10 reasons why ‘Hands up…’ teaching kills learning….

A teacher on Twitter today bemoaned the fact that his students don’t ask questions. I’ve also heard academics complain about the lack of critical thinking and inquiry among their students. What was absent in both instances is a lack of critical reflection on the problem. This is a teacher, not a learner problem. I’ve witnessed it in classroom observations and ask any pupil when they last experienced this behaviour and you’ll get all the evidence you need, as an old hand-me-down practice, it is still a deeply embedded behaviour in teaching. Here’s some reasons for getting rid of this practice:

Hands up

Hands up anyone who knows…..

1. The people who put their hands up usually know the answer. Asking these learners to provide an answer does nothing to improve their learning – they know it already.

2. On the other hand - this technique destroys the confidence and self-esteem of those who are not sure or don’t know the answer.

3. It excludes those who are introverts as it’s an invitation for extrovert behaviour.

4. Teachers allow far too little time for learners to think about the answer and choose someone tooquickly, demoralising those who are giving it some thought.

5. Note that most questions asked by teachers are not designed to make people really think. They are all too often quick fire questions that focus on atomic facts or names. Try this question:

A bat and ball cost £1.10.

The bat costs one pound more than the ball.

How much does the ball cost? (Answer at bottom)

This is a good question, as it really is a test of mathematical thinking but it needs time to think through before you answer. These are the questions you should not be shooting out at the whole class.

6. It can expose learners to ridicule, if the answer is way off-piste and encourages peer-pressure in the sense of exposing learners to ridicule from their class colleagues.

7. Worse of all, it conditions learners to see the learning process as one of providing correct answers to questions. It does NOT encourage students to ASK the questions or engage in critical thinking themselves.

8. If the practice of ‘Hands up…’ is thought by teachers to command attention. It actually instils in learners the fear of being exposed, that’s why most keep their heads down and don’t put their hands up.
9. Another excuse is that allows the teacher to do whoe class assessment, to know who kows and who doesn't know. First it doesn;t do this at all, many with their hands down are simply scared to answer. And if this is the reason, as we've seen above, it does more harm than good.

10. This is not active, collaborative or constructivist learning. It’s an insidious way to reinforce didactic teaching and get learners, not to think for themselves, but to fear authority.

Conclusion

Research from ‘The Practice of Questioning’ by James Dillon, showed that in both primary and secondary schools, children were rarely asked to come up with their own questions. One study, astonishingly, found that pupils asked only 2 questions to the teacher’s 84. Over a year, pupils were asking questions, on average, just one a month. It’s an easy ‘script’ for teachers to fall back on. But it’s illusory participation that inhibits rather than enhances learning. Teachers need to be giving a helping hand not asking for hand signals. Getting them to ask the questions wins - hands down. It’s a clear example of why seeing teaching as a practice is flawed, as that simply begs the question of what practice.

5p

Most answer 10p but that’s why the feedback matters – 10p+110p=120p (Try again) then 5p+105p=110p.

10 Oculus Touch ideas that bring VR within reach of learners. Let’s do it!

I’ve put an Oculus headset on hundreds of people from 5 year to 85 year olds, all over the world. I’ve even put one on a dog! The reaction is the same ‘Awesome!... Amazing!... I want one now!” Well, apart from the dog, who barked.

There are many reasons why I think this new medium is relevant to learning. And remember, VR is a medium, not a gadget.

What is Oculus Touch?

When you open your Oculus box, you’ll get a lightweight headset with built-in headphones (for 360 degree audio) and a wireless Xbox controller. Within months you’ll also be able to buy two hand controllers that will provide hand-presence, the feeling that your hands are there in that 3D world. This will unlock lots of interesting learning applications. Each has a small wireless pad with a ring that gives you three things:

·      motion-based input

·      physical controls

·      haptic feedback

As well as the ability to move your hands, tracked by the same IR LED system that tracks your head, you’ll be able to input actions and receive haptic feedback (vibrations).

