Formative Assessment Design version 3.0
V2.0 can be found here
V1.0 can be found here
The Plan
Assessments form the key tool in measuring and informing learning. Without assessments students do not know how to improve. Furthermore staff do not know how much students understand and therefore how to support their future learning. Like all tools, assessments must be designed with care and attention to detail. Teachers must be clear on skills, understanding and knowledge to be tested, and students needs before designing assessment materials. In order for assessments to be effective students must fully understand assessment criteria and tasks required of them. Teachers (to be highly effective) need to know about learning processes and strategies learners will use to reach understanding or acquire knowledge, possible alternative paths to acquiring knowledge and skills. Furthermore they need to know about pedagogical strategies they can use to help different students make progress along possibly very different learning pathways. Ultimately students should be the central focus when designing and implementing assessments and data generated must be used to inform and adjust future teaching with a view to improving students’ learning.
I propose to establish a baseline assessment for students entering secondary music education. As a private 3-18 school, my students have access to specialised music education from enrollment. Before they start my class in S7, the 6th grade, many students have had access to instrumental lessons and ensemble involvement (approx 30%) and all students have received one lesson a week classroom instruction, including singing, and instrumental performance opportunities. At secondary level, however, students experience a number of changes: they change teacher, have more exposure to music technology, are given more freedom and choice over group projects and work with different peer groups. Additionally, it is at this time when we receive more new students than ever before, many of whom have not had the same access to music education as those enrolled from foundation years. It is for all these reasons therefore that a baseline assessment is necessary in order to ascertain prior understanding and to generate data to inform future teaching in order to ascertain their prior understanding and current interests--data I will then use when differentiating work and to make curricular choices about content to be studied and concepts to focus upon. Through this assessment I would expect to see those students who have been involved in musical opportunities to have more refined aural development and musical awareness as opposed to students with limited musical experience.
This assessment will consist of a number of parts in which different areas of musical understanding will be assessed. The first section will need to question students on their prior musical experience to build a profile of their exposure to practical music making. Within this I would incorporate questions to encourage students to think beyond the classroom in terms of their musical exposure and gain an understanding of their musical interests and curiosities. The second section will need to be assessments of aural awareness and understanding of music theory. Ideally this assessment would also test creativity. However, I feel this may be too much to include in one assessment, and these elements could be assessed through later projects once students have been tested on their understanding of musical basics. The design of this assessment would assume all students have reached a level of literacy to access the questions, have basic ICT skills to access embedded links, text boxes and navigate web resources, and have had some exposure to a range of genres of music.
The information and data generated from this assessment to make initial decisions about differentiating the first year of secondary music education. It will allow me to gauge my students’ level of music theory and music terminology understanding prior to beginning classroom instruction and to understand the full range of learners and how best to support them in my mixed ability classroom. Specifically this knowledge will be used to reintroduce music which students have previously had exposure to in order to aid familiarity, alongside new and unseen work to stretch students understanding of musical genre. Additionally the data will highlight which students, if any, will need a parallel higher or lower ability course of study, and ways in which mixed ability work will need to be scaffolded and or extended in order to meet their individual needs. More generically it will give me details of the students individual and on a broader scale classwide strengths and weaknesses. For instance a class may need to skip a whole program of study on rhythmic understanding following their high level test results, with a parallel curriculum built in to support a small number of students who would benefit from completing the unit. Furthermore it will highlight those students who will need targeted extra support in future projects and ensure I know the areas in which they might struggle. Finally it will prove or refute the notion that students with past experience in the instrumental program will succeed better in my class than students who did not participate in the instrumental program. This is often a contentious issue with parents, who often feel their child should be achieving “higher” or “top” grades in all areas of music instruction because they have been involved in one area, generally instrumental lessons. I find that although musical understanding and terminology is better in students involved in the instrumental program, they do not necessarily achieve higher in classroom instruction, given that much of this curriculum centers on musical ideas, creativity and the ability to synthesise musical understanding into aural recognition, compositions and music technology. Just because a student has had piano lessons for the last four years does not necessarily mean he or she can compose.Through this baseline assessment I will be able to better understand the needs of all those in my classroom and the specific area in which all students in my care will potentially need additional support or higher level activities and the areas and skill sets in which these will be needed.
Since the first revision I have explored how I can embed sound clips into my assessment. In order to do this I explored adding links directly into the quiz for each question (possible in Google Forms and Socrative), creating an annotation activity in EduCanon or SoundCloud (perhaps too difficult for this baseline assessment and may create copyright issues in SoundCloud), and creating a longer sound/video file with quizzes built into this.
As most of these students will be unknown to me I have decided to keep the project as simple as possible and use only one tool, Google Forms, for the first part of the assessment, Google Forms with an addition of YouTube in the second part and an offline assessment using musical technology for the third part. I have opted for a blended hybrid assessment to allow me to respond to the needs of my class at the time of completion. Using “live” vs “recorded, embedded” sound clips throws up many pros and cons; live clips allow for students to become used to live sound (something which can become an issue in a digital world), ensure students listen to the whole of clips before completing their answer and spend an appropriate amount of time on each question, ensure all students move through the questions together allowing the teacher to give additional information to the whole class and correct any misconceptions which are picked up and control the number of times a clip can be played. On the other hand recorded clips would allow students to move at their own pace and allow for replays if necessary.
