceSo, what’s the equivalent of this good car and good driver when it comes to what we need in order to find our way through the fog of uncertainty around the Fourth Industrial Revolution? This is a subject that I have studied and written about quite a lot and a subject that is covered in the book Machine Learning and Human Intelligence: The Future of Education in the 21st century. Here I can only skim over the way that I unpack the intelligence that we need humans to develop if we are to find our way through this foggy landscape. This is the intelligence that can help us to cope with the uncertainty and it can help us to differentiate ourselves from AI systems. This is an interwoven model of intelligence that has seven interacting elements:The first element of this interwoven intelligence is: interdisciplinary academic intelligence. This is the stuff that is part of many education systems at the moment. However, rather than considering it through individual subject areas as we do now, we need to consider it in an interdisciplinary manner. Complex problems are rarely solved through single disciplinary expertise, they require multiple experts to work together. The world is now full of complex problems and we need to educate people to be able to tackle these complex problems effectively. We therefore need to help our students see the relationships between different disciplines. We need them to be able to work with individuals who have different subject expertise and to synthesise across these disciplines to solve complex problems.Secondly, we need to help our students understand what knowledge is, where it comes from, how we identify evidence that is sound enough to justify that we should believe that something is true. I refer to this as meta knowing, but of course we can use the terminology of epistemology and personal epistemology to describe this meta knowing.The third element of our intelligence that we really need to develop in very sophisticated ways is social intelligence. It is very hard for any artificially intelligent systems to achieve social"
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Adaptive Technology

Moving Intelligence Forward with AI

12 Aug 2019

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      string(5671) "a readable size as theyare assumed to have been read. In this grouping stage, the application providesthree explicit externalisation tools the grouping tool, the post-it note tool, and thesticky tape relation tool (as shown in the middle commands menu in figure 1).Theapplication only allows moving to the third stage if all the slips have been put in atleast a specified number of groups (usually three or four depending on the teachers’setting). In the sequencing and webbing stage, an additional relation tool, the arrowshaped sticky tape, is provided to help make linkages between items more explicit.Students can indicate the end of this stage by selecting the next command. After thethird stage, an explicit reflection stage is provided.In summary, the mysteries software puts special emphasis on:Supporting face-to-face collaboration.Enforcing a structure on the task (through the stages).Enforcing a structure on the interaction (through switching between multiple andsingle input).Providing tools (grouping, sticky tape etc.) which emphasise important cognitiveskills.Recording the activity, so that it can be played back for reflection.Providing relevant feedback to jump start reflection.Adapting the technology to suit learning needsWe conducted whole class trials, using six tabletops in a local secondary schoolworking in geography, history and English. One of the hard lessons we learned wasthat student disposition makes a considerable difference to how pupils engage withthe technology and the task. Where pupils are very tuned into their next set of testsand are not particularly interested in their own learning processes, they do not readilyengage and have a tendency to ‘game’ or beat the machine. By contrast, studentswho are interested in learning processes whatever their ability get very engrossedand interact with the task and the feedback.The following are goals of current technical developments:1. The class whiteboard and teacher screen should be set up to show some indicationof the progress of each group and for monitoring and demonstration.2. The teacher should be able to see on each table, not only the current ‘state of play’but also the history of actions, such as what has been put in the recycle bin.3. There needs to be flexibility for the teacher, so that they can increase or decreasennnnnnFigure 1Volume3.4nCreativeTeaching&Learning67e-learning–Technologythe level of challenge, based on observation of progress – perhaps by adding orreducing the number of data items or even changing the question.4. The technology needs to be integrated with other aspects of lesson planning, sothat the digital mystery is part of learning activities and some groups who workparticularly quickly, might move on to other tasks.5. The technology must allow the teacher control over the classroom (for example,override conditions, start, pause, resume and end the process).6. The technology should allow for transition between the individual, group, andclassroom planes.7. The technology should allow the outcome of the process to extend beyond thesession (for example, it should be possible to email a summary of the process andanswer to the students).Dialogue, demonstration and observationAnother recent development is a suite of‘authoring’ tools so that teachers can write theirown mysteries or edit existing ones to suit theneeds of their students and the content beingstudied. This also opens up the option of studentsthemselves constructing mysteries based ontheir own enquiries or fieldwork, as this providesa diagnostic assessment of understanding of anissue. We have also become very interested inthe general formative assessment potential ofdigital mysteries. The underlying premise hereis that formative assessment is grounded in talkabout thinking and ideas, therefore any seriousdiscussion generated by the mystery or duringthe reflection phase is formative, as it helps shapeideas and scaffold the sense making process. Thisis underlined by a ‘second generation’ definition of ‘Assessment for Learning’ byKlenowski2:‘Assessment for Learning is part of everyday practice by students, teachers and peersthat seeks, reflects upon and responds to information from dialogue, demonstration andobservation in ways that enhance ongoing learning.’Dialogue, demonstration and observation are available in abundance generated bydigital mysteries. There follow three examples of very formative assessment stemmingfrom digital mysteries.Example 1Deciding whether to put a slip in the ‘for’ or ‘against’ (staying) categories during thegrouping stage.This occurred during the grouping stage of a mystery (Annie Schmidt leaves WindyCreek) which asks whether a young female graduate should leave her small hometown in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.The students’ conversation was as follows:Student 1: Put that one in ‘red herrings’?Student 2: What does that one say, I don’t remember.(Student 1 makes the slip larger. Student 1 and student 2 read the slip content aloud.)Student 3: It’s kind of a reason to go, because she doesn’t want to waste her educationbut she loves her family.Student 1: It could be for staying.Student 2: It’s kind of in the middle.e-learning–Technology68Volume3.4nCreativeTeaching&LearningStudent 3: Or make another group like for I don’t know.Student 2: Like pie, like overlapped and it goes in the middle (makes circular gestureswith the pen).Student 3: Let’s make a group and put it in the middle. What shall we call it?Student 2: For and against.Not only are these"
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Creative Teaching & Learning

Digital thinking

22 Apr 2013

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