Teachers talking about writing assessment: valuable professional learning?

Abstract

This article argues that the engagement of teachers in collaborative discussions about assessment can provide a fruitful context for valuable professional learning. It is of interest to those who provide Continuous Professional Development (CPD) opportunities for teachers and teachers themselves. It looks particularly at the value of writing assessment moderation meetings, where teachers aim to use exemplars of pupil work to arrive at commonly held understandings about pupil achievement. Teachers' views of participating in the process of assessment moderation were sought. In the case study, two rounds of semi-structured interviews were conducted by the researcher with a project team of one staff tutor and six teachers. Data from these interviews were supplemented by field notes from the project team meetings and a one day writing assessment moderation meeting which was attended by teacher representatives from 10 schools. The results have implications for the organization of assessment moderation meetings within and between primary and secondary schools.

Moderation and the primary school context

“…Findings here reflect the recent preponderance of interpretivist research extoling the benefits of moderation as a socio-cultural learning experience in which developing teacher judgement is central (Adie, 2013a;Harlen, 2004;Reid, 2007;Klenowski &Wyatt-Smith, 2014;Smaill, 2013). Moderation in Scottish primary schools, as communicated in Scottish policy, has also shifted from external moderation through national tests to social moderation (Harlen, Malcolm & Byrne, 1995;Scottish Government, 2010) although there is to be a shift in this matter back to national testing as of 2017 (The Scottish Government, 2016).…”

Rater strategies for reaching agreement on pupil text quality

“…The focus is on what the raters talk about, and how they talk when assessing pupils' texts and not the scores itself. Several writing assessment moderation studies underline in similar ways how different teacher educational backgrounds and career experiences necessarily lead to a difference of opinions about what to value in writing, but that this is no impediment for achieving common understandings of pupil text quality through moderation (Reid, 2007;Wyatt-Smith, Klenowski, & Gunn, 2010). For instance, is unreliable scoring mainly due to rater incompetence, or to genuinely different views about what is relevant (Broad, 2000;Moss, 1994;Petruzzi, 2008)?…”

Encouraging professional learning communities to increase the shared consensus in writing assessments

“…In this regard, different opinions between assessors should not be avoided but rather embraced in the sense that they are necessary steps towards shared norms and standards (Colombini and McBride, 2012). Moreover, building consensus on text quality between assessors is not hindered by differences in what these assessors value in writing (Reid, 2007; Wyatt-Smith et al , 2010). Text quality is a complex and multidimensional construct, which implies that the construct transcends the different aspects that contribute to it.…”