By Fiona Aubrey-Smith
Assessment for learning: a social experience
Most schools across the UK are in the early stages of exploring how a learning platform can support, extend and enhance learning for their communities. And one of the most common questions over recent months has been how this ties in with assessment for learning (AfL).
The key here is to consider your existing priorities within the AfL strategy, and consider exactly what these priorities mean on a practical level. Are you focusing on the information sharing aspects of AfL, or on learners' engagement and their reflection on their work, or on developing their understanding of success criteria for example?
Sharing learning objectives and goals
At its very simplest level, this is about conveying information to people, whether that information is “We Are Learning To... identify the stages of photosynthesis” or a longer term objective of “This Unit of Work addresses... the affects of gravity”. We can use learning platform tools such as news or calendar feeds to enter this information centrally as a class or department and push out to the learners who are engaging with it.
Consider the value added to this simple task if we send this information out to learners this way at the beginning of the year (or topic or scheme) and include links to resources that will be used during the classtime coverage, and to activities students may wish to engage with before, during and after the classtime coverage – neatly linking learning with both preparation and revision. Where these tools are being used in practice for this purpose, it has been noticeable that the students involved have reacted very positively when asked about the impact upon their learning during the lesson (in one school survey 95 per cent of learners ticked "I got more out of the lesson" see below). 
Building on previous knowledge and understanding
At the beginning of lessons, units, topics or schemes it is common for teachers to seek clarification of existing knowledge, skills and understanding of the learners in the class. Many schools are now providing this opportunity using a learning platform forum tool where learners share their existing understanding.
Significant value has been noted where learners are able to revisit this forum to also identify what knowledge, skills and understanding they would like to gain, and later adding to the forum again as they gain this.
This provides a “before, during and after” snapshot of student’s development in specific areas of learning, both individually (as forum posts are usually name-stamped), and collectively (if a forum is used per class or set). This use of a learning platform boosts students engagement with the learning process itself - and anecdotally has generated significant impact on students' involvement and consequent attainment. It also provides a very neat audit trail for progression and value-added data for moderation and inspection purposes. (One such example of this can be seen in the screenshot below.)
Learners use wikis for personal learning pathways
The co-constructive nature of learning platform wikis provides the opportunity for students to use wiki pages to branch off and thus build on their personalised learning pathway within a given topic, subject, lesson or unit. Again measurable results have been observed of the engaging and empowering opportunities they provide for students.
For example, St. Stephen’s Primary School in Bolton used Wikis in this way for a group of boys who had lower than expected literacy levels (60 per cent Level 2 at the end of Year 4 in reading and/or writing) and who engaged and progressed in such a way that the same group showed 80 per cent working at Level 3 by the end of the autumn term in Year 5 in reading and 70 per cent in writing. This is a profound increase in literacy standards within such a short space of time and a huge credit to the teacher who was working with these children.
Sharing expectations and providing feedback
Typically, when we set activities for learners we provide a series of expectations; about behaviour, focus, content, effort, structure or a whole range of other possibilities. These expectations, we hope, will be at the forefront of their thinking when they are completing their work.
When the work is complete there is typically a conversation between teacher and student about the results of these expectations and the provision of feedback. Increasingly, schools are using their learning platform to streamline this process.
Task Tools provide an easy way of doing this – pushing an activity out to multiple students, and then receiving the consequent work in one central place (with students still able to view their work through their eportfolios). This enables the teacher to mark the work, track progression and attainment and provide both formative and summative assessment for students.
In many cases the feedback provided can be a mixture of assessment levels or grades, comments, targets, annotations or even an audio brief about the work produced and the consequent actions required by students.
The example below shows one such instance where the teacher has been able to access the work submitted by a class centrally, and then give feedback via audio.
Many teachers have also begun to explore the use of screen capture (for example, free Jing www.jingproject.com) which enables quick and easy screen and voice recording. By using this to talk through, highlight and annotate work online, teachers have been able to then send the screen capture embedded within the feedback comments provided, so that students can see exactly what their teacher is referring to as well as hear the commentary that goes with it.