1. Why? Head and hands

This homunculus shows exactly why VR needs handsets. Our brains are huge but lots of that brainpower is related to our hands. We think with our brains but do most of what we need to do in life with our hands. So the VR headset alone is not enough, we want to look, then we want to touch, then handle, manipulate. Arms and hands are what we use for most practical tasks, even gestures in communications. Even an Xbox controller, that will come with the Oculus Rift in Q1 next year, is OK for moving through environments, making choices from menus and shooting things, isn’t enough. As you believe you’re in another world, the natural thing to do is lift your arms, make gestures, reach out, touch things, pick them up, place them and so on. This ‘near-field VR’ is an important advance and opens up a whole new raft of learning applications

2. Relevant learning theory

First up, some basic lessons from proven learning theory. VR gives you immediate and involuntary attention (necessary condition for learning), intense emotion, low-cost simulated worlds, ability to learn from failure, context and real increases in retention. But the big win is in giving learners the ability to learn by doing. This is rare in institutional learning, yet we know that it is, in practice, how most us of learn. For more on this see this article.

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=VR

3. Tool use

For vocational tasks where one needs to use real objects, such as tools and meters, this will be possible, for example, in the training gas inspectors and any skills that involves the manipulation of real objects. I can see this progressing to the training of everyone from hairdressers with scissors to surgeons with scalpels.

4. Build

When one has to dismantle or build an engine, boiler or any other piece of machinery, these handsets will allow you to do maintenance and perform any task that involves the placing, insertion, pushing, pulling, screwing, unscrewing and joining of objects. The possibilities in porn have not gone unnoticed but there’s no end of possibilities in learning.

5. Vehicle sims

For all of those driving skills or any other vehicle skills on boats, trains and planes, one can see how manual manipulation matters. More than this you’ll be tested on defensive driving, on why mobile use is dangerous, even driving while under the influence of drugs.

6. Lab work

Lab work largely involves doing things within arms length. Techniques can be practised and perfected without using or breaking expensive kit. MRI machines and a host of other expensive healthcare kit can also be used without wasting valuable investigative time on real equipment.

7. Sports

In sports where one uses one arms and hands – that’s almost everything - I can see this being used in coaching, especially in technique – in everything from tennis, golf and fly fishing to throwing a javelin. Dangerous pastimes, such as parachuting or scuba-diving could benefit from preparatory training.

8. Gestures

For soft skills, the ability to use body language and gesture may be important. But it is the use of gestures as controls that also matter, so that you’re unencumbered by navigational menu issues or Xbox controller issues. You will be able to shake hands, thumbs up, give the middle finger, wave goodbye.

9. Training, assessment & certification

I have seen a 3D gas inspection simulator that trains, assesses and gives partial certification. This could provide an opportunity for huge reductions in the cost of all three. At present vocational learning is plagued by high cost assessment.

10. Social media

Make no mistake, Zuckerberg wants to take social media into VR. With one and a half billion regular Facebook users, this is the big audience, the big win, not just the gamers. Want to hold a virtual meeting, seminar, tutorial, class, collaborative learning session? That is mind-blowing.

Renaissance of vocational learning

These handsets give you more freedom and movement, more importantly they allow you to DO more. This will allow us to implement what the likes of James, Dewey, Kolb and Schank have been saying for decades. Many countries are now turning to re-examine vocational learning. In the UK, the winning party fought the election on the promise of 3 million apprenticeships, Finland, S Korea, Singapore and other countries are reassessing the excesses of overly academic approaches to education. This approach could make vocational cool. Imagine a world where young people want to do things, rather than spend years inside lecture halls. We learn by doing – so lets do it!

Millie the social networking teacher

Some time back I gave a talk at Richard Huish college in Somerset. Some in the audience were openly hostile to my recommendation that teaching needs to wise up and open up to the use of technology and social media in particular but I also received emails from teachers who apologised for their 'luddite attitude' with the message that they planned to do something. Millie, a teacher in the audience, young enough not to have been infected with the ‘ostrich virus’ popped up a year later, with something extraordinary, social media at the heart of her teaching. Millie sings the praises of the OU, as she dropped out of a more traditional University and found the whole non-lecture based OU approach far more relevant - and it tells.

