Assessment for Learning: Putting it into Practice

Effective teacher professional development needs to pay attention to both process and content aspects. Attention to process is important, because teachers need time, support and freedom to innovate in their classrooms. However, teachers also need ideas about what to do, and evidence that particular approaches are likely to be successful. This spotlight session will describe how professional development focused on Assessment for Learning can balance both process and content aspects of teacher professional development, can lead to significant changes in classroom interaction, and can have a significant impact on student learning.

Dylan Wiliam is Senior Research Director of the Learning and Teaching Research Center at ETS in Princeton, NJ. During his time at King's College, London, he worked on developing innovative assessment schemes in mathematics before taking over the leadership of the mathematics teacher education program. 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. In completing his PhD, he addressed 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. 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 in 1998 and has subsequently worked with many groups of teachers on developing formative assessment practices.

This spotlight presentation will be interpreted into British Sign Language.