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Instructions for Sharing of Assessment Plans and Reflections

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Instructions for Sharing of Assessment Plans and Reflections

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Please share your assessment ideas/plans, artefacts (if any), and reflections in the column allocated to your school.

It would be great if your sharing could follow this flow please:

1. What are the learning outcomes and success criteria for what I want my students to learn?

2. What evidence of learning did I / do I plan to collect to assess students' learning vis-a-vis the above learning outcomes and success criteria?

3. What formative assessment tasks did I / do I plan to design to collect the evidence of learning, and why? Formative assessment tasks could range from weighted assessments, in-class AfL activities, alternative assessments, AfL tasks in flipped learning, etc.

4. [only if you have implemented the assessment] What did I learn about my students' learning progress from the evidence of learning? How did I use the evidence to better support their learning (e.g., levels of feedback to feed forward; adjustment of instruction to close gaps)?

5. [only if you have implemented the assessment] What would I keep, improve, start, or stop the next time I do this?

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1. (Past) How have I done well in implementing formative assessment tasks this year? What challenges did I face?

2. (Present) What is one thing I now practise in formative assessment that I did not before?

3. (Future) What have I learned from my NLC peers about formative assessment that is new to me, or has inspired me to try something new next year?

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Dylan Wiliam, one of the authorities on Formative Assessment, has a YouTube channel that has useful PD videos for teachers.

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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The Assessment Chapter in the History TLG contains a useful guide to assessment practices contextualised to our subject.

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This article summarises the main literature on History assessment.

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Brooks et al - Landmark article about feedback

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Brooks et al - Landmark article about feedback

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This article provides valuable insights into how to provide and use meaningful feedback using two frames - levels of feedback and feed up- feed back-feed forward.

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This article discusses levels of feedback for different learner profiles.

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If you need a reference to Historical Thinking Concepts to frame your success criteria, here is the Big Six book.

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Formative Assessment in the History Classroom : course code - AL-000187

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(Leave your name in the subject!)

1. (Past) What have I done well when implementing formative assessment in 2024? What challenges did I face?

2. (Present) What is one thing about formative assessment that I previously did not know about but practise now?

3. (Future) What is one thing that I have learned from my NLC peers about formative assessment that has inspired me to try out something new?

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1: I have tried to align the weighted assessments with the learning outcomes and pedagogy employed in lessons to better assess student understanding (e.g., using MCQs to check students' conceptual and factual understanding; assessing students' interpretation and evaluation of one source to check mastery of routines). The challenge I faced was the time needed to provide individualised feedback to each piece of student work, given the size of my cohort.

2: One thing I wanted to find out was the use of EdTech to support formative assessment and the sharings by Ana and Alex Chan provided some useful ideas of how to do that.

3: I acquired many new ideas from the NLC members' sharing e.g., Justin's idea of MCQs to assess concepts; Ana's and Alex Chan's ideas of designing self-contained units with incremental formative assessment tasks.

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1. Trying out various alternative assessment modes for FA. One challenge was doing up a rubrics that aligns to the LORMs but not exactly the same as the holistic LORMs.

2. Not directly something I did not know but I adapted from Justin's "Success Criteria" to implement and try out for the JC1 students who were trying out the part a) SBCS in Terms 2/3.

3. I might try out timelines/MCQs as part of FA.

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1 - (Past) I had been able to try out implementing new and interesting ways of formative assessment (MCQs, Gobbet Source Writing), that could help us assess the students' learning and understanding in different ways.

2- (Present) I have become a lot more aware about the need to provide differentiated feedback to different students; through the formative assessment, we (as a team) had also looked through the students' work and discussed how we could provide more individualized feedback to the students

3 - (Future) I've been very inspired by way that some individuals have planned formative assessment within the unit plans (Ana / Alex), which would be something I could potentially explore.

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1. For weighted assessment, I tried to overcome some of the limitations of the current assessment format tied to the A’Levels by including MCQs and a timeline component in WA1 (which also included an SBQ Part (a) question) to enable me to assess at a more granular level students’ content conceptual understanding and their grasp of chronology.

The challenge I faced was in thinking about how to design an alternative WA for the more complicated SBQ Part (b) and Essay components of the A’levels, especially one that could allow me to assess whatever skills I have taught to J1 students without getting them to tackle a full Part (b) or essay question that they might not yet be ready for. In part, this had to do with a lack of time to come up with new rubrics for anything more complicated than MCQs and a timeline exercise.

2. I learnt that success criteria need not be so comprehensive and have sought to teach more general success criteria to my students that would be less overwhelming to them.

