1. Processes for aligning teaching, assessing and reporting Session 4
Backward mapping
Processes for aligning teaching, assessing and reporting
Session 4

2. Step 1: What do we want students to learn?
Identify the key understandings
Identify key skills
Identify focus areas for teaching understanding and skills
Build a picture of why that learning matters
If you remember back to the earlier presentation and the A of assessment we spoke about achievement and accountability. So as a faculty you need to be confident that you understand and can articulate what students need to learn and do in your lesson.
When developing your assessment processes you need to look at the big picture presented within the curriculum. You need to first of all be able to articulate what learning expectations are prescribed in the curriculum and then translate those learning expectations into your planned programs.
By creating a shared understanding within the faculty of the big picture of the learning expectations within your subject it will help your faculty better prioritise your focus for assessment.
So as teachers we need to be clear about the WHAT we want our students to learn as well as the WHY it is important and then from that we can determine WHAT we should be assessing and WHY we have chosen to assess that?

3. Identifying learning expectations
Understanding / Skills
Achievement standard
Content
Learning
expectation
practise and refine skills involved in invasion games
develop their understanding of strategies and movement concepts associated with invasion games
understand how the concepts and strategies can be transferred to other games and sports
(including The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating) nutritional requirements and dietary needs (including The Australian Dietary Guidelines) food labelling and packaging food advertising personal, social, economic and cultural influences on food choices and eating habits strategies for planning and maintaining a healthy, balanced diet healthy options for snacks, meals and drinks

4. Unpacking learning expectations
For each of the understandings and skills, identify the learning expectations described within the:
Achievement standards
Content descriptions
Build a picture of how well students need to learn

5. Interpreting the standards
continuum of development
read in conjunction with content
describes typical level of achievement
Its important to remember that the achievement standards represent a continuum of development from Foundation to Year 10. They are descriptions of what a typical student should understand and be able to do by the end of each band level. When unpacking the standards you should read the content in conjunction with the standards as this will provide context for quality and depth of understanding required and the complexity, breadth and application of skills.
For all standards you can map the content threads directly to aspects of the achievement standards … here’s one I prepared earlier. You can access this mapping for all of the bands on the resources page.

7. Identifying learning expectations
Understanding / Skills
Achievement standard
Content
Learning
expectation
practise and refine skills involved in football (soccer)
demonstrate control and accuracy when performing specialised movement sequences and skills.
 ACPMP080
ACPMP087
develop their understanding of strategies and movement concepts associated with invasion games
investigate and apply movement concepts and select strategies to achieve movement and fitness outcomes
ACPMP082
ACPMP084
ACPMP088
understand how the concepts and strategies can be transferred to other games and sports
apply movement concepts and refine strategies to suit different movement situations
(including The Australian Guide to Healthy Eating) nutritional requirements and dietary needs (including The Australian Dietary Guidelines) food labelling and packaging food advertising personal, social, economic and cultural influences on food choices and eating habits strategies for planning and maintaining a healthy, balanced diet healthy options for snacks, meals and drinks

8. Identifying learning expectations
Understanding / Skills
Achievement standard
Content
Learning
expectation
practise and refine skills involved in football (soccer)
demonstrate control and accuracy when performing specialised movement sequences and skills.
 ACPMP080
ACPMP087
analyse their own performance and use feedback to refine their attacking and defensive skills
develop their understanding of strategies and movement concepts associated with invasion games
investigate and apply movement concepts and select strategies to achieve movement and fitness outcomes
ACPMP082
ACPMP084
ACPMP088
explain and justify the movement concepts and strategies selected in different game situations
understand how the concepts and strategies can be transferred to other games and sports
apply movement concepts and refine strategies to suit different movement situations
 select and apply strategies that have been successful before and implement them in different game situations

9. What do we want students to learn?
Making the links
What do we record?
What do we assess?
What do we want students to learn?
As part of the session we are going to focus on the last two questions to bring this all together – the what evidence we record of student learning and how we can translate that to reporting.
What do we assess?
We need to decide whether we will:
assess all or some of the outcomes
target certain aspects of our teaching and learning
types of tasks
formal or informal tasks
theory vs practical
What do we record?
What methods do we use to assess/record?
School issues
Professional development concerns
Consistency of judgment

10. Why do we assess? To collect information about students’ learning
To make judgments about:
quality of student learning
quality of our teaching
SO why do we assess? We assess to collect information about students’ learning in order to make judgments about the quality of student learning ... and by association ... the quality of our teaching.
It also tells us when the kids have learnt what we want them to learn .... if they get the concept on the first activity ... we don’t need to keep teaching follow up activities – move – on. But on the flip side – if they don’t get it – you need to re-teach it!

11. But first of all let’s reflect on what assessment is all about
But first of all let’s reflect on what assessment is all about. A few years ago when the Federal government instigated a consistent reporting format nationally which required A-E reporting or a five-scale equivalent, there was a fair bit of misinformation that proliferated. Many teachers believed that in order to grade using an A-e or equivalent scale, every student had to perform the same tasks. Not only does this make your job in assessing students a lot more time consuming ... as the slide shows it is very unfair to students ...

12. Assessment should: be relevant (linked to standards and content)
be appropriate (measures what it intends to measure)
be fair (opportunity for all students to demonstrate what they have learnt)
be accurate (reliable and valid)
provide useful information
of learning (summative)
for learning (formative)
This is the list of characteristics or principles that the Department believes represents quality assessment. Hopefully a lot of these are on your brainstorm list. We’re going to go in to some of these in greater detail as the presentation goes on.
But there are also a couple of features that I’d like to add in to the mix. These include ....