Millie’s Blog: What I Taught in….

Millie has a blog called What I Taught in Geography This Week. Stephen Wheeler has given a detailed account here of why blogging is such a powerful amplifier for teachers, and Millie is its living embodiment. What better way to interact with her students than to give them what she’s taught online, supplemented by useful videos, links, geography film reviews and relevant books. For teachers and lecturers to simply turn up and deliver verbal stuff in classrooms and not record or and supplement that teaching with useful resources and cool stuff seems odd to me. A blog does nothing but enhance the reputation of the teacher and gives students a second chance to access and use that teacher’s expertise.

Millie’s student Blogs: What I Learnt in….

Her students have responded in kind, creating their own What I Learnt in Geography This Week blogs, contributing content, film and book reviews. One student, who’s applying for Cambridge this year, has used her two year blog as part of her UCAS application, as it shows her deep commitment to the subject. The first line from another student blog says it all, “So I am a geography geek and got added so I can blog too. What can I say, I love it absolutely love it! I'm not really that clever but it doesn’t stop a love I have for the subject, I also study environmental science and geology.” Now I challenge anyone who has doubts about this to read these blogs and say it doesn’t motivate and enhance the students’ learning experience. The very act of writing this stuff gives them reflection, reinforcement and confidence.

Facebook: Richuish Geography

Not content with blogs, although she and her students like them, she set up a Facbook account for her course. More than this, she started to integrate her blog, Slideshare for presentations, discussions (lots on mutual help on revision), Flickr, YouTube (relevant videos) and citeme (pull out a citation in the correct format for research). Closed tutor groups are now being developed.

After a year it’s running at around 13000 page views a month and they’ve only had to delete one comment, which in any case, was pretty tame. And with success in the trial subject, geography, they’re rolling it out to other subjects with Philosophy and Photography up and running.

Coveritlive: online workshops

Millie also used live events through coveritlive. This app runs through the blog and allows a realtime workshop to be run, especially useful for revision sessions. The teacher has complete control over the comments and content and it can be replayed at any time. The –re-exam sessions were well attended, performing the useful function of getting the students to revise through a scheduled event.

Conclusion

All of this was achieved on the back of some visionary teachers, good staff training and the will to help students. As the social media tools took hold they started to move away from Moodle with its log-ons and limited interactivity. My own view is that this supports my last two posts on feedback and good practice in teaching. If, as I believe, teachers often fail students through too much focus on summative scoring and not enough formative assessment through specifically constructive comments, then social media is the way forward. Almost everything Professor Paul Black has to say on formative assessment can be implemented through these tools. Far too long have teachers been stuck in ‘hands-up’ questioning in class, scoring tests and giving vague feedback. This opens up dialogue between teachers and students, especially those who are somewhat introverted in class and who need constructive support and help. Go Millie.

Slaughterhouse live - my first real job!

People in education and learning often imagine that everyone works in an office and is in need of hokey 'Leadership' training. Working people who do physical jobs, not on Zoom, are often written out of the narrative. I've had some of those jobs.

In fact, I’m always surprised when young people get to University or start their first job after graduating, having never worked. Sure paper rounds have gone the way of newspapers, and employing children is no longer easy but it’s part of growing up. More than school, college or any University, it’s your first honest encounter with real people and the real world.

What follows may seem like fiction but, believe me, every word is hard fact. I had a paper round for two years, delivering the Evening News (Pink on a Saturday) in a tough housing estate (scheme in Scotland) called Craigshill (affectionally called Crazyhill by those in the posher estates to the west). I also had to collect the money, which wasn’t easy, as my pay was a percentage of the takings. It is where we lived and seemed quite normal but nothing prepared me for my first real job. I was 16, still another year to go at school and I got work at Halls of Broxburn. It was a slaughterhouse.

