Developing Feedback for Pupil Learning

Teaching, Learning and Assessment in Schools

Ruth Dann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138681019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317189718
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Feedback is often considered to be one of the pivotal enablers of formative assessment. This key topic has received considerable attention within research literature and has been studied by a number of leading experts in the field. This book is positioned at the heart of these debates and offers a specific contribution to 'exploring' and 'exploiting' the learning gap which feedback seeks to shift.

Developing Feedback for Pupil Learning seeks to synthesise what we know about feedback and learning into more in-depth understandings of what influences both the structure of and changes to the learning gap. This research-informed but accessibly written enquiry is at the very heart of teaching, learning and assessment. It offers a timely contribution to understanding what works (and what doesn't) for whom and why. Split into three main parts, it covers:

• Feedback for learning in theory, policy and practice;
• Conceptualising the 'learning gap';
• New futures for feedback.

This text will be essential reading for students, teachers, researchers and all those who engage with issues related to teaching, learning and assessment academically.

PART I

Feedback for learning in theory, policy and practice

1

Framing learning in national and international assessment policy contexts

Chapter overview

Assessment is centre stage within global education systems. Ostensibly the power of high-stakes global comparative testing systems, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TiMMs), and Progress in International Reading and Literacy (PIRLS), are used as signifiers of a nation’s educational performance, which lead to assessment shaping global educational systems (Au, 2011; Lingard, 2010; Tanner, 2013). Furthermore, in England, a national testing framework, as well as formal examinations at age 16, are used as powerful indicators of school and teacher success. Overall, the dominant paradigm of assessment is summative, serving the purposes of accountability. Successes in learning from our education systems are therefore seen largely through the lens of standardised testing.

It is important to understand the significance of this form of assessment, and its use in national and global interpretations of how specific learning outcomes are characterised and measured. It is only through understanding how and why this form of assessment prevails that the argument that is developed as the central strand of this book can be usefully positioned. This chapter thus provides an important foregrounding for some of the classroom-focused practices that are explored. Additionally, it adds a rationale for a different approach to understanding and supporting pupils’ learning, through feedback, which is subsequently examined.

Educational purpose

There seems little question that education is important. Schooling is compulsory across the developed world and in part of the Sustainable Development Goals across the globe. In England, even in times of economic recession, and significant government cutbacks, the education budget has been protected. Policy narratives stress the importance of education for the development of the economy. Driving up educational standards is part of national policy on securing continual and growing presence in the competitive global market (DfE, 2010 and 2016).

England is not alone in locating education as a central player in economic success. The United States of America and Australia, for example, have similar policy aspirations. If education is given such centre stage, it is clear that the high levels of funding given to it must be accounted for and seen to be effective. The need to demonstrate the success of education policy and expenditure becomes an important strand of developing and sustaining an education system. Education, therefore, has to become both visible and measurable in order to show the impact of education policy and expenditure. Allied to these requirements, the formation of a national curriculum with accompanying testing, offers structure and evidence to frame such a policy.

More fundamental to this argument is the essence of the education that is offered. Since national agendas are increasingly pulled in the direction of international priorities, there is a particular leaning towards the curriculum areas that are highlighted in international educational comparative statistics. Hence a national curriculum that is designed to be broad and balanced becomes weighted in particular ways. Policy arguments alone do not account for such weighting. There are more educationally grounded perspectives. Perhaps of most significance in the USA and England is E.D. Hirsch’s argument for core knowledge being particularly prominent in the national curriculum (Gibbs, 2015; Hirsch, 2006). Specific weightings given in the curriculum are of significance as part of the values and priorities placed on the content of learning within compulsory schooling. Such values and priorities are part of the cultural values and beliefs of a country, selected for the next generation to learn.

Although this national policy-driven account may offer a particular story for the priorities of the education system, it is far from complete and very far from meeting with universal approval. Underpinning such policy priorities are a range of assumptions and conceptions that are challenged and critiqued across the educational sector. It is not the priority of this book to give sufficient account of such challenges. Albeit here, the purpose of a brief critique is to place this policy setting in an arena in which other thinking and other ways of being and doing can be constructed and enacted. These offer different understandings of learning and what it means to be a learner.

