Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the annual lecture of the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment.
My name is Victoria Murphy and I'm the deputy director of the Department of Education.
I'm very delighted to be able to welcome you all to these salubrious surroundings in Oxford,
to what promises to be a fascinating lecture from a very distinguished colleague.
While I tend to sympathise with the view that nationalism is a kind of glorification of tribalism,
I'm going to indulge in my tribalistic tendencies and admit that I am particularly
delighted to introduce this event with Nancy Parry because she is a fellow Canadian.
This year in the department is particularly exciting for us because we're celebrating our 100 birthday,
and I can't think of a nicer way to celebrate than by sharing the evening with you with an inspiring lecture and a lovely evening to follow.
Over the past 100 years,
our department has made some really important contributions to both research and teaching in England and also internationally.
We are currently ranked number one in England for our research outputs,
and we regularly appear in the top slots of international rankings for departments of education.
And it's at this point where I'm supposed to make a kind of glib comment that we don't care about these things,
which of course you never do if you're at the top of the rankings.
But I think it's actually really important to pause and celebrate the hard work and achievements that we have accomplished.
We don't often in our very busy days, have the opportunity to do that.
So I think it's worth pausing. And I think an event like this one this evening is a wonderful opportunity to do that.
I'm extremely proud to be a member of the Department of Education in the University of Oxford because, well, for many reasons.
But one of them is that I feel that we're one of those rare departments that excels at both producing the highest quality, rigorous,
internationally relevant research, while at the same time maintaining the highest standards in terms of our professional programmes.
So a good example of that is recent outstanding assessment from the four for our PGCE programme on a recent Ofsted.
And I think what that signifies is that in our essence,
we are a department that recognises the importance of producing the most rigorous, robust research evidence.
But at the same time, applying it to Real-World educational settings to real problems and real challenges.
So celebrating our achievements is important. And for the U.S.A. in particular,
who have had a very busy and very successful year this evening is a fantastic opportunity to
celebrate with them and to learn from and be inspired by colleagues like Professor Perry.
So I'm very delighted to have this opportunity to welcome you all to welcome and thank Professor Perry
for coming all the way from beautiful British Columbia to beautiful Oxford to share her work with us.
And I'm going to now hand you over to Theresa Hutton back, who is the director of the Centre for Educational Assessment.
To formally introduce this very thank you. Thank you very much for coming and thank you for coming to science.
It's a very pleasure to invite you and to introduce you to the audience here in England.
It's been quite a long time since I first met you in 2006 and University of Oslo,
and I'm so pleased that you would come here to night and share this event with us.
So, Professor Ramsay, is that already an armchair in special education and professor of education,
counselling, psychology and special education at the University of British Columbia?
And her research has two main goals understanding how classroom policies are integrated in children's development of self-reliant
learning and working with teachers to design activities and structure interactions with students that support self-regulated learning.
And I think this is particularly interesting,
and I'm looking forward to what you would share with us today because there's something about also to apply what we do in research.
In addition, you have been working on Form, a partnership with school districts and the Ministry of Education in British Columbia,
as well as national and international collaborations with colleagues at university in Belgium,
Finland, Norway and currently Cambridge, Oxford and York.
So yes, we do share also with Cambridge, and I even think we have some visitors from Cambridge here tonight.
If I can see David welcome David.
So Professor Perry is a past president of the different education psychology of the American
Psychological Association and the Canadian Association of Educational Psychologists.
And she has served. On the editorial boards of the top journals in education psychology, such as Journal of Education,
Psychology, Educational Psychologists and a journal of learning and instructions,
the last thing you did before you came to Oxford was to receive the wrote the case Memorial Award from the Canadian
Association of Medication of Psychology in recognition of your major contribution to education psychology in Canada.
So there's a reason why we are very,
very pleased that you took the time to also visit Oxford in your very busy schedule and share your research experience with us.
Personally, I have had the pleasure of working and collaborating with you,
and you have supported us on the search to a different project assessment for learning in Africa.
And I'm very happy also that some of our colleagues on the Hill come just co-investigator from South Africa and South Africa.
He is also here tonight, and you will also meet Professor Gordon Stolberg,
previous lead editor of the Assessment and Educational Journal, and also and advice on our research.
I'm really happy for all of you being here as part of this.
