Responding to Assessment — Science - Video 8 of 9

My favourite subject would probably be Chemistry because I think I have a natural talent for Chemistry. I just understand the subject matter and I like the physical part of it — how we do a lot of prac exams as well instead of just learning from the teacher about things. Well last term we did a big assignment on the Chemistry of dyeing fabrics. So, we were given three different fabrics that are used in modern day and then three dyes and so we had to alter the conditions that these were dyed under, researching which would be the most effective, coming up with why our results did or didn’t work. It was very interesting because it is something that applies to real life. I find, particularly in Chemistry, they assess us in order to challenge us — they want us to teach us through our assessment. Feedback enhances — improves — learning. And quality feedback actually has the catalytic, almost, property to move students’ learning forward. I think the purpose of assessment, apart from ranking students, is also so that students get a deeper knowledge. My teacher helps me with feedback after assessment. She goes through the exam with me if I have questions or if I don’t understand somewhere that I have fallen down, and she goes through, answers my questions. Or, she goes through as a class, the whole entire assessment piece and explains what criteria was used with each assessment piece and how she marked each assessment piece or each question. If we are doing a research assessment, we do our own research instead of getting our teacher to tell us everything. So we will go find books, we will go to the internet and in that way we’re doing our own research and I think we’re learning more ourselves. The relationship between students and teachers is pivotal to feedback. Students are reliant on teachers to be the translators of tasks. So what that means is that students rely to teachers to share with them what the success criteria actually are. I find that the teachers often go through with you generally what is required of you to get an A standard for your subject either in an exam or an assignment. They generally, at the beginning of assignments and EEIs, they make us talk to them about our method and how we are going to go about it, and we tell them how many tests we are going to do with how many variables and they advise us on whether that is too much or not enough. To prepare myself for assessment using the task sheet, first I will actually look at the task sheet and the instructions on it which tell me the topic and what kind of processes I need to go through to prepare my assignment. So firstly, I’ll look at the actual instructions and the structure of what I will be creating and I will also look at the criteria sheet. The criteria sheet for assessment I feel is very valuable because it is what the teachers use to mark you. And so it is very good to use as a checklist. You can work out what you had done and what you need to do to improve your mark to the next level. So what we need is ongoing feedback and continual informal feedback that is happening as students are engaging in a task so that students have time to action the feedback, to calibrate the feedback cognitively, and to think about the process steps that they might go through. The kind of support I need to complete my assessment would be, if I ever have any questions, I go to my teacher and she can help me. She doesn’t necessarily give me the answers but she will sort of set me on the right path to answering the questions I need to answer. Our feedback on our Chemistry EEIs is generally quite general. So they don’t go specifically into if we have the wrong information because they let us research our own topics. They tell us whether to refocus on an area or not they don’t tell us how it is wrong. So, with the EEI introduction I did and the evaluation I did, I took the draft work they put on there and I took how they told me to restructure it and put that into my final. When I do an EEI, I get lots of different types of feedback along the way. First, I might hand in my hypothesis for checking to see if that is an alright hypothesis to develop on as I do my assignment. And then I will also hand in an introduction perhaps, [as] the background knowledge about what I am going to be investigating. Then with the information that I had to research, I went back and researched that information that they told me. I was able to ask them simple questions, though they wouldn’t tell me exactly what the information I needed to know was. I had to learn it and research it myself. I do the experiment and I gather the data and I will sometimes hand that in to her as well for her to check and see if I have it in the right format — in tables and graphs and things like that. And then the last thing I hand in to her is the draft for my discussion which she can tell me if I have done the correct structure or if I need to elaborate on anything more. If you are giving summative feedback at the end, there is not a lot students can immediately do with that feedback until they return to that assessment task again. We did an EEI in Grade 11 that really helped me prepare for the EEI that I had to do in Grade 12. I learnt in Grade 11 that the discussion needs to be extremely thorough and needed to talk about the data that I picked up during the course of my investigation. Effective feedback actually provides feedback to teachers that can be used to help shape their teaching. I think this is something that we often overlook, is that we need to be finding opportunities as educators to seek meaningful feedback from students so that we can check that they understand the material, check that they understand the task, and so that we then can adjust our teaching or modify what we are doing so that all students in the class can engage.