6

• Assessment


  Key curriculum tool for facilitating learning and teaching
• Existing assessment instruments assess intelligence or educational achievement but not a person's capacity to learn
• Deakin Crick et al (2004): '"It is arguably our characteristics as learners and what we bring to any particular learning situation that will be the most important quality for us to be able to measure in the unpredictable and ever-changing world of the twenty-first century"'
• Learning as a journey

  • Station 1: The Learning Self (identity, relationships, stories, aspirations)
  • Station 2: Personal Qualities (values, attitudes, dispositions for learning)
  • Station 3: Publicly-required and Personally-valued Skills (e.g. managing situations, active citizenship, managing ambiguity)
  • Station 4: Publicly-assessed and Valued Knowledge
• Learning power


  The combination of the 4 stations
• Core dimensions of learning power

  • Changing and learning
  • Critical curiosity
  • Meaning-making
  • Dependence and fragility
  • Creativity
  • Relationships/interdependence
  • Strategic awareness

  
• Changing and learning


  • Negative: Learning ability is fixed, stuck and static. Challenging situations expose limitations and 'failure'
  • Positive: Learning as a lifelong process, can be learnt. Challenging situations as opportunity to develop and grow
• Critical curiosity


  • Negative: Passive learners, more likely to accept 'received wisdom' uncritically, 'surface' strategies, unlikely to actively engage in speculation
  • Positive: A desire to find out – 'getting at the truth', willing to question 'received wisdom', 'deep' strategies, willing to reveal their questions and uncertainties in public
• Meaning-making


  • Negative: Respond to new learning on individual merits in piecemeal fashion, interested in criteria for successful performance, happy to live with fragmented knowledge
  • Positive: Look for connections between new learning and prior knowledge, interested in the 'big picture', making sense of their experience, enjoy pursuing coherence

  
• Dependence and fragility


  • Negative: Easily disheartened, prefer less challenging situations, easily disheartened when make mistakes or get stuck, self-esteem (in learning) likely to depend on other people and external factors
  • Positive: Resilient, like a challenge – willing to 'give it a go', willing to make occasional mistakes but learn from them, accept learning is sometimes hard but 'hang in' - stickabililty
• Creativity


  • Negative: Rule bound, like to know exactly what's expected of them, may function well in familiar activities, less imaginative
  • Positive: Understand learning needs playfulness as well as being purposeful, happy to follow a train of thought without knowing where it will end up, enjoy playing with ideas, receptive to hunches and inklings
• Relationships/interdependence


  • Negative: May either be over-dependent on others or fail to engage properly with others
  • Positive: Achieve a healthy balance between independent and social learning, like to learn with and from others, when appropriate, recognise the value of watching and emulating
• Strategic awareness


  • Negative: Robotic, may confuse self-awareness with self-consciousness
  • Positive: Reflective, good at self-evaluation, good at judging the time and resources a task will require, happy to try alternative approaches, can cope with frustration and disappointment
• Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory (ELLI)

  Assessment tool to measure learning power
• ELLI is a 72-item questionnaire, learners report on themselves at a particular point in time using a 5-pt Likert scale from Almost Never to Nearly Always
• Dynamic assessment with interactionist orientation

  Focused on facilitating improved learner performance
• ELLI follows Vygotskian philosophy: "we must not measure the child, we must interpret the child"
• Example questions from ELLI

  • I expect to go on learning for a long time
  • Getting to the bottom of things is more important to me than getting a good mark
  • I like to learn about things that really matter to me
  • If I wait quietly, good ideas sometimes just come to me
  • When I have trouble learning something, I tend to get upset
  • I often change the way I do things as a result of what I have learned
  • I like working on problems with other people
• The ELLI profile shows the self-reported level in each dimension of learning power
• The research in this paper is qualitative, looking at classroom practices, teachers' perceptions, and examples of pupil work
• Teachers varied their response to ELLI profiles, but all found the ELLI profile of individual students was in keeping with their own perception and knowledge of students
• Teacher commitment to learner-centred values was a critical factor, and the teachers themselves were the most important vehicles for development in their students of the seven dimensions of learning power
• The centrality of the learner-teacher relationship was important, as well as other relationships in class, at home, and in the community
• Teachers used metaphors to describe the learning dimensions, particularly for young children
• Modelling and imitation, by the teacher and by stronger students, were important, as was linking the learning powers to learning purposes, including public exams
• There was a need to actively prioritise time for reflection - for individuals, with learning buddies, and as a whole group
• ELLI was used to develop students' self-awareness about their learning, to develop student-owned strategies and targets for change (i.e. Assessment for learning)
• Degree of choice regarding how and what students learned, and ownership, were important
• Sequencing and framing of material, to stimulate curiosity, creativity, meaning-making, including explicit links to experiences outside school, were used to encourage students to see and make connections
• Teachers developed a toolkit of strategies
• ELLI was seen as a tool for diagnosis and development of strategies, and for the development of self-awareness, ownership and responsibility for learning - intentional learners
• The quality, authenticity and face validity of the ELLI profiles were seen to reflect back to learners and teachers what the learners already say about themselves, and stimulate purposeful learning
• There is a call for curricula to place greater emphasis on learning to learn
• In the Biological Sciences at Leicester, there can be an excessive focus on fact-regurgitation, and a "learning power" assessment might be a more effective tool for PDP than the current practice
• Students struggle to engage "unless it counts", i.e. unless there are marks, and there is a need to demonstrate the crucial need for active development of one's own learning skills