Greenacre School in Medway, uses the embedded sound recorder in their learning platform (above) to provide feedback for student assignments
Self assessment and peer assessment
One of the most frequently seen uses of a learning platform for Assessment for Learning recently has been the use of learning journals through blogging tools. Clearly, these are powerful tools because of the ability of the learner to record their reflections on learning through a range of text, sound, image and video, depending on the preferences and ability of the child. However, where the impact upon learning has been most profoundly seen is where the learning journal blog created and maintained by the child has then been viewed and commented upon by a range of people who are supporting that child’s learning – for example, teachers, parents, peers and learning mentors. When the focus of the content of the learning journal blog is upon learning (as opposed to listing daily activities that have been participated in), this provides a learner-friendly mechanism for identifying where learning experiences are going well, where there are gaps in understanding and who best can help support the learners to develop to the next stages.
Using a blog as a learning journal at Grappenhall Heys Primary School, Warrington (child’s name has been removed)
There have also been instances where these learning journal blogs, when used regularly by learner, home and school, have been able to supplement and in some cases replace traditional termly school reports because there is an ongoing deeper level of understanding already in place. The termly school reports become unnecessary as they are being ‘outclassed’ by the learning journal blog shared between student, home and school.
Thinking outside of the Box class
Every assessment activity that we are already engaged with is for an audience, whether as teacher we are providing formative or summative assessment back to the student, or whether as teacher we are providing assessment data for moderation or reporting purposes within or beyond our school. Assessment for learning is therefore by its very nature a social experience, and increasingly teachers are enabling students to become more skilled at using the social nature of assessment for learning activities.
In most classrooms, forms of peer assessment are seen in every lesson – whether through students discussing their work with each other, or through peer marking. We frequently ask students to work together in small groups collaborating on assessable projects which again, by their very nature, mean that students' success and outcomes are dependent on their peers. Interestingly, running parallel to all of these school activities, students are online outside of school hours, working with their friends to explore common interests and feeding back to each other about their experiences, using online spaces (often social networking sites) to do so.
The example below is taken from Facebook, and is one of countless similar examples available over a range of different sites. The screen below can be accessed by anyone with a Facebook account and does not lie behind the safety of a protected learning platform environment. However, because learners are leading from their own experiences and are encouraged to create social conversations, examples such as those below follow.
In this instance, there are 3,299 secondary students who have joined a group called “I can’t wait to burn my anthology” where they have instigated discussion around a poetry anthology that they are using for a particular lesson at school. Three things are striking about this experience. Firstly, the students have autonomously created an opportunity to share their school learning experiences. Second, that 3,299 (and rising) students have found this opportunity and joined it – reaching far beyond their own schools and local communities, reflecting a more 21st century global classroom. Thirdly, that on the very first page, students are already outlining their learning intentions (see the Description – Study Groups), and provided further learning resources through the links available on the overview page. 
The area becomes more interesting when viewing some of the discussion links within the area. One such discussion thread can be seen below, with names removed (although all of this is publicly available to anyone with a Facebook account) and it is very useful to see these areas in context to gain a better understanding of the ways in which this is being used.
Here, the students begin with a social exchange about a particular poem that other students have been critical of. This quickly stimulates students to ask questions about aspects that they do not understand, and to support each other’s development and understanding through suggestions and opinion exchange. Towards the end of this dialogue students can be seen making recommendations about how to tackle related exam questions. 
This Discussion board is available to view without needing to Join the Group “I can’t wait to burn my anthology”. Individuals have their names and photographs attached to their posts, but they have been hidden in this example.
This kind of dialogue is taking place without any support or the intervention of a teacher. Imagine how this could be built upon within a safe learning platform environment, where students are empowered to have these kind of conversations with peers in their school and beyond, supported by teaching teams who link students to related activities and resources within the learning platform to further enhance this experience.
So how can a learning platform enable AfL to become safely social?
As a consequence of the changing trends in both assessment for leaning inside school, and an increased engagement in online interaction outside of school, there appears an opportunity to use these two experiences for mutually beneficial purposes. However, while some teachers are happy to make this leap, most of us feel more comfortable moving gradually in this direction at a somewhat steadier pace. Perhaps the following six points could be stepping stones to move from existing practice towards these kinds of ideas. The ideas in italics provide some suggestions of how learning platform tools can enable these stepping stones to be achieved in practice.
1. Learners become aware of the success criteria of their learning experience and realise that their work will be assessed against this, therefore being more informed by their teacher;
Learners could access learning objectives through News or Calendar tools for both the lesson, day and term/year ahead.