13. Creating maximum learning effect – Visible learning
Transparent learning goals
Success criteria
Quality feedback
Focus on performance against a standard not performance against other students
The more transparent the teacher makes the learning goals, then the more likely the student is to engage in the work needed to meet the goal.
The more the student is aware of the criteria for success, then the more the student can see the specific actions that are needed to attain these criteria.
The more there is feedback about progress from prior to desired outcomes the more positive attributes to learning are developed.
Source: Hattie: Visible Learning, Routledge; ISBN 13:  ; ISBN 10: 

14. Our tools of the trade
Post-it notes – group challenge relay ... who can come up with the most different tools for assessment.
Group them into formative / summative / both
Record a whole group list on the whiteboard – then compare in relation to efficiency, reliability, consistency of judgement

15. Group relay challenge
What sorts of assessment tools and evidence do you currently use to make judgements about student achievement?
Teachers use a variety of methods to assess students.
We use methods such as tests, assignments, reports, checklists, oral presentations and teacher observation of student performance to assess a student in a particular area. When identifying how you will assess your students you need to be thinking about what evidence you want to collect.
We use marks, grades, and comments to convey this information to students.

16. What constitutes evidence?
work samples / work books
practical performances
peer coaching opportunities
group presentations
group and class discussions
responses to questions
observations of students working
in-class tasks
tests
take home assignments

17. Considerations when selecting assessment tools
time efficiency (both the students’ time and yours)
reliability within a class
consistency of judgement across classes
We will look much more closely at these considerations in terms of your own programs in the next workshop.

18. Planning your assessment
What might you observe students doing, saying or producing that will support you to make an on-balance judgement?
Go back to the identifying learning expectations table in your workbook. For each of the understandings and skills you identified – answer this question.

19. Planning your assessment
What learning activities will provide an opportunity for:
students to demonstrate what they’ve learnt?
teachers to provide timely feedback?
Now lets dig a bit deeper into our units of work to explore what other opportunities there are for students to demonstrate their learning. Highlight which learning activities could provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate their understanding and skills. If you take a look at the sample unit of work you can see that for each sequence what students should understand and be able to do has been drawn out and placed at the top of the teaching and learning sequence.
Do the same for your unit of work – identify a lesson sequence and identify what it is you want students to understand and be able to do by the end of the lesson. Record this in your workbook on page 13.

20. Bringing it all together
What do we record?
What do we assess?
What do we want students to learn?
As part of the session we are going to focus on the last two questions to bring this all together – the what evidence we record of student learning and how we can translate that to reporting.

21. Collecting evidence of learning
Doesn’t need to be as pain staking as a criminal investigation but it does need to hold up to scrutiny.

22. Explore the evidence of achievement
Aqua 8
Task 1
Task 2
Essay
Book
Test
Group task
Jemima Puddleduck
74% C 12 
21.5
Thomas Engine
89% A 9 25
Bob Workman
61% B 15
Poor/ needs
attention 20
Let’s look at what is probably current practice around recording evidence of learning and transferring that to reports.
We need to look at what evidence we have around this information and you may have a mark book that resembles something like this recorded or it may be all marks.
Note that Thomas had a “blip” in his performance – only getting 9/20 in his essay. This was because he had 4 other tasks due that week and ran out of time for the essay. This demonstrates more of a lack of time management skills rather than lack of understanding – given the expectations in schools around completion of assessment tasks in each learning area this is problem a common issue for kids. So what does it mean for his grades?? How would you grade Thomas and the others?

23. Make a judgement about student achievement
Aqua 8
Task 1
Task 2
Essay
Book
Test
Group task
Jemima Puddleduck D C 12 
21.5
Thomas Engine B A 18 25
Bob Workman 15
Poor/ needs
attention 20
At report time we need to transfer this information and convert it into a single grade that represents a fair assessment of a students overall level of understanding and skill in your subject.
The critical thing is to ensure you have collected and recorded the right information to ensure that the grade you come up with actually reflects what the students know and can do.
We have some amazing ways of transferring this markbook information into an A-E grade or whatever the scale is you are using.
I think if we do some critical thinking about how we actually do this at the point when we are deciding what to record we can make our jobs so much easier.
Similarly, you really know at the end of a stage or a year lots of information about what students know and can do. Most teachers would be able to put students in categories of working at a satisfactory level, above satisfactory or below satisfactory ( and this is based primarily on natural intuition and professional experience) The problem comes with over-formalised assessment programs where the student did poorly in a number of set written tasks yet you know they work at a much higher level than what is reflected in their assessment tasks. What do you do. The answer – ensure your assessment processes acknowledge the flexibility catered for in the 7-10 program and reflect on that main underlying philosophy – to be fair to all students. The bottom line is that the grade the student gets must accurately reflect what they know and can do.
To get to this end product.
Jemima Puddleduck
Thomas Engine
Bob Workman
Assessment of Learning
One Grade
in Class/Semester

24. Recording evidence
Remember back to the end of the last session and we identified how students could demonstrate their learning within a selected lesson sequence. We are now going to take that one step further and look at the evidence that students might demonstrate of their learning through the entire unit. From this we are going to develop an observation record of the sorts of things you are likely to see a student doing, saying or producing in a lesson that demonstrates the quality of their learning. There’s a sample in your workbook for the movement unit

25. Collecting evidence of achievement
How can you collect and record evidence of student learning in an efficient and valid way?

26. Workshop evaluation