Week 9 - International Perspectives in Education and Assessment

International Perspectives in Education

In this week's session we spent some time investigating what other education systems around the world are doing. As a lead in, we discussed Cultural Intelligence. This can be understood as the capability to relate and work effectively across cultures. It was a nice introduction as we prepared to build an understanding of worldwide approaches in education, and as we live and work in an increasingly global context it is also something that is increasingly important in our everyday lives.

We then had a discussion around PISA testing. This video gives an overview:

PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. It is a global, triennial test on 15 year olds that compares the education in OECD countries. Though it is a standardised test, I found it interesting that it aims to evaluate real world application of skills and knowledge. We looked in a little more detail at two high-performing countries, Singapore and Finland. Though they both score well in this test they could not be more different! Singapore had a system that had a high focus on teaching to the test and quite a traditional model of schooling. In Finland there is very little standardised testing and it is a very social model and approach. So what do these two have in common? What stood out the most was the very high societal value placed on teachers. They are highly trained (though not necessarily highly paid) and very highly respected.

This was the aspect we chose to run with for our activity tonight. We were to select one aspect from international education that we thought would make a difference in NZ and make a short news clip set in the year 2020 based on the idea that this concept had actually been put in place. We had a lot of fun with this one!

The digital tool we explored tonight was Kahoot! a fantastic quiz app. Head to the website to check it out https://getkahoot.com/
You can create your own quizzes (or even better have the students create them!) around anything you choose, fantastic for student surveys or a quick pretest of knowledge. You display the questions and options on a big screen and students answer on their own devices, so 1:1 works best for this app. Fantastic, fun tool though. We used it tonight to participate in a quiz about Finnish education - watch the competitive streaks come out!!

Thank goodness I got at least one right!

Assessment
The second half of this week's class centred around assessment, particularly formative assessment.
Three key questions to consider were:

• What do you assess and why do you assess it?
• How effective is what you are doing (how do you know)?
• What constraints determine your assessment practices?

This is a wee video as a bit of an overview of formative assessment:

We reinforced the key concept that assessment is only formative if it is used to modify the teaching and learning.

We moved on to consider digital tools that might be used for formative assessment. Our final task for the evening was to adapt a rubric that would evaluate a tool or app as to its effectiveness as a formative assessment tool. This was our group's effort - thrown together pretty quickly but contains some pretty key concepts that could be worked on further, and certainly some of the things we need to be aware of when considering using various apps.