Up early in those wet, dark mornings, it was five miles by bus. Nothing prepared me for what was coming. There were three of us and we were given white lab-like coats, tight greenish gloves, hair nets and black wellingtons. This seemed nice, I thought, almost clinical. In we went, pushing through big black plastic sheets that acted as doors and then the smell hit me. It was an indescribable concoction, a thick, meaty but also charnel and chemical smell. It smelt like hell.

Our first task was standing either side of the bandsaw, where huge, half carcasses of pigs were sliced up into great chunks, one to the left, the other the right – legs, loins, bellies and shoulders. The great chunks of flesh slid off into our hands and we packed them into big, white, plastic tubs. It was dangerous work and more than one of the old hands literally had an old hand that was missing a finger or two.

The butchers worked away on benches, skilled men, paring red meat from the bone. They moved quickly, knives flashing, tossing the shorn meat into vats. One later showed me the scars on his stomach, they all had them from knives that had, by accident, slipped. Every so often one would stop and sharpen the blade on a rough rod of steel. The noise was chilling.

A few days in, I knew something was up. I had already been sent for the left handed screwdriver and was now wary of these rituals but was told to go to the station at the far end of the slaughterhouse. This, I knew, was where the pigs were slaughtered. Pushing hard through two transparent flaps of plastic I saw a gruesome spectacle. Pigs came in, hung up by their back legs. They had been stunned. You could hear the shots, on the other side, great thuds but far worse, the horrific squeals. And here, right in front of me, they were having their throats cut. Out of the red slash on their throats thick spurts of blood pumped out, straight into big aluminium milk vats. It was a rite of passage for newbies like us and they enjoyed the idea of us weaklings having a heart of darkness moment. I mean that literally, as stunned but still living, their beating hearts pumped the blood out into the vats. This blood was later congealed, spiced and turned into black puddings. Three hundred pigs a day were slaughtered and moved around on a rail on the roof, hung up on chains by their back feet, a great cavalcade of carcasses, that wobbled, shivered, some still jerking.

I remember a pig escaped from the pens and was running around really fast, squealing. No one wanted to face up to it as it was big, strong and and was charging at people on the trot. It was eventually boxed in with moveable fences and sent back to its death. That was maybe the saddest moment of the whole experience, seeing that poor, terrified creature, witness its own fate.

Back on the bandsaws, my hands had developed sores, as the freshly cut bones had shards that cut through the plastic gloves into our palms. My hands stung when we had to pack the great chunks of loins and gammons into huge vats, filled with salt and nitrate liquid for curing.

Then one day another instruction. I was sent to the ‘burners’. I had no idea what this meant but was about to find out. The great parade of carcasses, once killed and bled, went through to another room. I had heard the noise, a roar every minute or so, regular like great waves hitting the shore and through the slit in the huge, black plastic doors, an orange glow. It looked and sounded like Dante’s Inferno. It was worse.

What I saw were vertical gas jets that roared out flames. They wrapped and licked round the hung carcass. This was to burn the hair off the pig. Pigs are a lot hairier than you think, great thick hairs. Once flamed the hairs singed and curled black and we had to step forward onto little platforms, stripped to the waist, and stand with great curved knives, a wooden handle on both ends, to scrape the burnt hair off in great long, downward strokes. But it was the smell I will never forget, that smell of singed hair you sometimes get when a candle perhaps brushes your hair. Imagine that multiplied by a thousand, a great sickly burning smell hanging in the air. I did this for a day. It was foul work.

At this point I was sure there was no worse job on earth than scraping burnt hair from the skin of still warm pigs. I was wrong. Again after a couple of days back on the bandsaws, my hands now pitted with bone cuts, I was sent to the ‘gut room’. I remember the guy with the Glasgow Rangers scarf, which he wore every day to work, like a cravat, grinning when I walked down toward the gut room.

