In this section, we're going to explore standards and assessments for literacies. Standards are what the expected learning outcomes are at different levels of learning and across a variety of subject areas. And of course in this case we're going to look at literacy or literacies. Assessments measure student outcome against these standards. Here in this session, we will be contrasting the fundamental assumptions and processes of standards or achievements and assessments with intelligence assessments. Along the way we will examine the difference between a number of approaches. For example, diagnostic versus formative and summative assessments. Norm referenced versus criterion referenced or self referenced assessments. And selects response versus supply response assessments. Finally, we want to posit the value of bringing formative assessment, that is providing direct feedback to learners, closer to summative assessment, that is providing a retrospective view of what learners have achieved. Particularly in the new media learning environments. >> We're going to look at questions of literacy assessment. This is the last section of this series of videos and it seems assessment always comes at the end. You do your work, then you have a test at the end of the semester. Well actually, one of the themes we're going to have through these videos is that maybe that's not the way assessment should be but, anyhow in the interest of being sort of old fashioned eventually, now at the end, we've come to assessment. And in fact, what I'm going to do is look at not just assessment processes. But what is it that you're assessing? So, in contemporary curriculum what we do is we establish a framework which is called a set of standards. These are expectations of outcomes at a certain level of learning, right? So, it's a description of the framework of outcomes. Now In the old days, the way syllabi worked, syllabus has worked and curricular work, is the syllabus said, look, these are the content areas you're going to cover year by year, week by week, month by month, and then people wrote textbooks covering that content. The whole purpose or the idea behind a standard is describe a set of skills and capacities and ways of knowing and ways of thinking at a somewhat higher level of abstraction. It's really not about content, but it's about certain kinds of capacities. And what we do with literacy standards, is we describe for each grade level or learning level, what it is that you're supposed to be able to do in reading or writing. Or if we think maybe more broadly in terms of our multi-model knowledge representations, how well we can express ourselves in these communicative forms. Now it's against these standards that assessment now occurs. And what I'm going to do is through these series of videos, I'm going to talk about different assessment perspectives. Now firstly, there's a classic sort of time distinction between assessment that happens before learning, assessments that happens after learning and assessment happens after learning. The words they use to describe these is diagnostic assessments, so in order to place students appropriately at a learning level, we will do pre test diagnostic assessment to work out what they know already. Okay, so that's before we start. And these days, most importantly they're done in cases where there are issues of student abilities and disabilities. We want to place kids appropriately because they may have certain physical or intellectual disabilities of some sort or another. Or let's say somebody's come from another state and we still have tracked classrooms and we want to know which levels are going to go in. I mean, there are fewer tracked classrooms in the world these days. But nevertheless these are the kinds of reasons why we want to do diagnostic assessment to work out what kinds of learning experiences and what kinds of curriculum appropriate to a learner, given their learning level. Now, formative assessment is assessment that happens during the learning process. In other words, it's progress assessment, it's assessment which often might be designed to give specific feedback to learners that helps them in their learning. And then at the end of a chunk of learning, at the end of a week or a term or year or a whatever, we often have summative assessment which is sort of a retrospective evaluation of what the students have learned. And in fact of all these three types of assessment or these three times of assessment, the one that dominates by far over the others is summative assessment. And in fact what people complain about and what people argue about is that we've become just completely obsessed and overwhelmed by the amount of summative assessments going on in order to judge school systems, in order to judge teachers. It's a very managerialist, judgemental type of system. And one of the critiques of this system is to what extent do these summative assessments dominate the teaching in a way which is often not hugely helpful, because the summative assessments don't give you feedback which helps your learning. At the end of the semester, you get a certain grade or a certain rating, and what does it tell you? You'd better become a better person if you didn't knew very well or it congratulates you if you did very well but it doesn't give you any specific information or advice which will in a concrete way assist your learning. It has this kind of bureaucratic managerialist function, and one of the worries in education is that we've become dominated in recent years by bureaucratic managerialism as reflected in tests.
