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reliability

Does the new inspection framework trade off reliability against validity?

2020-01-15T13:52:40+00:00January 15th, 2020|leadership|

Yesterday I saw a thread on Twitter from headteacher Stuart Lock on the pros and cons of the new inspection framework: https://twitter.com/StuartLock/status/1216475275514523648?s=20 In it he discusses the idea that because the previous inspection framework relied heavily on schools'  results in national exams in making judgements it managed to be fairly reliable. That is to say, an inspection team inspecting two schools with similar results or that two different inspection teams inspecting the same school would arrive at a broadly similar judgement. In 2015 Ofsted conducted some research on the reliability of it's judgments (the report can be found here). Two independent [...]

When assessment fails

2017-07-27T18:29:04+01:00July 12th, 2016|assessment|

I wrote yesterday about the distinctions between assessment and feedback. This sparked some interesting comment which I want to explore here. I posted a diagram which Nick Rose and I designed for our forthcoming book. The original version of the figure looked like this: We decided to do away with B - 'Unreliable but valid?' in the interests of clarity and simplicity. Sadly though, the world is rarely clear or simple. Clearly D is the most desirable outcome - the assessment provides reliable measurements which result in valid inferences about what students know and can do. It's equally clear that A is [...]

Feedback and assessment are not the same

2016-07-11T21:18:46+01:00July 11th, 2016|assessment|

You don't figure out how fat a pig is by feeding it. Greg Ashman At the sharp end of education, assessment and feedback are often, unhelpfully, conflated. This has been compounded by the language we use: terms like 'assessment for learning' and 'formative assessment' are used interchangeably and for many teachers both are essentially the same thing as providing feedback. Clearly, these processes are connected - giving feedback without having made some kind of assessment is probably impossible in any meaningful sense and most assessment will result in some form of feedback being given or received - but they are not the same. [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #19 Measurement

2015-06-30T21:13:23+01:00June 30th, 2015|assessment, psychology|

This is #19 in my series on the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching and Learning and the second of three posts examining how to assess students’ progress: "Students’ skills, knowledge, and abilities are best measured with assessment processes grounded in psychological science with well-defined standards for quality and fairness." The more I read on this subject, the more it becomes clear how widely misunderstood testing and assessment are. But does this actually matter? Do teachers need to know about such issues as reliability, precision and validity? Isn't this just a matter for exam boards and Ofqual? Well, it's been designated as one [...]

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