There was an open door and on the left hand side of the door, a hatch, with what looked like a slide from a children’s playground that went down into the orange glow of the room below. A man stood next to the slide and split the carcass from head to toe, inserted his hand and knife deep inside the split to gather the insides with his arms, an enormous bulbous bundle of organs, then expertly pared and separated them off from the flesh and guided it on to the slide, where it slid silently down into the depths of the gut room.

I has been given huge galoshes and a big rubber apron. Why? Heaven knows, I didn’t. But I was about to find out. Stepping down the wooden staircase, there was a square room, like a cube. It was several inches deep in a sticky, yellowish liquid and in the middle there was a huge mangle. Once again, my forearm came automatically up to cover my nose. This time a sharp, metallic, acidic smell hit the back of my throat. It was the acid contents of stomachs, mixed with great piles of noxious shit from the intestines that were being squeezed out through the mangle. There was surely not a place, even in hell, as awful as this. I’ve yet to find one.

After several weeks of blood, shit, and I don’t mind admitting it - tears, I had made enough money to quit. It was twenty quid a week. My mother charged me rent, that was the deal back then. You work, you pay your way. Even then, I felt as rich as Croesus. Up to that point my experience of money had been entirely in coins. I now had notes!

It was the tail end of summer, so off I went on my own, an old rucksack with leather straps and hitch hiked round Scotland. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free. The air smelt sweet, the hills spectacularly green. I stayed in youth hostels, walked from Inverness through beautiful Glen Affric to the Kyle of Lochalsh then on to Skye and Rasaay. My parents had no idea where I was - no smartphones then. I never looked back. It was too damn frightening to look back.

7 FAILS in the way we practice 'failure' in learning

Failure, as we know, is a fundamental part of learning which I have explored elsewhere. Yet failure, in practice, is often used in learning to hinder rather than help learning. It too often becomes defined in practice as a deficit technique, rather than a formative feature of progress. Here’s seven examples of how failure can fail learners.

1. Language of failure

Far too much emphasis is put on final, summative assessment, at the expense of formative assessment, confusing and importing summative habits into formative processes. The summative language of ‘pass’ and ‘fail’ is a mutually exclusive opposition that makes little sense in formative assessment. We take a dualist attitude and transfer it, mistakenly, back across to the entire process of learning. Too many teachers and online learning programmes default to the language of failure, rather than the language of learning. The fact that you have yet to know or master something is a state of ‘not yet knowing’ not failure. Yet the red pen culture and lack of knowledge about feedback, deliberate practice, memory and the role of failure in all learning is endemic.

2. Language of gifted and talented

My heart sinks when I hear parents use these terms about their kids. Even worse, are schools and teachers, who should know better, using a whole raft of terms associated with these fixed ability terms. Attributing success to ‘talent’, ‘ability’ and being ‘gifted’ is disturbing from a head teacher or teacher. You don’t have to be a Dweck freak to realise how destructive this language is in learning. It fixes attributes and therefore demotes effort and practice. It also gives learners a get out clause. Even the learners who succeed with high marks stop at the pass mark and ignore the remainder. The rest, if they are branded as failures (not talented or gifted) will make less effort and many will drop out

3. Hands-up anyone

A good example of awful teaching practice is the ‘hand up anyone’ technique, beautifully exposed in Ferris Beuller “….anyone, anyone.”. The teacher asks a question. This is good as it forces the learners to try to recall the answer but only the ones who know the answer put their hands up and the rest feel deflated. The introverts are excluded, tehre's not enough time for true reflection. It makes no sense. The process of learning needs to be kept positive at this level, not some lazy ritual where people are embarrassed, even castigated for not yet knowing.

4. Whole task assessment

Rather than create, active, effortful learning experiences, where failure is part of the learning process, we set whole tasks and simply repeat those tasks. You don’t learn to write by simply writing, you learn hundreds, indeed thousands of small rules around spelling, sentence structures, punctuation, style and so on. It’s lots of tiny acts of failure and correction that lead to success. The ‘whole language’ movement, for example, led to decades of bad teaching and poor literacy, as it failed to recognise the role of failure in the learning process. Whole task teaching and assessment is the route to self-doubt and failure.