3. I’m inspired to try out the gobbet exercise that Alex and Janice shared, especially for J1 students starting out with SBQ.

I’m also inspired to try out the activity that Ana shared about how she got her students to re-evaluate their initial evaluation regarding an issue as they learnt more content/developments about the issue.

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1. As a team, we’ve been intentional in ensuring that there is close alignment to learning objectives. We’ve also sought to tighten the assessment feedback loop, in particular focusing on feed forward. A challenge is ensuring the sustainability of these efforts, with individual feedback taking significant amounts of time. Exploring how AI can aid in the feedback process will be a good avenue for our team to explore in the future.

2. Having greater awareness of success criteria and what it entails. Even in NIE, I wasn’t always quite clear on how it might differ from the learning outcomes.

3. I think use of MCQ and gobbet exercises as part of weighted assessment is an interesting approach that could allow for better understanding of specific gaps in student understanding. I would be keen to share these ideas with my team, and discuss how we might potentially change the way that we approach our weighted assessments, which have historically been based on the A level assessment.

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What am I interested to explore in depth?

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What am I interested to explore in depth?

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Having explored a range of assessment strategies as a NLC, we could explore a specific aspect of assessment in greater depth in 2025. Please share what you may be interested in exploring.

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It came up a few times during today's session: how we can use tech to monitor whether students progress based on multiple feedback/feedforward junctures. I don't think this is so much of AI but rather facilitating data management and creating easy access. But this is a narrow procedural area and would only be a side hustle for our NLC next year, if we even want to take it on.

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As we shift towards e-assessment in 2025/2026, perhaps a focus on tech-enabled assessment could be useful, to see how formative assessment in class might evolve / change in response.

Another area I am interested in is about self and peer assessment, and how this can be better leveraged in lessons.

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My top 3 interests are:

1. Weighted assessment ideas that go beyond just sit-down timed exams

2. Peer assessment strategies

3. Differentiated assessment strategies

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An aspect that I would be interested in exploring would be the effective strategies for closing the feedback loops and the intentional differentiation of feedback for students during formative and summative assessment.

Additionally, I would be interested in exploring and discussing how we can help students understand success criteria more effectively in order to allow them to be more self-regulated in their learning, and develop the ability for self-assessment and reflection of their work.

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I am curious about the following:

how to build a (not-so-onerous but impactful) reflection routine for conceptual understanding and skills development to develop metacognition and student capacity for self- and peer- assessment.

how to design meaningful alternative and/or weighted assessment tasks to assess historical understanding.

how to leverage on tech to augment/transform assessment practices for history.

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1. How to feed-forward more effectively, whether through the use of tech tools?

2. How to design WAs (beyond sit-down tests) that would be able to be effective building blocks for the eventual A levels?

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We added the MCQ and timeline exercise components to allow us to have a more granular assessment of our students' understanding of content, concepts, and chronology.

The added components also allowed our students to better pinpoint the stumbling blocks affecting their performance for Part (a).

There were some students who did not do well for the first two components and, correspondingly and understandably, also did not do well for the Part (a).

On the other hand, there were students who did well for the first two components but did not do well for the Part (a). This suggested that while they had a good grasp of the content and chronology, they struggled with the skills of identifying comparisons and/or providing insights to them.

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From the MCQ component, we realised that many students got questions 1, 5, 7, 8, and 9 wrong, so we retaught some content when reviewing the WA.

Question 1 - Many students chose options that revealed that they did not have a clear idea of the back-and-forth between the Western powers and the USSR about the issue of reparations.

Question 5 - Many students had the misconception that there is a single post-revisionist interpretation.

Question 7 - Many students had the misconception that Syngman Rhee's regime was democratic in nature.

Question 8 - Many students had the misconception that the Soviet Union sent ground troops to the Korean War, demonstrating that they did not have a clear understanding of why the Korean War is called a proxy war.

Question 9 - Related to the misconception for Question 8, many students had the misconception that the Soviet Union signed the Armistice Agreement.

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Success criteria for SBQ Part (a)

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*Assessment materials & artefacts will be shared in the slides attached.

1. Through the series of formative assessment tasks, we want students to get a good grasp of content, understand the success criteria of what goes into the evaluation of a source, instead of following a given set of criteria blindly, and understand the success criteria of Part A SBCS.

2. / 3. Multiple short take-home individual assignments, and in-class tasks where students work in groups - opportunities for individual feedback and group feedback.

4. / 5. The following gaps were identified in student responses from CA1, which teachers could follow up with.

MCQs: students tended to struggle with the more conceptual type of questions (with weighted options - all options are correct to some extent), which reveals their conceptual clarity or lack thereof.