The commodification of learning

Central to the notion of schooling is the idea that something will be learnt. The importance of learning is thus central. But what learning is, and who or what it is for, is not straightforward. As education became compulsory in the late nineteenth century, concerns were focused on the importance of education, notably the 3Rs, for an increasingly industrialised society and economy. The importance of raising the standards of education through inspection processes loomed large even in these early days. The system of Payment by Result in 1862, designed to reward effective teaching, was met with attempts to ‘game’ the system. This resulted in a narrowing of the curriculum. Even the inspection system had to work differently in bowing down to the supremacy of the examination data, as Matthew Arnold, chief inspector reported:

The new examination groups the children by its standards, not by their classes; and however much we may strive to make the standards correspond with the classes, we cannot make them correspond at all exactly … He hears every child in the group before him read, and so far his examination is more complete than the old inspection. But he does not question them; he does not, as an examiner under the rule of the six standards, go beyond the three matters, reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the amount of these three matters which the standards themselves prescribe; and, indeed, the entries for grammar, geography, and history, have now altogether disappeared from the forms of report furnished to the inspector. The nearer, therefore, he gets to the top of the school the more does his examination, in itself, become an inadequate means of testing the real attainments and intellectual life of the scholars before him.

(Arnold, 1908: 93)

The nature of learning, even in the early days of schooling, became intricately caught up in attempts to make it accountable. However, alongside the increasing pressure to make schools accountable were other agendas. Lowndes (1937) wrote of the ‘Silent Social Revolution’ in which he argued that early schooling was as much about social discipline and the calming of society in the midst of urban growth as about notions of specific knowledge to be learnt. Indeed, ‘Education has become a principal foundation of practically every new activity in the community’ (245). The purpose of education was thus promoted as a form of social control as well as cultural expansion. These early examples of shaping learning for particular purposes, serve to illustrate that understanding learning in the context of education is not straightforward, and has been much contested. Hanson (1993: 5) takes the notion of social control even further. In relation to the use of tests, not only do they become a means for providing evidence for accountability, but they ‘enlist people as willing accomplices in their own surveillance and domination’.

It was not until James Callaghan’s Ruskin Speech in October 1976, that the content of the curriculum in England became a matter for national concern, and subsequently control. The focus of learning became more related to content to be acquired than to notions of who was learning and how they might experience their education. With a declining budget for education, efficiency became even more important. A decade later the National Curriculum (1988) brought the nationalisation of the curriculum and the predefining of learning outcomes for children across the compulsory school sector. Although it presented a coherent curriculum for all, the leading role of assessment in shaping the curriculum illustrated that prevailing considerations were rather more about accountability and standards (Haviland, 1988; Lawton and Chitty, 1988). Furthermore, accountability shifted away from being to the public to being to the government as its regulator (Biesta, 2004: 240). This is further explored in the next chapter.

With a legacy of an education system using tests for school selection before comprehensive schooling, and the renewed use of tests for accountability accompanying the National Curriculum, England was influential in the use of testing internationally. Indeed, White (2014) argues that many of the countries that are currently highest ranking in international educational comparative tests scores have drawn their own systems from England. Priorities given to particular subjects, measured in particular ways, have thus become dominant, with other countries better shaping their systems (fashioned on the English system) to perform well in tests. Such a legacy seems to make it currently more difficult for other ways of shaping education to have credibility.

Extending such contemporary debate, Biesta (2006) has sustained consideration of fundamental questions of what or who learning is for. With little choice over what is given priority in the curriculum, complex decisions over what we teach and why, often become marginalised from debate. As Foucault recognises (2002 /1972: 28), we soon seem to accept the knowledge that is set out for us, and do not question why it is there, and whether it could be different. The fact that it is not agreed within a school, or between teachers and learners, but based on external decisions and constructions seems to get lost. Thus, not only do teachers soon lose interest in disrupting and questioning what counts as knowledge, but pupils too receive the content without much legitimate scope for having their own views or being able to drive their own interests. The content of learning thus becomes presented as fact rather than as constructions of knowledge. There are arguments for why this may be useful, E.D. Hirsch’s contribution, being a particular example. Such arguments are developed further in chapters 2 and 4.

