Quality Assessment in Education

Introducing Quality Assessment

• Performances of individuals and institutions are measured and compared, leading to rankings.
• International benchmark tests have emerged to measure school learners in literacy, science, and mathematics.
• Examples of these tests include PIRLS, TIMMS, and PISA.
• South Africa has participated in international benchmark studies and performed poorly.
• The Annual National Assessments (ANAs) were introduced in South Africa in 2011 to benchmark tests.
• ANAs were administered to learners in grade 3 (literacy and numeracy) and grade 6 (languages and mathematics).
• Grade 9 was added in 2012, but the ANAs were postponed in 2015 due to concerns about administration.
• Provinces have also introduced their own systemic benchmark tests in selected grades.
• Schools are compared, ranked, and classified based on these tests and National Certificate examinations.
• Measuring performance is associated with quality education but may distract from the purpose of good education.
• Good education should refer to the purpose of education.

Domains of Education

• The purpose of education includes qualification, socialisation, and subjectification.
• Qualification provides learners with knowledge, skills, and attitudes for performing tasks.
• Socialisation involves becoming part of social, cultural, and political orders.
• It also includes how we are inducted into disciplines like mathematics and science.
• Subjectification is the process of becoming an independent and critical thinker.
• Good education encompasses all three dimensions.
• If education focuses only on qualification, assessment becomes reduced to technical validities.
• Quality education goes beyond what learners know and can do.
• It should also consider what learners ought to be or become.
• Good education includes a normative element.
• Measurement is integral to assessment, but assessment is more than measurement.
• Quality assessment aligns with good education and considers the three educational domains.

Process Skills in Science

• Mastering science process skills help learners to design and conduct experiments.
• Designing experiments includes formulating hypotheses, observing measuring, classifying, representing findings, and drawing conclusions.
• Observing and designing experiments fall under the domain of qualification.
• Science involves ways of thinking and doing, inducting learners into these scientific practices.
• There are multiple scientific methods, not a single universal one.
• Science is a human endeavor within a culture where scientific knowledge results from will and imagination.
• School science develops learners' scientific literacy.
• Scientific literacy enables citizens function in a scientifically advanced global society.
• How science learners become socialized into the discipline relates to socialisation.
• Education should focus on learners' ability to distance themselves from socialization and think critically.
• The ability to think critically about concepts independently is the domain of subjectification.
• Subjectification brings newness into the world and promotes change.
• Subjectification develops learners' critical thinking abilities.

Good Education

• Quality education includes qualification, socialisation, and subjectification.
• Quality assessment must align with this view of quality education.
• Quality assessment cannot be discussed without first looking at quality teaching and learning.

Good or Productive Pedagogies

• Good/productive pedagogies enable all learners to achieve high-quality academic, social, and personal learning goals.
• Achieving high-quality learning outcomes prepares learners for the present and future world.
• School structures, organization, management, and policy changes impact learning and assessment.
• Assessment, integral to teaching, enhances learners' abilities to attain and exceed educational aims.
• Several international research studies explore pedagogies that enhance academic and social development.
• Such pedagogies have been the focus of research on teacher and school effectiveness for over 50 years.

Productive Pedagogies

• Research from Australia identifies four pedagogies/classroom practices integral to quality teaching and assessment.
• Intellectual quality, connectedness, supportive classroom environment, working with and valuing difference are all quality teaching practices.
• Each pedagogy describes classroom environments and teaching strategies as good or productive.
• Strategies that count as productive help learners attain learning goals.
• This is true regardless of social, cultural, or academic backgrounds.
• The Productive Pedagogies model has four dimensions.
• Each dimension consist of different elements explicitly defining quality learning.
• The pedagogies should be combined based on the nature and needs of the specific learner groups.
• Focus should be maintained on the learners when designing learning programmes and assessment tasks.
• Productive Pedagogies framework informs, supplements, or replaces traditions of pedagogy.
• It can reflect local communities' concerns, cultures, traditions, and desires for schooling.
• Instruction and assessment are central expressions of humanity what it is to be human.
• Teaching and assessment support learners to live out elements associated with each pedagogy.
• Teaching and assessment should function as critical citizens.

