DWALOC34101122: Assessment Literacy Online Course by Professor Dylan Wiliam
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Assessment Literacy Online Course

 


Assessment Literacy Overview

Even the best-designed assessment system needs to be implemented thoughtfully, which requires that all users of assessment evidence have a certain degree of assessment literacy— an understanding of both the meanings and the consequences of educational assessments. Participants will learn what makes some assessments better than others, why student progress measures are almost entirely useless, why most tests will never produce useful diagnostic information on students, and why most school assessment systems do not do the things they are intended to do. The sessions will include a consideration of how assessments are interpreted, recorded, and reported to key stakeholders, as well as some in-class suggestions for how to get good and quick feedback from students. The major elements of the Assessment Literacy series of webinars are described below.

 

Topics include:

Quality in Assessment

Quality in assessment—while it is common to talk about assessments needing to be both reliable and valid, thinking about assessments in this way can often lead to confusion, since reliability can be thought of as both a pre-requisite for validity and at the same time, in tension with it (in the sense that attempts to improve validity can reduce reliability). Participants will learn about how to see validity as a property of inferences, rather than of assessments, and understand how changing assessments to improve the way they support some inferences may make them less able to support other, desired, inferences. In other words, any assessment system involves trade-offs.

 

Assessment Literacy

Assessment literacy—as noted above, an understanding of both the meanings and the consequences of educational assessments is an essential component of teacher expertise but there is little agreement about the term's meaning. In this session, participants will learn about what makes some assessments better than others, why student progress measures are almost entirely useless, why most tests will never produce useful diagnostic information on students, and why most school assessment systems do not do the things they are intended to do.

 

Assessment Design

Assessment design—big ideas, designing an assessment system, quality in assessment. Learn the key stages of developing an assessment system:

  • Selecting a small number of big ideas for each subject
  • Creating learning progressions for each of the big ideas
  • Identifying key checkpoints in the learning progressions
  • Developing assessments for each of the checkpoints

 

Evidence-centered Design

Evidence-centered design—since assessments are, in essence, procedures for drawing inferences, it makes sense to design assessment by starting with the inferences they are intended to support. In other words, assessment design should be evidence-centered. In this session, participants will learn about the four main processes in the evidence-centered design paradigm (task selection, task presentation, evidence identification, evidence accumulation) and understand how these ideas can be applied to a wide range of assessment design issues, including recording and reporting student achievement.

 


 Professor Emeritus Dylan Wiliam

Dylan Wiliam photoDylan Wiliam is Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London.

After a first degree in mathematics and physics, and one-year teaching in a private school, he taught in urban schools for seven years, during which time he earned further degrees in mathematics and mathematics education.

In 1984 he joined Chelsea College, University of London, which later became part of King's College London. During this time he worked on developing innovative assessment schemes in mathematics before taking over the leadership of the mathematics teacher education program at King’s.

Between 1989 and 1991 he was the Academic Coordinator of the Consortium for Assessment and Testing in Schools, which developed a variety of statutory and non-statutory assessments for the national curriculum of England and Wales.

After his return to King’s, he completed his Ph.D., addressing some of the technical issues thrown up by the adoption of a system of age-independent criterion-referenced levels of attainment in the national curriculum of England and Wales.

From 1996 to 2001 he was the Dean and Head of the School of Education at King’s College London, and from 2001 to 2003, he served as Assistant Principal of the College. In 2003 he moved to the USA, as Senior Research Director at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. In 2006 he returned to the UK as Deputy Director of the Institute of Education, University of London. In 2010 he stood down as Deputy Director to spend more time on research and teaching.

His recent work has focused on the use of assessment to support learning (sometimes called formative assessment). He was the co-author, with Paul Black of a major review of the research evidence on formative assessment published and since then has worked with groups of teachers all over the world on developing formative assessment practices.


 

Registration

Course Code: DWALOC34101122

Topic: Assessment Literacy Online Course

Presenter: Professor Dylan Wiliam

 

Topic

Date

Singapore Time

Quality in Assessment

16 November 2022, Wednesday

8.00 am to 9.30 am

Assessment Literacy

18 November 2022, Friday

8.00 am to 9.30 am

Assessment Design

29 November 2022, Tuesday

8.00 am to 9.30 am

Evidence-centered design

30 November 2022, Wednesday

8.00 am to 9.30 am

 

Mode of delivery: via Zoom

Closing date: 28 October 2022 Friday

 

Click here to register

Workshop Fee: S$280.00 per participant. If 2 or more participants from the same school/organization attend the same webinar, the discounted fee will be S$230.00 per participant for that particular webinar. Fees are subject to GST and include all training materials.

Registration is on a first-come-first-serve basis. No refunds will be made for cancellations or in the case of absentees. The Academy accepts replacements for registered participants who are unable to attend for whatever reasons.

Please contact Joseph Loy at email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it if you need further information.