I'm sharing this evening with you. And with these words, I open the floor to your notes.
Thank you, Theresa, and for that very warm welcome.
It's a pleasure for me to come and speak to you here on this exciting evening your celebration of seventy five years, my gosh.
And I'm heartened to hear about the kind of foci on both research and making sure that that research gets into practise,
because that's a focus that's very near and dear to me.
I think I'm feeling kind of heavy because I'm double might.
And maybe that's because if you don't hear it the first time, you'll have an opportunity to hear it again.
OK, let's see if this works OK? At the University of British Columbia.
It is our practise to acknowledge that we work and learn on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Muskingum Nation,
which is a group of First Peoples in Canada. So I always like to do that.
I also want to recognise that the work that I do, I don't do by myself.
It takes a village. And I think tonight, when I'm referring to my research, I'll be saying we.
And that's because I have a team of researchers who helped me to do my work.
My work is supported, of course, by the University of British Columbia, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
I have. Great group of graduate research assistants who helped me to do what I do,
and I also want to acknowledge my collaborators, specifically at the University of British Columbia,
the top three, but also to acknowledge the work I do with scholars at the University of McGill and Western University in Canada,
as well as here in the UK at Cambridge and Oxford.
Finally, I'll just acknowledge my community partners, particularly the teachers and children who participate in my research.
They are the teachers for me.
So my research purpose for the past now more than 25 years has been to engage in scholarship that really advances knowledge and improves practise.
So as Teresa mentioned, I have two main goals one is helping children to develop independent, academically effective approaches to learning,
which I refer to as self-regulated learning and also supporting teachers through guided and
sustained professional learning experiences to develop and hone their cereal promoting practises.
And I'll talk a little bit tonight about what I'm mean when I talk about guided and sustained, because I think that's critical.
For my presentation this evening, I'd like to cover kind of four areas or I've divided it into kind of four chunks.
First of all, I'm going to give a little bit of an overview of self-regulated learning what I am
thinking about when I talk about self-regulated learning kind of a surreal one on one.
And then I want to make some links to assessment and why it is that I think both assessment and Cyril fit together quite nicely.
I'm going to talk about my work with teachers and provide some examples from one project that we have going currently.
And then I will conclude with a little bit of a recap of lessons that we've learnt over time from this work.
So what is self-regulated learning this?
Check my time here.
A group of grade one, two and three students in one of my projects defined it as the ability to do your job without being asked, told or shown.
And I thought that's a pretty good definition of self regulated learning.
Barry Zimmermann, who is one of the originators of itself for the term self-regulated learning,
talks about it as the ability to control thoughts and actions to meet goals and respond to environmental demands.
So I think the grade one twos and threes got it pretty dead on self-regulating learners attend to key features of the environment.
They resist distractions, they persist when they're challenged and they respond adaptively and flexibly.
Self-regulation is something I think that we're doing all the time in all the engagements
that we have with the world and in our learning when whether it's in school,
in formal settings or informal settings and self-regulation includes or has targets that can be cognition or metacognition.
In other words, you can be regulating your cognition and metacognition, regulating your motivation, emotion, learning and behaviour.
And from my point of view, it doesn't matter what the target of the self-regulated learning is, the mechanisms are all the same.
When we self-regulate for learning, I emphasise that we engage in metacognition, motivation and strategic action.
And by metacognition, I'm referring to learners awareness of themselves, their own personal characteristics, their awareness of task demands,
what's being asked of them and their understanding of strategies that they can use for bridging any kinds
of gaps that might be between what they're able to do as learners and what the task is asking them to do.
They are strategic, and I mean that they know they it's more than knowing strategies, they are able to use strategies in flexible ways.
They have conditional knowledge about strategies. They know when, where and why to use them.
And finally, I always like to say that there will be no self-regulation without motivation,
because even if learners are self-aware, aware of task demands,
even if they have strategies that they could use to solve problems if they don't have the will to do that, it's never going to happen.
So I like to say that you need both skill and will in order to be a self, a successful, self-regulating learner.
Models of self regulation tend to be cyclical.
And so they involve learners in first focussing or identifying what it is that they're being asked to do.
And then typically making a plan, figuring out or deciding how it is that they're going to approach the task,
then they enact some strategies to help them through. And they also engage in reflection and this reflection piece.