Dimensions of the Productive Pedagogies Framework

• Intellectual quality, connectedness, supportive classroom environment, working with and valuing difference are components of the Productive Pedagogies framework
• Intellectual quality refers to engaging learners in activities using successful adults' thinking.
• Learning improves when learners are engaged in higher-order thinking when there is a focus on deep knowledge, when learner activities are geared towards focus on deep knowledge of the subject.
• Academic engagement occurs when knowledge is treated as problematic, and learners understand how language shapes knowledge.
• Intellectually challenging classrooms are a social must for learners.
• Intellectual quality goes beyond qualification and socialisation.
• Intellectual quality incorporates subjectification (learners' critical dispositions).

Connectedness in Real-World Learning

• Learners connect to real-world experiences outside of the classroom.
• Connecting happens with classroom practices focus on stated curriculum topics.
• Connection happens when cultural knowledge is appropriately valued learners bring to the classroom.
• Connectedness involves valuing learners' background experiences.
• It involves recognizing learners' background experiences when making deliberate attempts to connect beyond the classroom.
• Connecting beyond the classroom can investigate physical or human challenges.
• When connectedness occurs, learning will have meaning.
• Base learning on learners' personal experience.
• Base learning on learners' on real-world public problems that interest learners.
• Give learners opportunities to share their work with audiences beyond the classroom.
• Connections are made in learners' minds, not by the teacher's intention.
• Support learners in building new knowledge based on existing background knowledge.
• Integrate knowledge from different bodies of knowledge (subjects).
• Make learners aware that there is connectedness to the world as new understandings develop.
• Develop learners' knowledge and skills in a context of solving real-life problems or issues.
• Learners should be exposed to a problem- or issue-based curriculum.

Supportive Classroom Environment

• Productive Pedagogies incorporate the domain of subjectification that supports new knowledge.
• Building new knowledge is best captured in building on existing backgrounds.
• A supportive classroom environment supports all learners to achieve the fullness of their potential
• Maximizing a supportive environment depends on physical space, interactions, and relationships between learners and teacher.
• Hayes et al (2006) warn that a socially supportive environment should be intellectually demanding'.
• Learners control or influence teaching and learning activities.
• They are also guided strongly by high expectations, closing gaps through scaffolding.
• Learners are expected to engage seriously with tasks in order to achieve deep understanding.
• Learners regulate their behavior in accordance with the high expectations of teacher and clear criteria.
• The teacher provides the high expectations of teacher and clear criteria.
• Supportive learning is necessary for on quality education, enhancing all domains of education.

Working with and Valuing Difference

• This dimension has 2-fold purpose: helping learners to achieve their academic social outcomes is first purpose.
• Guiding learners to take up future roles as active and functional citizens is the second purpose.
• Bringing diverse cultural knowledge into the teaching and learning engagements is necessary.
• Inclusion of non-dominant groups in relation to specific population must be practiced.
• Using and acknowledging learners stories or narratives that are relevant to the substance of the lesson is meaningful and important.
• Creating learning communities that are recognized within classroom is necessary.
• Deliberate efforts should be developed to make active citizenship.

Productive Assessment

• Teachers must use assessment practices congruently with productive pedagogies.
• Doing so ensures their efforts to produce high-quality learning will not be wasted.
• Alignment is especially crucial with increased emphasis on summative assessment and systemic evaluation.
• Summative assessment provides summary of achievements at a given time certifying learning.
• Summative assessment reports to parents/learners about progress done by relative position.
• Systemic evaluation measures the education system's achievement of social, economic, and transformational goals.
• Objectives of systemic evaluation: identify factors affecting learner achievement and make appropriate interventions.
• Questions should be asked about respect to elements of pedagogy to address social purposes of schooling.
• This is supported by ensuring assessment practices shape student learning to encourage it.