Of further concern is that our curriculum therefore makes learning a very particular and focused endeavour mainly concerned with ‘having’ specific knowledge. Biesta (2006) signals the danger of an approach to learning that he terms ‘learnification’. He warns that as learning has become so central within policy, it has marginalised and pushed out broader ideas of education. Its centrality has also been characterised by a particular ‘language of learning’. The cause of this shift has been varied and the result of many changing priorities. Amongst these is the increasing emphasis on learning outcomes, so that teaching is seen as being about measuring and being accountable for learning outcomes. Most teachers in England have their ‘performance management’ linked to targets for pupil attainment outcomes. Their success and progress thus become dependent on their pupils’ results. This certainly steers what counts as learning in classrooms in particular ways. The relationship of teaching, learning and assessment is further analysed in more detail in the next chapter.

Biesta (2006: 20–21) argues that learning across all sectors of education has become commodified, and part of an economic transaction. Here the learner is identified as having particular needs, and the teacher in the institution provides for these needs. Although in some senses this should be part of education, what seems to prevail is that this way of seeing the relationship between teaching and learning becomes education itself. It is thus pre-determined, rendering education to be where the learner gains the particular pre-defined learning which s/he is lacking. Little acknowledgement is given to the experiences and insights that each child brings to their educational encounter. Indeed, this may even be seen to contaminate rather than enrich the standards that are valued nationally and globally.

Measurement of learning, and its impact in classrooms

The importance of the prized educational standards that are seen to matter most are born from the national and international data sets that are used to reflect each nation’s educational success both within national policy and international comparative data. As schools are positioned against national benchmarks, and countries pitched against each other on the competitive educational arena, the curriculum slowly becomes more shaped to reflect the priorities of this national and global ‘game playing’.

Standardised testing has notably been the tool through which national and global comparisons are made. Accordingly, their increasingly high-stakes role has had a significant impact on learning in schools. Koretz (2008: 251) identifies seven ways in which schools/teachers make adjustments in order to maximise test results:

• working more effectively;

• teaching more;

• working harder;

• reallocation (moving resources to better match test content);

• alignment (matching teaching more specifically to test content);

• coaching (giving specific instruction to small details of taking a test, e.g. eliminating wrong answers first from multiple-choice questions);

• cheating (e.g. providing answers or hints to students during the test, or changing answers).

Such responses by teachers are evident due to the way results are used and the implications of the scores for accountability. They reveal direct links between testing and classroom practice. Some may be considered beneficial, others clearly result only in raising test scores. As this book begins to unravel, the impact of testing priorities also begins to shape the focus and type of feedback given to children.

Standardised testing potentially offers a good way of providing data on what has been attained in a way that offers least bias and greatest validity and reliability. However, distortions leading to grade inflation (higher results that do not relate to increased learning) are particular possibilities. All too often the results from standardised testing (undertaken under particular uniform conditions) are used to reflect aspects of the education system which they are not intended to measure. As Koretz so aptly points out, standardised tests select from the ‘domain’ that they are intended to test. Thus they give only a representation of what has been attained. Ensuring that a domain is adequately reflected in a test is not a simple matter. The number of items must be balanced against the length of the test. The type of question, and whether its language or requirements introduce bias, might give some pupils (or groups of pupils) an unfair advantage or disadvantage. The scoring or marking of the test must also be considered so that the reliability of the markers is consistent within a test, and across different markers. ‘Any standardised test is merely a planned set of compromises, and cannot be perfectly reliable and valid! A test, even a good one, is always just a test: a valuable source of information, but still only limited and a particular view of student performance’ (316). For this reason, Koretz indicates that the result of a test should not be considered in isolation from other forms of evidence about attainment. Unfortunately, this is seldom heeded.