The Assessment
This assessment will be given to learners in the initial weeks of their secondary music instruction, following a short sequence of introductory lessons. As this will be the first time many of these students have been in my classroom, I do not want to give the assessment straight away. I feel this will be too overwhelming for students and could lead to them being turned off the subject before it even begins! The first lesson for students always involves music and name games to act as icebreakers between the new groups and myself, and I would like students to begin working on a group practical project before the baseline assessment is introduced. My rationale for this is that students should feel comfortable in my classroom and with the subject matter in order to connect fully with it, and by leaving the assessment for a few lessons in, it will allow for students to be more familiar with the subject and my methods allowing for a greater depth of detail in students responses. Ideally the assessment would be completed over a number of weeks, in short exercises. Unfortunately, however, I only teach the students once a week, therefore I will not have the ability to spread over a number of lessons in order to complete before the first parents evening, which will be further explained within the feedback section.
The assessment will be taken in three parts:
Part 1- aural perception and music theory, administered in class time
Part 2- musical experience and interests, a home-work
Part 3- Creativity, again administered in class time.
Part 1- This will be emailed out to students as a link just before their assigned class time (through Outlook’s delayed delivery system). Students will record their responses in the emailed Google Form which will have embedded audio links built into the form, students will navigate their own way through the assessment at their own pace using their laptop and will require individual headphones. Questions will be a mix of multiple choice and short answer covering the following:
Please find an example of the types of questions and layout here.
Part 2- this link will be embedded through the school’s home-work announcement system with the usual class announcement.
Ms Jones- Music- Please complete the following questionnaire *link* Deadline- *date*
Students will again complete a Google Form answering multiple choice and short answers on the following
In addition students will be asked to copy and paste links to their favourite music and justify their reasons for the choice of music.
Please find an example of the types of questions and layout here.
Part 3- Students will create a piece of music using the software Cubase and audio clips. These will then be exported and uploaded to Google Drive for submission through Google Classroom.
Instructions will be given verbally for this project alongside a teacher demonstration. Students will then be given a tick sheet to ensure they understand how the music will be assessed.
As Ms Jones’ has explained, your task is to create a piece of music in a style of your choice using the clips in Cubase.
When you are creating make sure your piece…
Feedback
Research by Hattie and Timperley (2007) states that feedback can have a large impact on student learning--larger than many other important factors including (for example) students’ prior cognitive ability, socioeconomic influences, homework, or class size. However, we know that in order for feedback to be useful it must be specific, identify strengths and weaknesses and be tailored to each student. “Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve, and should avoid comparisons with other pupils” (Black and Wiliams, 1998). Research has also shown that giving students numerical grades can at best take away from any feedback given and at worse render all feedback useless. Therefore for this reason students will not be given a numerical grade for part 1 and 2 of the assessment. Students will however need to receive a grade for the part 3 assessment, in line with school policy to report national curriculum grades twice per term. Criteria for this grade are set by the national curriculum requirements. This grade will be reported in school documentation and be available to students if requested. This will result in students receiving detailed descriptive feedback which will be emphasised over the numerical grade generated, however students will be able to request to talk through their numerical grade should they wish
Students will receive the following written feedback:
The ratings used above have been generated to highlight positives and show students have knowledge in each area i.e. entry level as opposed to weakness or ¼ etc. This will show students the areas in which they need to focus their improvement and be more meaningful than keeping the entire section as one “grade”. Similar to part 2 this will be received via email
As the sole teacher of these students I will use the data from the assessment to revise and differentiate class activities as outlined in the plan section, including numerical grades for each of the areas within part 1 and the detailed profile information form part 2. This thorough baseline assessment will ensure I have a full overview of each student’s strengths and weaknesses in order to differentiate work as listed in the plan section.
In addition the results of the assessment will be discussed with students and parents during the parents evening in order to help parents understand how best to support their child's development at home. Finally the data will be used in conjunction with school baseline data and predicted levels to revise individualised targets for the students (both numerically for school systems and in the form of achievable targets for student improvement).
Technology integration
As listed above two projects will utilise Google Forms for the collection of data, Google sheets will be used to collate and analyse data, and add-ons Flubaroo and custom-built Javascript to grade support the creation of customised feedback sheets. In addition students will use the music technology software Cubase in the creative exercise and use Google Drive and Classroom to submit and receive feedback (which will also be emailed to students).
Design rationale
This assessment has been designed for both myself and students to understand students’ current skills and understanding, and identify areas in which more support is needed. It will be used to underpin and differentiate all future work and therefore is a key example of formative assessment and assessment for learning. Many theories have stated three principles of improving learning: “where am I?”, “Where do I need to get?”, and “How do I get there?” This assessment seeks to establish the principles and ensure that future teaching and learning is tailored to students needs and requirements. As outlined students will receive detailed information on “where they are now”, receive revised target grades beginning to outline “where do I need to get” and through descriptive feedback in the creative exercise begin to establish “how do I get there”.