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61.003 - A Conversation Between Edmund W. Gordon and Friends: Assessment in the Service of Teaching and Learning

Mon, April 8, 8:00 to 10:00am, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Floor: 100 Level, Room 104A

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Assessment for learning is a new, but old approach to Pedagogy in which assessment, teaching and learning are dynamically inter-related such that these three processes are dialectically and reciprocally employed each in the service of the other. Aspects of such an approach can be identified in such traditional strategies as Socratic dialogues and Formative assessment. As with these well-known approaches to the facilitation of learning, we argue that assessment information and processes can be diagnostic of learners’ characteristics and needs. Such processes and the data from them can be used to inform teaching and learning processes. Such data can also support accountability. We have come to believe that the assessment processes, themselves, can be didactic. The processes of assessment, those of teaching and learning, and the information derived from all, can inform teaching and learning interventions as well as the continuing assessment of their impacts. We believe that cultivating deeper understanding and nurturing maturational development are purposes toward which pedagogy and so its assessment should be directed in order:
1. To measure the status of and growth toward developed ability;
2. To analyze and shape teaching and learning processes;
3. To understand these processes of learner becoming and development; and
4. To cultivate intellective competence and the other developed abilities being measured.
We believe that this is a more dynamic and organic conception of pedagogy which allows greater support for the diverse characteristics and needs of learners. In addition, enables greater learning systems’ sensitivity to the Intentionality of Learning persons, thus opening teaching and learning transactions to being shaped by the self-identified appreciations, feelings and self-referential information of learners as active learning persons. In this conceptual frame our approach to assessment, teaching and learning are consistently and transactionally employed in the service of learning persons. These ideas reflect some of the findings of the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment. Prominent in the thinking of the Gordon Commission is the notion that in addition to the use of testing to assess the effects of teaching and learning, the science of measurement can and should be used to inform and improve teaching and learning processes.

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