5. Essays

The ‘essay’ is a lazy and vastly overused form of assessment. A Professor of Pharmacology once complained to me that her University forced her to set essays for her Pharmacology students, which she found ridiculous. Smart students simply memorise essays for exams, so they are far from being an adequate form of summative assessment. Hand written essays encourage this as it is difficult to engage in critical writing, which always involves redrafting, structural change and rewriting. Waiting for weeks (the norm) to get a grade back (with scant feedback) on an essay, is a ridiculous form of formative assessment. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come across parents writing essays for their kids at school and, unbelievably, University. Then there’s the simple fact that you can buy them. Encouragecheating and you’ll get cheats.

6. Marking as end-point

Unnecessary marking is another technique that confuses summative with formative assessment. Professor Black rightly criticises teachers for being over-zealous with marking, when they should be promoting learning. His advice is to drop marking during the formative learning as it does more harm than good. Let’s say a few get a pass by crossing some threshold, let’s say x%. Even with these learners this will act as an end point, leaving 100-x% of the knowledge or skills absent. That’s not good in healthcare, where that 100-x% can kill. It also demotivates those who ‘fail’, so that more damage is done to the whole cohort. For a more detailed account of why marking sucks, see here.

7. Deficit model

The education system is too often seen in terms of a deficit model, a dangerous conceit. Structurally it is layered like rock and the learner has to punch up through these layers while many fail to punch through at each stage. This deficit model, where the system is always failing, with failed schools and failed standards, pushes politicians and professionals towards a deficit model that defines the domain, policy and practice. The glass is always half empty as the language of failure is allowed to dominate. League tables, winners and losers , do little other than promote a culture of failure.

Conclusion

Failure is the end point for too many in this process. To promote and see ‘failure’, not as a means to an end (learning) but an end in itself, is to misunderstand its fundamental role in learning and memory. Sifting, sorting and ultimately abandonment, is to fail to understand the true joy of education and learning. For too many the end point is being branded as a failures. Turn this on its head and see failure as a state of becoming and you turn a fixed entity into a dynamic process and opportunity.

Black & Wiliam - Avoid ‘hands up’… Formative feedback… evils of marking…

Feedback is seen as a key feature of good teaching, yet precise research and theory is hard to find. Black and Wiliam published a well-researched and influential paper, Inside the Black Box, that recommended methods of feedback, making it the sweet spot in improving productivity in schools, even beyond lower class sizes.

Inside the Black Box

The classroom is the ‘black box’ and they attempt to change teaching with clear advice on ‘formative assessment’. This is the powerful lever, they claim, that unlocks potential through good teaching. Most educational policies focus on ‘summative assessment’ yet this is an end-point, when it is often too late to influence the learner. Even on formative feedback they researched the common practice of straight or primitive marking as opposed to constructive guidance and feedback from teachers. Marking as formative assessment, they claim, may do more damage than most educators realise.

Praise the work not the child

Too many students ‘get by’ and seek tactics that lead to good marks not good learning. ‘Never praise a child, praise what they did’ says Professor Black, and by this he meant praise the work of the learner and not the learner. To praise the student encourages two ideas that are powerfully corrosive in learning; a) the idea that it is all down to ability, b) the idea that the ‘teacher’ likes me. To counter this, teachers must praise the work and effort, not ability of the student. Nor should teachers compare students with other students. Praising the person also stops students from trying harder. Learners must believe they can change for the better.

Avoid ‘hands up’ techniques

They observed that teachers jump in too early after asking questions (often less than a second), often prematurely answering their own questions. They are critical of teachers that rely on ‘hands up’ techniques, as it encourages the extroverts and achievers but discourages the rest. It also encourages, not diagnostic or ‘hinge’ questions that reveal understanding, but the simple knowledge of facts.