The context in which tests are framed is also important. Tests were often related to norm-referenced standards. This meant that a sample of results were captured that were thought to reflect a ‘norm group’. Results were consequently compared with this ‘normal sample’ so that each school result was referenced to this comparative group. In England, end of key stage results for each school were set alongside national averages, which effectively acted as a comparative norm. Percentage scores of pupils reaching particular levels in relation to benchmarks became the format of reporting. However, since ‘levels’ were removed from the national system (DfE, 2015) reporting changed. National measurements then became linked to particular standards. These formed from clear nationally determined expectations of the knowledge that should be reached at particular stages in schooling. Reporting of results therefore linked to the extent to which particular standards had been reached or exceeded. Typically the language used in reporting standards assessment links to an ‘expected’ or ‘proficient’ standard that pupils match, fall below, or are significantly above. In England (in 2016) a scaled score based on assessment or testing results was used to determine whether or not a pupil was within the expected category or not. Of course, the way the test results are scaled, and the decisions made over what standard is expected, are nationally determined. These can be adjusted each year. It makes comparisons year on year potentially unreliable.

The importance for a pupil to reach the expected standard, and for a school to have the greatest percentage of pupils possible at or above the expected standard, becomes essential. This returns us to the impact of these tests and measurements on classroom practices. In the United States it has been very clear that defining standards will focus teaching to precisely ensure that these standards are met. The agenda of pushing teaching towards the content of what is tested is not necessarily an unintended consequence. Popham (1987) was a particular advocate of ‘measurement driven instruction’ (MDI), which was further promoted by Madaus (1988). The drive in the UK for standards to be increased for all children, and evidenced through the outcomes of national tests, reveals that the focus on a narrowly defined core curriculum is intentional. This is despite the broader terms and aims of the National Curriculum. The reality that schools are increasingly judged on test and examination data gives further evidence that what leads to the best data possible must be most important. The presumed causal link between teaching to the test and better test outcomes may not be quite so linear as it may seem. Classroom practices that sharply focus on particular curriculum outcomes may lead to better outcomes – however, they may not. The focus in this book on feedback reveals that feedback is often far more focused and linked to particular success criteria, and is mainly in the subjects that are tested in national tests, particularly at the primary school level. This reflects much of the research evidence base for feedback (outlined in chapter 3). However, standards are not soaring, and simple solutions to raising standards through more focused teaching practices (including feedback) do not seem to have the uniform outcomes of raising attainment across the pupil population. Understanding why this might be and how we could understand teaching and learning differently, using feedback as the communication tool between both, provides the essence of this book.

It has become far clearer that the drive for school improvement, through the use of pupil performance data as key evidence of school quality, raises the importance of pupil learning within schools. However, as already indicated, it often does so in a way that commodifies learning, and to a large degree dehumanises it. Indicators of learning, seen largely through test and formal examination data, are aggregated to give percentages. Individual pupils become less significant in such aggregated data. This leads to groups of pupils who are identified as not adequately performing becoming a problem, for the school as well as for individual teachers (Pratt, 2016).

The extent to which lower achieving pupils become a problem is particularly illustrated through Hill et al.’s (2016) study looking into types of head teachers in 411 UK Academy schools (separated from local authority control). Cook (2016) reports on this study that some head teachers, given the typology label as ‘surgeons’, are often brought in for a short term to turn around a failing school. They remove (expel) on average 28 per cent of the lowest achieving final year pupils taking age 16 examinations. This has the effect of raising the percentage examination result scores for the school. However, this increased school performance has little more than a two- or three-year positive effect for the school. It illustrates that pupils, under this form of leadership, are valued only for the achievement scores they can bring to the school.

Further indication that some schools closely link their school priorities to testing and examination priorities relates...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART I: Feedback for learning in theory, policy and practice
• PART II: Conceptualising the learning gap
• PART III: New futures for feedback
• References
• Index