I want to particularly emphasise because it provides a feedback loop and this is really central,
I think, to this link to assessment that we talk about, particularly self assessment.
So good. Self-regulating learners are engaged in monitoring all of the time what it is that they're doing and whether they're being successful,
whether they're meeting the demands of the task,
meeting the goals that they've set for themselves personally and adjusting when things are not going as planned.
So why should we focus on self-regulated learning?
Well, the research over almost to 50 years now indicates that self-regulation is a significant source of achievement differences amongst students.
We know that when students are not good, self-regulating or not good at self-regulating for learning, they struggle.
And whether it's because they're having difficulties regulating their emotions or some of the behaviours that they have,
or whether it's just about their cognition or metacognition, if they're not,
if they're struggling with those things, they're not going to be successful.
But we also know, and this is the good news as far as I'm concerned, that self-regulation is malleable and it's developmental.
And so it's a process that can be learnt and it can be manipulated.
So even children with exceptional learning needs, which are a focus for me, can improve in their self-regulated learning.
Self-regulation supports both personal and social forms of learning, and so in the literature,
we talk sometimes about code regulation and when I'm working in classrooms, particularly with very young children.
Much of what I see is teachers code regulating children's self-regulation.
And I think that in terms of the developmental progression, individuals tend to move from code regulation to self-regulation.
The goal of cocoa regulation is always to support self-regulation.
My colleague Allison Hadwin and sign a yarmulke and also David White Bread have done work that looks at socially shared regulation.
And this is more when the individuals involved in a learning task are on an even playing field.
But what they're doing is maybe they're constructing what it is that they're being asked to do in terms of the demands of the task.
They're thinking together about what strategies they might be able to use, and they're even sharing the monitoring and making adjustments.
So it's true kind of interdependent or collaborative activity.
And then finally, one of my graduate students, Linda Hutchinson,
who's now at Western University in Canada, coined the phrase socially responsible self-regulation.
And by that, she's referring to the fact that in order to be self-regulating yourself,
be successful at learning for yourself and also supporting others, you have to engage in learning and socially responsible ways.
Self-regulation is an asset. We're finding that cuts across social sociodemographic boundaries.
So in my own work, as well as work that Dennis McInerney and others have done,
we're finding that regardless of the social and cultural group, teachers are saying that when student,
when they support students to be self-regulating and when students are taking up those opportunities, they're being successful in their learning.
And finally, sell Israel pairs well with some of the current educational initiatives and innovations that are going on globally.
So the focus on 21st century learning goals. Focus on assessments for learning or enquiry learning all of those things.
From my point of view, take up ideas that are related to self-regulated learning.
OK, I'm going to move now and talk a little bit about what I see as links to assessment.
First of all, I'd like to point out in preparing for this talk,
it took me right back to my graduate days at the University of Michigan, and that was in the early 90s.
At that time, there was a great emphasis on portfolio assessment, performance assessment.
And that's when I decided with my dissertation work that I would look at portfolio assessment as a context for supporting self-regulated learning.
But in doing all of that reading, I came across a wonderful article.
I commend it to all of you.
Written by Terence Crooks in 1988, in which he pointed out that classroom evaluation guides students judgements about what is important to learn.
He made the point in that article that it doesn't much matter what else we do as
educators in terms of conveying what it is that we are what our goals are for learners.
If we don't reflect those goals in the ways that we're assessing those learning, though,
that learning they're not going to pick up on our goals, they're going to focus on the test.
How many of us have students who raise their hand whenever we ask them to do things or assignments to say, will it be on the test?
So we want to make sure that those two things are in alignment for learners.
And for teachers, at least the teachers that we've been working with,
the unfortunate thing is that there isn't a lot of time spent in teacher preparation programmes and then when they get out in the field,
probably less time spent in terms of helping them to develop practises for assessment.
And so teachers sometimes feel a little bit unprepared in terms of assessing learning in their students.
And when we have been working with students or teachers to help them to develop practises, excuse me, that support self-regulated learning,
we have found that they're very good at the practises of that are more instructional and providing opportunities for students to be self-regulating.
But what they struggle to do is to say well is what we're doing.
Making a difference is what we're doing to support self-regulated learning,
making a difference to what we see in students activity and how do we know.
Those are the essential questions that bring us to the assessment of self-regulated learning.
