Holistic Teaching requires Holistic Assessment - Kim Koh and Allan Luke

 "The emphasis is on local curriculum development, teacher decision-making on pedagogical approach and alternative assessment methods - e.g., Strategies for Active and Independent Learning (SAIL); Strategies for Effective Engagement and Development (SEED); Science Practical Assessment (SPA). Such moves are attempts to open up pedagogical practice and begin delinking it from a strong examination culture, oriented towards the replication of facts and ideational content." (p. 292)

The Main Points

Conventional Assessment

• Assessments typically measure recall of discrete facts, retrieval of given information, application of routine computational formulas or procedures
• Have been increasingly used for high-stakes reasons - judging teachers' professional capacity and performance, overall school and system efficacy
• Results in teachers "teaching to the test" rather than to intended learning outcomes
• "Struggle to establish valid measures of students' higher-order cognitive abilities or to support their capacities to perform real-world tasks."

Authentic Assessment

• Prepares students to become critical thinkers, productive workers, and lifelong learners
• Promotes students' higher-order thinking skills, in-depth conceptual understanding, real-world problem-solving abilities, and communication skills
• Requires teachers to design classroom assignments or assessment tasks that require students to demonstrate authentic intellectual capacities
• When teachers assign more intellectually demanding assignments, students were able to demonstrate more complex intellectual performance in their work

Nine criteria adopted from the Newmann model and Singapore classroom coding scheme were used to evaluate quality of teachers' assignments or assessment tasks:

1. Depth of Knowledge
   - Bloom's three types of knowledge: factual, procedure, conceptual -- all are essential for student learning
   - Focus on extent to which teachers require students to demonstrate mastery of knowledge in day-to-day classroom assignments or assessment tasks
   
   
2. Knowledge Criticism
   - Predisposition to the generation of alternative perspectives, critical arguments, and new solutions or knowledge
   
   
3. Knowledge Manipulation
   - Application of higher-order thinking and reasoning skills in reconstruction of texts, intellectual artefacts and knowledge
   - Organization, interpretation, analysis, synthesis, and/or evaluation of information
   - Assessment tasks provide students with opportunities to share hypotheses and generalizations, rather than simply reproducing information
   
   
4. Sustained Writing
   - Tasks ask students to elaborate on their understanding, explanations, arguments, or conclusions
   
   
5. Clarity and Organization
   - Tasks are framed logically and have instructions that are easy to understand so that students will not have misinterpretations and missing information
   
   
6. Connections to the Real World Beyond the Classroom
   
   
7. Supportive Task Framing
   
   
8. Student Control
   - Provide students will opportunities to determine the parameters of a task, such as topics or questions to answer, alternative procedures, tools and resources to use, length of writing or response, performance/marking criteria
   
   
9. Explicit Performance of Standards/Marking Criteria
   - Tasks are provided with the teacher's clear expectations for students' performance
   - Marking criteria are made explicitly clear to the students
   - Looking for specific and differentiated criteria for what might count as 'value', quality or success at completion of task, not just simply number of examples needed or length of response expected
   
   

Six criteria used to judge quality of student work:

1. depth of knowledge
2. knowledge criticism
3. knowledge manipulation
4. sustained writing
5. quality of student writing/answers
6. connections to the real world beyond the classroom

My Thoughts

Having gone to a small, Christian, liberal arts university for my undergrad and education training, I find that a lot of the above mentioned techniques and ideas have been ingrained into what I know and believe about teaching and learning. Viewing the student as a whole person and adjusting one's teaching to this idea is something that makes so much sense to me! Actively engaging in techniques that reflect this, however, is a different story. 

Most teachers that I know have a deep desire to teach in ways that connect to their students and create meaningful understanding of the content being taught. While this can look a variety of ways, when it comes to teaching mathematics, I find that despite our best effort, educators regularly fall into the trap of "I do - we do - you do" teaching. This is likely how we learned when we were in school and it is a way that satisfies our innate desire to help and communicate our knowledge. Telling students how to do something surely results in them being able to effectively replicate, as well as understand, the strategy, right? It's the easiest way for us to remove an obstacle for them. 

When reading this article, I couldn't help but think about Peter Liljedahl's Thinking Classroom model. The lack of active thinking happening in a classroom led to thousands of educators across North America adopting a method of teaching that requires students to embrace being 'stuck', collaborate to problem-solve in meaningful tasks, and develop holistic understandings of the material they are engaging with. Naturally, assessments should reflect this. British Columbia's Ministry of Education has provided teachers with Curricular Competencies that must be assessed, practically handing us the ability to give students open-ended assessments. If you take Thinking Classrooms and combine it with the curricular competencies, we're reaching a great deal of what the Singapore educators are striving for: higher-order thinking, real-world problem solving, personal construction of meaning and knowledge, as well as providing students will opportunities to explain in their own ways. 

I appreciate the list of 9 criteria to use when creating assessments. It's easy to veer too far to one side -- either complacent, taking the easy way, giving a regular worksheet or test, or providing open-ended but potentially vague spaces for students to "do math" without being clear about what they should be thinking about or doing. The above list is concise, clear, but still allows for professional discretion and student choice.