Keynote: How education gets in the way of learning

The formal structures and processes of school education – including the organisation of the school curriculum, processes for assessing student learning, methods of reporting performance, and the uses to which student results are put – are often inconsistent with what is now known about the best ways to promote human learning. Rather than being designed to maximise every student’s learning, these structures and processes often reflect 20th century priorities, including the use of school education to sort and select students into different education and training destinations, and future careers. This sorting function of schooling is becoming increasingly irrelevant in knowledge economies that now look to their school systems to provide every student with high levels of knowledge, understanding and skill, including skills in critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, using new technologies, and working collaboratively with others. The challenge is to ensure that every student reaches the levels currently achieved by only some. However, the structures and processes of today’s schools are often poorly designed to meet this challenge.

This time without ‘feeling’: Children’s intuitive theories of art as a logical basis for learning progression in visual arts

Learning in Visual Arts has traditionally been framed as an experiential process in which feeling and intuition complement the development of aesthetic knowledge. However, while art can be about feelings and processes that develop students’ expressive capacities, the complexity of art understanding and thinking extends beyond this narrow common-sense assumption. I argue that this assumption, which is represented in the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (ACARA, 2015), and even more firmly resonates in recent proposals for the revision of this curriculum (ACARA, 2021), obfuscates the conceptual and theoretical bases on which students make progress in art understanding. This paper examines the proposition that art understanding emerges progressively and can be described in conceptual terms, the basis of which can be identified in empirical research on the emergence of children’s intuitive theories of art. This paper examines how selected studies articulate the cognitive grounds on which students’ ontologies of art and epistemological beliefs are represented in their reasoning about art over time. It is argued that an empirically supported conception of learning anchored in students’ cognitive development in art that recognises the theoretical commitments underscoring their conceptual and practical reasoning in visual arts practices K–12 provides a logical basis for articulating progression in the subject.

Keynote: Accountable assessment

There is widespread agreement about the importance of accounting for the extent to which educational systems advance student learning. Yet, the forms and formats of accountable assessments often ill serve students and teachers; the summative judgements of student performance that are typically employed to indicate proficiencies on benchmarks of student learning commonly fail to capture student performance in ways that are specific and actionable for teachers. Timing is another key barrier to the utility of summative assessment. In the US, summative evaluations occur at the end of the school year and may serve future students, but do not help teachers better support the students who were tested. In contrast, formative assessments provide actionable grounds to improve the quality of instruction on the basis of both the granularity and specificity of their content and their timing. Unfortunately, the psychometric qualities of formative assessments are often unknown. I describe an innovative approach to assessment that aims to blend the productive characteristics of both summative and formative assessment. The resulting assessment system is accountable to students and teachers by providing actionable information for improving classroom instruction, and at the same time, it addresses the demands of psychometric quality for purposes of system accountability as it is currently practiced (in the US). The innovative assessment system relies on partnership with teachers to generate (1) a shared conceptual frame for describing instructional goals and valued forms of teaching and learning; (2) a set of electronic tools to help teachers detect, share, analyse, and interpret student learning data; and (3) classroom and school-level community professional development structures to support and sustain a widespread practice of assessing to guide instruction. These features are coupled with new psychometric models, developed by the Berkeley Evaluation and Research Center, that provide more robust estimates of student learning by linking information from multiple sources, including student classroom work, student responses to formative assessments, and summative evaluations. (Mark Wilson will address the psychometric modeling during this conference.) Here I describe challenges and prospects for this innovation with a case study of its implementation in a K–5 elementary school that is seeking to improve the quality of instruction and students’ understandings of measure and rational number arithmetic.

Learning progressions as models and tools for supporting classroom assessment

Like all models, learning progressions (LPs) provide simplified representations of complex phenomena. One key simplification is the characterisation of student thinking in terms of levels. This characterisation is both essential for large-scale applications, such as informing standards, but potentially problematic for smaller-scale applications. In this paper, I describe a program of research designed to explore the smaller-scale use of LPs as supports for teacher classroom assessment practices in light of this simplification. Based on this research, I conclude that LP levels may serve as a generative heuristic, particularly when teachers are engaged with evidence of the limitations of LP levels and supported to use LPs in ways that do not rely on their levels.

Leading system transformation: A work in progress

Internationally, the COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly disrupted the education sector. While NSW has avoided the longer periods of remote learning that our colleagues in Victoria and other countries have experienced, we have nonetheless been provoked to reflect on the nature of schooling and the systemic support we provide to transform the learning of each student and enrich the professional lives of staff within our Catholic learning community. At Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta (CEDP), a key pillar of our approach is to create conditions that enable everyone to be a leader. Following the initial lockdown period in 2020 when students learned remotely, we undertook an informal teacher voice piece with the purpose of engaging teachers and leaders from across our 80 schools in Greater Western Sydney to reflect on and capture key learnings. This project revealed teachers and leaders reported very high feelings of self-efficacy, motivation and confidence in their capacity to learn and lead in the volatile pandemic landscape. These findings raised the question: how do we enable this self-efficacy, motivation and confidence in an ongoing way? This paper documents the systematic reflection process undertaken by CEDP to understand the enabling conditions a system can provide to activate everyone to be a leader in the post-pandemic future and the key learnings emerging from this process.