And finally, what qualities do assessments need to have to support self-regulated learning?
These are the questions that we've been taking up with teachers in my most recent project I've had.
I'm going to describe for you a little bit about a longitudinal study where we've followed a cohort of children from kindergarten.
They've just finished grade five and will be continuing next year as they finish grade six.
So age 11 12. And our focus, starting with the kindergarten to grade two teachers,
was more on helping them to know and use practises that would be supportive of self-regulated learning, so giving children's opportunities.
But then we found that in fact, what they needed some support on was the assessment piece.
And so when we started working with the grade three teachers as these children moved up through the grades and three four and grades three,
four and five, we have been working on the assessment piece. So my assessment for learning and self-regulated learning, ideally,
we want these things to be activities that are undertaken by teachers and students
that provide information used as feedback to inform teaching and learning activities.
Ideally, these assessments would help teachers to know what is it, what's going on for my learners,
what's going on for students in my classroom and what can I do to support their learning and for learners?
We hope that it gives them feedback that will help them in their efforts to take control of their learning to be self-regulating learners.
In terms of qualities of assessments that support self-regulated learning, here are the kinds of things that I found in my dissertation work way back.
But I think that they're supported in much of the literature on self-regulated learning and also the assessment for learning literature.
First of all, that they are embedded in the regularly occurring activities of classrooms and their ongoing.
They emphasise learning processes as well as products.
So the how of the learning, as well as the what is produced from learning.
They focus on personal progress and they encourage learners to focus on their growth and progress as opposed to making social comparisons.
So excellence can be defined on an individual basis.
Inclusion is another one of those educational innovations that is supported globally and to be able to work with students on an individual
basis and assess them and have them see their progress within classrooms is an important component of assessments for learning,
I believe. They encourage students to view errors as opportunities for learning.
OK, so the feedback you get can only help you with your learning.
We're not doing this in a summative way where you get a score and then you never have a chance to improve again.
And they involve students in setting criteria for assessment and self assessment.
They make expectations explicit. OK,
I'll tell you a little bit about how it is that I work with teachers before getting
into a couple of examples from the work that we've done over the last few years.
So my work with teachers has been informed always by participatory approaches to research,
and that gets operationalised in things like communities of practise, collaborative enquiry or research, practise partnerships.
The key characteristics of the work are that it involves long term collaborative relationships with community partners.
So it's not kind of a one stop. It's not the researcher going in and doing the work and then leaving again.
It's about addressing mutual interests and goals and focussing on problems of practise,
engaging and iterative cycles of planning, enacting and reflecting.
We use a process that's very much like a cycle of strategic activity.
And that's by no accident.
We want teachers as learners to be able to experience self-regulated learning so that they can support self-regulated learning in their students.
So this longitudinal study, which has been going on since the spring of Twenty Twenty fourteen,
has involved about 200 children and over 100 teachers during that time.
And so we and we've been involved in different schools in one particular school
district in the area close to the area where I work in the longitudinal study,
we focus on mainly three kinds of activities. First, we engage teachers in what we talk well.
We call learning teams OK. Teacher learning teams, which are very much communities of enquiry.
We meet the the learning teams, meet with researchers to reflect on practise.
We consider together what it is that we would like to accomplish.
What are our goals and planning alternatives to things that are in place already?
And we experiment in classrooms between our meetings. So over the course of a school year,
the learning team meeting tip the learning teams typically meet three to four times and we have the same number of classroom visits.
So and those visits are interleaved. So we have a learning team meeting a classroom visit and then a learning team meeting and a classroom visit.
The classroom visits involve researchers watching what's going on and then at the end of that debriefing with individual
teachers about what their intentions were for supporting self-regulated learning and how they think it went.
It also involves collecting samples of students work.
So the the samples include assessments that teachers develop together in the learning team, and they also develop class specific assessments.
So in addition to having kind of shared projects as the learning team, individual teachers also have projects.
So over these last few years, what it is that we've tried to accomplish with the teachers is to develop and implement
curriculum linked and formative assessments of children's self-regulated learning.
We have embedded assessments in complex, meaningful tasks and activities.
Given students opportunities to demonstrate metacognition, motivation and strategic action,
I should say these are our goals rather than to claim we've accomplished it.