2. Learners digest the success criteria given to them and identify the relationship/correlation with their own work achievements themselves through self-assessment once work is completed;
Learners could use a learning journal Blog to identify where their work has met the success criteria, and to what extent – they can link these observations to evidence through photos, sound recordings, film and work samples as well as linking directly to work completed within the learning platform / their eportfolio.
3. Learners immerse themselves in the given success criteria in order to focus their efforts during the process of participating in a particular learning activity;
Learners could use a Wiki to structure their outcomes in such a way that clearly identifies how they have met the success criteria – for example branching off showing references or further sub-sections in more detail, tracking versions of a wiki page to show self-improvement and vocabulary extension, wiki commenting to show extended or critical thinking. There are some superb examples of this stemming from Radstock Primary School.
4. Learners consider the success criteria of larger scale learning experiences in relation to the activities being addressed and use this to extend the aspects in which they excel and build upon aspects that are found more challenging (for example, how an individual piece of work affects the grading for a module, and therefore seeking help to boost weaker pieces of work, and extend more successful pieces);
Learners could self-evidence their strengths and areas for development against specific tasks and targets through Task Setting – for example students providing work samples to evidence writing standards improvement, or photographs of a D&T project at different stages of development showing the progression taking place. There are some superb examples of this in practice within the early years foundation stage (see www.graysschool.co.uk for a film about this which recently won a Becta Excellence Award for their use of the UniServity cLc learning platform).
5. Learners relate coverage aims to success criteria in order to map out a learning journey with several stages and development points, and work alongside other learners to achieve this.
Learners could use their Eportfolio to map out their intended learning journey, using this Personalised Learning Space to link to people, places, communities and opportunities where they are able to turn these plans into practice before, during and after. This exact same process can be carried out collectively using class areas with Topic/Module Maps linking to the related people and places (activities and resources). Collaborative Projects such as these are showing measurable impact upon attainment standards.
6. Learners identify learning needs, and decide upon the most appropriate approach, including who is able to help them, carry out their actions, review outcomes and highlight learning consequences (Action Research).
Learners could create Spaces where they shape a learning journey which is going to best address the targets and objectives that they are working on. Learners then invite other learners into their Community in order to Collaborate through a range of activities such as Wikis and Forums in order to Co-construct knowledge and understanding, and to evidence this process. They are then able to quantify this Evidence for more formal assessment or examination both qualitatively through their learning journal Blog and quantifiably through self, peer and teacher assessed Marksheets with suggested next step targets for future learning.
What does all this mean to each of us?
Ultimately all of these ideas and examples are based around the fact that learning is all about human interaction. The social nature of learning means that it is just not possible to learn in complete isolation - even apparently isolated activities such as reading a book require someone to write the book first so at the very least there are two people involved in the learning experience. The recent Digizen Report shows yet more compelling evidence that there are already benefits being seen in the ways that social learning tools and spaces are supporting personalised formal and informal learning.
With technology engaging more and more people through spaces and communities, and all schools currently exploring ways in which this technology can be used purposefully to enhance and extend learning - particularly with learning platforms - it is perhaps our role to use these opportunities both for our students and for ourselves to engage in more social forms of learning experience both within and outside school. We all belong to existing communities of learners – our class, our year group or department, our key stage, or school, our cluster, our LA, our country, our professional network. How can we use these online spaces to increase the engagement of those within our communities, particularly those who have not yet discovered the benefits of this kind of use of technology? Consider this quote from Boyd & Ellison about the nature of spaces which enable learners to learn socially together – including social networking sites: “What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks”.
The point to note is that it is the visibility that is important to the learner. Once we are within the safe space of a learning platform, the visibility that we can provide for our learners (both our students, and those colleagues who have not yet discovered the benefits of this style of learning) has some profound opportunities. Opportunities to link to learning partners, learning mentors, experts, home, school and beyond, people who all share one thing in common – that they all are seeking to learn with and from each other.
So perhaps the question that we might want to start our day with tomorrow is not "What we are learning and assessing today?" but "Who we are going to be learning and assessing it with?
More Information
Fiona Aubrey-Smith is head of educational development at leading learning platform supplier UniServity. This article was written for NAACE and is reproduced with the author’s permission.
www.uniservity.com
Fiona Aubrey-Smith wishes to thanks to all the schools that gave permission to showcase their use of the UniServity learning platform.
Reading
Article in Sharing Good Practice by Philip Griffin, Year 6 teacher at Radstock Primary School, Wokingham
Boyd, D.M., & Ellison, N.B., (2007) Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 13 (1).