Applying empirical learning progressions for a holistic approach to evidence-based education: SWANS/ABLES

Learning progressions have become an increasing topic of interest for researchers, educational organisations and schools as they can describe the expected pathway of learning within a content area to allow for targeted teaching and learning at all levels of ability. However, there is substantial variation in how learning progressions are developed and to what extent teachers can use them to inform their practices. The ABLES/SWANS tools (Students with Additional Needs/Abilities Based Learning and Education Support) are an example of how an empirical learning progression can be applied to support teachers’ ability to not only target teaching to a student’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978), but also to plan, assess, and report on learning. Across Australia, these tools are used to help of thousands of teachers of students with disability to make evidence-based teaching and learning decisions and demonstrate the impact of their work with students. This approach, which scaffolds student achievement towards goals informed by an empirical learning progression, combined with reflective teaching practices, can help teachers to develop their capacity as professionals and provide the most effective teaching and learning for every student, regardless of the presence of disability or additional learning need.

Evidencing creativity and curiosity in IB schools

There is growing recognition of the importance of learners gaining transversal or 21st-century attributes in order to thrive in the contemporary world. This poses a number of challenges for educators. First, to what extent are transversal attributes innate, or do they include a combination of traits and skills? Second, what can teachers do to help nurture these attributes in learners? Third, how can the existence or strengthening of attributes be recognised? In this paper, we draw on work that we are doing for the International Baccalaureate Organisation to define conceptual frameworks for creativity and curiosity. Our goal is to enable learners to evidence achievement in each of these attributes, and for teachers to be able to recognise it. The frameworks draw on extensive scholarly literature to define the core components of both curiosity and creativity and the skills that are inherent in each one. This is the first step towards the development of a ‘transversal résumé’ that will allow learner achievement to be recorded. This includes a focus on the extent to which schools and teachers can provide learners with opportunities to gain, practice or enhance the skills that contribute to transversal attributes and a scaffold that enables learners to reflect on the extent to which they have evidenced creativity or curiosity in sustained pieces of work. The paper raises some key questions that have arisen as we have grappled with both conceptual and practical issues in this project. These provide valuable insights into the nurturing of transversal attributes, and the implications for educational professionals.

Identifying and monitoring progress in collaboration skills

The nature of skills such as collaboration is complex, particularly given that there are internal processes at play. Inferences need to be made to interpret explicit behaviours observed from intentionally designed assessment tasks. This paper centres on the approach to develop hypotheses of skill development into validated learning progressions using assessment data. Understanding a skill from a growth perspective is essential for the effective teaching and development of the skill. The application of Item Response Theory (IRT) allows the interpretation of assessment data as levels of proficiency that we can use to map or monitor progress in collaborative skills.

Using assessment data to improve equity: How teachers use insights from the Scottish National Standardised Assessments

Evidence-based decision-making is regarded as an important indicator of quality in schools around the world. Using data gathered from assessments, in conjunction with other insights, can help school leaders and teachers better meet the needs of learners. In schools that cater to disadvantaged learners, using data to design targeted interventions plays an important role in improving equity. In this paper we report on a study with five schools in Scotland. All schools had learner cohorts characterised by multiple layers of disadvantage. Informed by the theoretical underpinnings of sensemaking theory, we investigated how teachers and school leaders used data from the Scottish National Standardised Assessments (SNSA). Our findings suggest that teachers and leaders are adept at combining assessment data with other insights – including their own observations. All schools were active in using data to inform decision-making, both at the whole-school level and at the classroom level. They reported multiple uses of data, from validating their own instincts to targeting support to particular cohorts of learners. We suggest that the way in which SNSA is designed – explicitly providing data to teachers to help inform their professional judgement – is a factor in the positive approach to data usage among these schools.

Karmel Oration: Excellent progress for all: A function of year-level curriculum or evidenced-based learning progressions?

Excellent progress for all students is an ambitious but necessary goal if we are to improve the life choices of all students. At the moment, we are not serving all our students well despite the best efforts of teachers. We need to look further afield to the curriculum and assessment regimes that drive current practice. Grouping students by ability and offering a watered-down curriculum for some is not the answer. Evidenced-based learning progressions that point to what is important in ensuring all students build a deep, well-connected understanding of mathematics over time is what is needed to support reform at scale Where the evidenced-based tools and resources produced by this type of research are used to identify and respond to student learning needs in relation to what is important, it has been shown to make a significant difference to student outcomes and engagement. Adopting a targeted teaching approach means that not everything has to be differentiated and not everything needs to be considered as often or to the same depth. Time can be spent researching challenging but accessible tasks and developing a culture that supports and reward persistence, effort and a growth mind-set.