Embedded Formative Assessment PDF

# Embedded Formative Assessment ## Chapter 6 Activating Students as Instructional Resources for One Another 1. Some ways to give effective feedback have been described in this chapter but, every teacher will be able to come up with many more, provided that the key lessons from the research on feedba...

# Embedded Formative Assessment ## Chapter 6 Activating Students as Instructional Resources for One Another 1. Some ways to give effective feedback have been described in this chapter but, every teacher will be able to come up with many more, provided that the key lessons from the research on feedback are heeded. 2. If we are to harness the power of feedback to increase student learning, then we need to ensure that feedback causes a cognitive rather than an emotional reaction - in other words, feedback should cause thinking. 3. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor. 4. Indeed, the whole purpose of feedback should be to increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning, which is the focus of the next two chapters. ### Activating Students as Instructional Resources for One Another Even though there is a substantial body of research that demonstrates the extraordinary power of collaborative and cooperative learning, it is rarely deployed effectively in classrooms. This chapter explores the role that learners can play in improving the learning of their peers and concludes with a number of specific classroom techniques that can be used to put these principles into practice. ### Cooperative Learning Having reviewed the evidence, Robert Slavin, Eric Hurley, and Anne Chamberlain (2003) concluded that "research on cooperative learning is one of the greatest success stories in the history of educational research"(p. 177). Exactly why cooperative learning has such a profound effect is still a matter of some debate, although there appear to be four main factors: * **Motivation.** Students help their peers learn because, in well-structured cooperative learning settings, it is in their own interests to do so, and so effort is increased. * **Social Cohesion.** Students help their peers because they care about the group, again leading to increased effort. * **Personalization.** Students learn more because their more able peers can engage with the particular difficulties a student is having. * **Cognitive Elaboration.** Those who provide help in group settings are forced to think through the ideas more clearly. All these factors have a role to play, but some appear to be more powerful than others. In particular, just focusing on social cohesion, without attending to the other factors, appears to have little impact on student learning. A review of ninety-nine studies found that cooperative learning in which group rewards depended on the aggregate of the learning of individual members produced four times the impact on learning than was found when rewards were based on a single group product (Slavin, 1995). ### Practical Techniques The remainder of this chapter presents a number of techniques that teachers have found useful in getting started with the process of activating students as learning resources for one another. Inevitably, a number of these techniques involve students assessing each other's work, and this raises a number of ethical concerns. Perhaps the most important is whether students should be involved in summative assessment, and in my view, the answer is a firm no. I think it is quite wrong for one student to be placed in the position of evaluating the achievement of another student for the purpose of reporting to parents or others. The purpose of peer assessment should be simply, and purely, to help the individual being assessed improve his work. *** This content is a summary of Chapter 6 of the book _Embedded Formative Assessment_ by Dylan Wiliam.