John Raiti

assessON informs professional learning

How can student learning guide and inform your professional learning?

Formative assessment is widely used to improve learning outcomes for students. However a recent paper from the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development titled Using student assessment for professional learning: focusing on student outcomes to identify teachers’ needs suggests that the same principles of formative assessment can be used to inform professional learning for teachers.

This paper suggests that the learning of both students and teachers proceeds through ‘successive, cumulative stages, or dimensions’. In particular, these stages focus on three key questions:

‘Where am I going?’,
‘How am I doing?’
‘Where to next?’ (Hattie & Timperley, 2007)

While students answer these questions during their learning, teachers also use the answers to these questions to inform their knowledge of students and how to teach them.

Go to the latest edition of Curriculum Leadership to read more.

Jacaranda’s newly released online assessment tool assessON allows students to focus on these three key questions to navigate their learning. From a teacher’s perspective, the rich diagnostics in assessON enable teachers to be better informed of their students’ learning while interrogating the ways they teach.

assessON