Dimensions of Productive Pedagogy

• Intellectual quality, connectedness, a supportive classroom environment and difference are all part of productive pedagogy.
• Intellectual quality concerns deliberately engaging learners in activities for thinking used by successful adults.
• Learning improves with higher-order thinking and a focus on deep knowledge of the subject.
• Connectedness means connecting experiences with classroom learning and valuing cultural knowledge learners bring.
• Supportive environments help learners achieve full potential, depending on interactions.
• Valuing diversity means bringing cultural knowledge into teaching.

The Meaning of Assessment

• Le Grange and Reddy (1998) says assessment supports teaching/learning, informs about learners/schools, and determines accountability.
• Assessment should developed with clear sense of purpose and levels of analysis.
• Assessment can be facilitative or inhibitive and should support objectives.
• Brainard (1997) states that the word assessment comes from the Latin verb, assidere meaning to sit beside.
• The simplest assessment level means observing, perceiving and supporting learning in students.
• It must be understood in order for this knowledge to be gained
• Jones and Bray see assessment as determining learner achievement.

Distinctions in Assessment

• Traditional teaching primarily focuses on a learner's memory and/ or capacity to recall information.
• In traditional models, assessment is summative and norm-referenced rather than formative.
• Judgements indicate what learners know at the end of a term in order to decide whether or not they should be promoted to grade's next level phase.
• Emphasis is placed on the end product in which knowledge recall is assessed as the end product.
• Assessments of types focus on learner's processes of how attitudes competence and any associated processes are developed.
• More examinations are concerned and test lower order and abilities within cognitive domains
• Cognitive domains means the memory and recognition of lower and thinking and problem solving skills relating to abilities and any development.
• The practices within teacher are informed by productive pedagogy to see if there are qualities such intellect and any connectiveness.
• Deep understanding and critical engagement with knowledge become the priority.
• These promote discussions used and assist any cognitive requirements.

Links between Thinking Skills

• Discussions of terminology must be used along with higher-order thinking such as application synthesis to theme.
• This can help students develop deeper insights see to Figure 1.2.
• Figure 1.2 shows how it overlaps with the six levels cognitively see the revised version of Bloom's Taxonomy.
• Each level possesses differences and levels can help progress assessments.
• Various verbs must be at certain levels.
• Traditional approaches to assessment should be used to focus development of all learners so domains are maintained.
• Productive pedagogies can support assessment using living inclusivity, Messick, and contributing to a sustainable one and active citizenship.
• The environment must be very strong the more important they can become all of the aims.

Curriculum and Assessment in Education

• Curriculum must be aligned of good pedagogies and good education.
• This can be used without mentioning any explication.
• Curriculum needs to be examined what it entails.
• The term can be examined.

The Relationship Between Curriculum and Assessment

• Curriculum has various definitions, which is a contested term.
• Curriculum derives originally to run.
• Curriculum now is reduced to something in paths.
• In the context of curriculum education is heavily knowledge to the organisation of schooling.

What Describes World Knowledge

• Information documents its works from early human existence.
• Curriculum knowledge works formally to create better information
• Disciple units in discipline for purposes of schooling.
• Hierarchical information will be given from complex ones.
• Assess methods and determine knowledge, know assessment, progress which will again coupled requirements.

Principles of Assessment

• Brainard talks about assessidere and close them as engage in them.
• Assessment measures reality to get understanding them.
• Jones to determine ever present teaching.
• It's given by the learner himself.
• Needs include clear promotion and appropriate ones.
• The assessment can be the one and all.
• They give an educational aims
• As the curriculum needs
• This means these are understood
• Achievement can match
• Each individual
• Emphasis
• In traditional quality must involve concerted information.
• Skills have acquired to expand to capture information

The Aim of Assessment in Education

• According to Le Grange and Reddy (1998) assessment intends to do the following:
• Serve to improve learning for students
• Serve to inform teachers and schools
• Serve as accountability
• Encourage curriculum development
• Act as a selection device
• Act as device for certification

Assessing Alignment

• Discussion documents are geography example of how the meeting takes place.
• Key is an education to achieve grades and understand learners in the curric.
• Improve teaching interventions to full potential.
• Subject and grade are linked what has to happen.