Single source (gobbet) writing: students tended to show weaknesses in contextualisation - either not contextualising at all or contextualisation was not effectively tied to source evaluation.

Part A: students were able to demonstrate the required moves to compare points of view and provide insights; but the quality of insights varied.

During review of CA1, in addition to personalised feedback, big group feedback was given via student sample analysis with reference to success criteria (see attached review document).

To facilitate feed forward, students, depending on their gaps, were required to submit the relevant corrections.

For particular MCQs that were poorly attempted, teachers reviewed the options and use that opportunity to clarify content gaps.

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Hope the slides are self-explanatory (as sadly I won't be able to be there, as I have been pulled to do some DSA briefing! Any questions about the lesson / materials, please email me!)

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Hope the slides are self-explanatory (as sadly I won't be able to be there, as I have been pulled to do some DSA briefing! Any questions about the lesson / materials, please email me!)

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For this series of lessons (lecture + seminar), I wanted students to be more explicit, intentional in employing the success criteria crafted for essay writing. A peer assessment element has also been included so that students assess each other in terms of how well they have met the success criteria.

The group essay that they produced at the end of the Seminar.

Exit Ticket Responses, in-class tasks , Group take-home assignments

Students are definitely more intentionally using the success criteria to guide their essay writing. There has been progress since it was first introduced to them in the middle of last year. Even the peer comments' reflected this understanding.

As I have reflected within the slides, giving feedback that feedforward took me quite a bit of time as it still feels rather unnatural for me and requires more practice.

Keep - Group Work - much benefits on the students' end but for the teachers, it helps in the teacher's marking load as well (so that you can focus on giving timely, quality feedforward feedback)

Improve - on my feed-forward feedback. I definitely need to build more confidence in this area in order to benefit my students better in terms of my feedback. I really took a lot of time trying to give feedback that feeds forward. So I returned the assignment later than I had planned for.

Start - Haven't thought about this

Stop - So far no red flags in the flow of tasks. ( I hope)

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Sample of the Op Ed Rubrics used for P1 Theme 3 the Indo-Pakistani Conflict

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Sample of the Op Ed Rubrics used for P1 Theme 3 the Indo-Pakistani Conflict

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4. The Op Ed exercise revealed some gaps in understanding. Together with the standard tutorial discussion questions, it gave me feedback about certain gaps. As a follow up, I created an additional document with hyperlinks for them to read more about the areas they were not sure about (see image).

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Upcoming Formative Assessment Plans - for new JC1 students:

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Upcoming Formative Assessment Plans - for new JC1 students:

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1. Korean War poster that reflects multiple perspectives (US/Korea/China); idea is to get students to understand agency/role of actors for their SBCS skills (and not immediately undermine a source just because it is from the North Korean POV)

2. Vietnam War Op Ed also linked to multiple perspectives - using the same J2 Theme 2 rubrics

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Current Experiment: Using AI/Class Companion to "mark" essays based on a rubric for JC1. 

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Current Experiment: Using AI/Class Companion to "mark" essays based on a rubric for JC1. 

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www.classcompanion.com

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In working towards an essay about the factors for China's economic transformation, students are tasked to:

The step-inside task serves as a means of sparking curiosity, as well as to assess students' differing levels of prior knowledge on concepts related to the economy. before starting the inquiry proper. Students who come with more prior knowledge, such as those offering economics or CSC, would demonstrate more coherent / well-considered proposals, while students without prior knowledge may demonstrate misconceptions.

assess if students can explain how an individual policy / reform contributed to transformation, they work in groups on a performance task by gathering evidence from various sources, and presenting their findings to their classmates. They will also need to demonstrate their understanding by responding to a Google Classroom exit card about what they have learnt from the presentations. Through their responses, teachers will provide feedback on any misconceptions and further questions that students may have.

To assess students' ability to evaluate the relative importance of factors, a figjam activity is conducted, allowing students to make their thinking visible and subsequently justify to their cohort mates (in lecture), their choice of ranking.

To assess if students can apply their understandings from the figjam lesson, students are tasked to work on an essay outline about the factors for transformation, and submit an introduction paragraph on Google classroom before the tutorial. In class, students will engage in peer assessment by critiquing the curated introduction samples. The teacher will help guide students towards providing accurate feedback about the introductions.

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To consolidate their understanding of the unit, students are given a choice to write a full essay on either China's economic transformation or Japan's economic transformation.

Based on their responses, we realized that students had some misconceptions about state-owned enterprises and privatisation. During our feedback lesson for both essays, we provided a quick content recap for these areas, as well as additional readings to help them with their understanding.