Form and Function

Daisy makes the following point:

Christodoulou notes that AfL is a powerful tool with much potential that has lethally mutated as it has been adopted by teachers who have misunderstood its application.

The main problem, according to Christodoulou, is that AfL are formative assessment strategies but are being deployed as summative assessments and, crucially, formative assessment strategies ought not to resemble summative assessments. She claims it is difficult to do AfL on summative assessments as they require students to perform too many complex skills simultaneously making it impossible to give meaningful feedback (how can you give useful feedback if the complex task requires multiple complex skills that are interdependent?).

Daisy gives the analogy, of someone training to run a marathon. You do not practice to run a marathon by running marathons every day from the get-go. Rather, you start small and importantly, the practice and training you do does not always resemble running a marathon (e.g. squats at the gym or plan a healthier diet). Similarly, students practicing to "think like a scientist" ought to start small and will need to practice individual and isolated skills before it is all put together on a summative performance evaluation. AfL and feedback are done before the final summative performance on isolated skills where feedback is actionable and clearly targets a problem.

Click here to see a specific example I've used.