Constructive, formative feedback

Their advice is to target questions to individuals, then wait, for at least three seconds. Tasks should elicit thoughtful reflection, students be given time and asked to express their ideas. Do not pass judgment as every answer deserves a positive response in terms of building confidence and not knocking students down. To steer, not being too dominant or too open, but steering students in the right direction, is the real art of feedback. Asking the right questions gets the right answers, so teachers must reflect in depth on the questions they ask. Many questions just fill time or don’t stretch the students or probe understanding. Hinge questions are carefully structured to diagnose students, which is why coloured cards and clickers can accelerate a teacher’s diagnosis of whole class performance. Comments on students’ work is hard work but some simple rules help. Avoid vague, general, ‘Needs more detail….expand…add a few thoughts of your own’ comments. Be specific about errors and recommend a specific positive action. A good comment would be, ‘You’ve used ‘particle’, ‘element’ and ‘compound’ in your answer, look at the glossary in your textbook to see how they differ’.

Evils of marking

A terminal test promotes the idea that it marks an end-point. Tests are therefore seen by learners as terminal. You have passed or failed, a success or failure, bright or dim. It is far better for teachers to deliver feedback in the form of specific comments that point to improvement. For many learners, marked tests are literally the mark of Cain, as they leave their psychological mark, for the majority a mark of failure. The mark is seen as a score on fixed ability, fixing in the mind of the learner, a rigid view of their ability. It says nothing meaningful about how they can change and improve. Even for high scorers, full competence is rarely the aim, so they see a high mark as ‘having done enough’ and take their foot off the pedal. A score, rather than understanding and improvement, becomes the goal. It promotes the idea that you need to pass the test, not master the subject. In short, for Black and William, we need to focus more on ‘formative’, not ‘summative’ assessment. They recommend high quality, small, frequent tests that require good feedback. It is the feedback on what they don’t know, not that which the student got right, that leads to learning.

Black quotes an important study of 132 mixed ability, Y7 students in 12 classes across 4 schools. The students were given three types of feedback:

1) Marks

2) Comments

3) Marks plus comments

The ‘Comments' only group had a significant attainment gain with NO gain in the 'Marks' only and 'Marks plus comments’ groups. Increased interest and motivation was positive with all in the ‘Comments’ only group but only positive with high achievers in the ‘Marks’ and ‘Marks plus comments’ groups, where low achievers registered lower interest and motivation. This is at first puzzling. Why does more feedback 'Marks plus comments' have such a negative effect? The researchers concluded that ‘marks’ signaled the end of the matter, a terminal test, which stopped learning and further interest. The message is clear - hold back on marking in formative assessment.

Teachers

They see teachers’ traditional views of learning (transmission) and traditional views on ability (fixed IQs) as being the main barriers to effective formative feedback. For Black and William it is quite clear that teachers should not be left to their own devices on this subject. They need professional development and support. Self and peer assessment also raises the quality of formative assessment while taking pressure off the teacher.

Online learning and formative feedback

Technology, in the form of self-paced, online learning content, simulations, games and adaptive learning have all contributed to increasing the level of feedback in learning. In real time simulations and games, such as flight simulators, the feedback is continuous and in real time. More recently, in adaptive learning, powerful back-end algorithms have supported sophisticated feedback, based on what the learner has done, where they want to go, presenting the right content and feedback, dynamically on their learning journey.

Influence

Is there evidence that improving formative assessment raises standards? Yes. Is there evidence that there is room for improvement? Yes. Is there evidence about how to improve formative assessment? Yes. Black and Wiliam shone a spotlight on a critical weakness in educational theory and policies – the lack of focus on effective teaching and, in particular, formative feedback, which they believe is the key to increasing the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

Bibliography

Black P & Wiliam D (1998) Inside the Black Box Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment http://weaeducation.typepad.co.uk/files/blackbox-1.pdf

“Assessment in Education” (Black and Wiliam, 1998)

Wiliam, D. (2010). An integrative summary of the research literature and implications for a new theory of formative assessment. In H. L. Andrade & G. J. Cizek (Eds.), Handbook of formative assessment (pp. 18-40). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.