I'll show you some data and you'll see how it's a work in progress.
We want to show how our efforts support Assad or how our efforts to support Syria are working.
And in the assessments, we've worked to have both kind of a set of common elements that go across classrooms, and that's helpful to us as researchers.
But also, we want the assessments to be flexible enough that teachers feel free,
that they can make adjustments to suit their learning, their particular learning contexts.
So I'm going to share an example from the grade three year and in grade three,
all of the teachers on the learning team decided that they wanted to focus on writing.
So there were some common elements that they all decided.
They decided that across classrooms they would focus on. And those included linking the writing process to self regulated learning.
So for those of you that are familiar with the writing process,
you usually engage in some form of pre writing activities which correspond to the planning process in self-regulated learning.
Then students engage in writing and use strategies for writing and revising.
So again, you've got the enactment of strategies and the reflection piece.
And then at the end of the writing, also some kind of reflection activity that is more kind of summative.
They also decided that they would focus on expository text.
So what it is that children would be writing would include either informational text or personal descriptive text.
And then there were some flexible elements of the topics.
So as long as the focus was on writing, they were using the writing process and it was informational text.
Topics could be anything, and they could be in the context of projects that people were already doing in their classrooms.
The scope of the projects. So some teachers were engaged in very elaborate units of study,
and other teachers really were going to just design something that was the writing for this particular assessment.
And it really depended on the confidence of the teachers and their sense of competence.
Some for some of them, it was quite a new approach it.
We also had flexibility around their approach to implementation.
This is an example from one of the grade three teachers who decided that she was going to focus on creation stories.
So already you see stories she may not be informational text because it has a narrative structure.
But I think it fit because the students had to use factual information in their study
of indigenous peoples in order to come up with their creation stories before writing.
She had the students research animals that were particular to indigenous groups in their community or in the area,
and they created concept maps to organise their information for writing during writing.
They used their maps to guide the writing process.
And finally, after writing, students read one another's stories and provided feedback before completing their final draughts.
Oops! Sorry, I'm going to go back a little bit.
This teacher, as one of her personal goals, wanted to engage students in self assessment, so that was kind of a focus of hers.
And the strategy that she used for that in this particular activity was something that the class referred to as critical friends.
So in their classroom, it was very common for them throughout the year to engage in editing one another's work or providing feedback to one another.
And they talked about the fact that they had critical friends or they could be a critical friend.
And you can see here that part of that process was to construct together criteria for giving effective feedback.
They discussed what it meant to be a constructively critical friend.
And when they came to the end of their story, the teacher reminded them it's not really the end, right, because we're going to edit it now.
And for editing,
she provided students with a template that they could use to provide feedback that incorporated both what they saw as the strengths of the work,
as well as things that might be changed to make it better.
And so you see some examples of the children's work.
What we discovered in working with the grade three teachers was that they had known and actually they discovered about
themselves was that they were great at coming up with ideas about assessing students work that was very focussed on the task.
So getting traces of students writing process. They were pretty good at that.
Their metacognition and so on. But they said what we're challenged with is figuring out how is it that we know students are motivated
or how do we know what they're feeling or what they're sensing about their writing process?
And so I had to capitulate and allow for the development of these learning logs.
And I say capitulate because some of my colleagues in the room will know that I've written things about the difficulty with self-report.
But I will admit that there are some things that you just can't get access to unless you ask participants about them.
And so that's what we did with the learning log.
Here is what we came to for the grade three students, and this was something that we designed collaboratively with the teachers.
They wanted to know about the different emotions that students were feeling while they were writing,
and we asked then for children to describe why they felt that way.
What strategies they tried to use in coping with motivational and affective experiences and what they might try the next time.
We also asked them to rate on a 10 point scale there how interesting or how important they thought the work was.
So the teachers then across the across the classrooms, implemented the learning log a couple of times over the course of the writing activity.
They did it kind of in the middle during the writing and then at the end after the writing projects were complete.
And so here's a couple of examples from of what children said about the experience.
So here is while they were in process. And this, I believe,
was on a day when the students had been focussing on gathering information for their writing project and organising it for their writing.
And this student says that he was focussed because I had lots to write and he tried to write down as much as my brain could think.
And he said, next time, I'll try to add more details in my writing.
Here's another one who says it was an amazing story with lots of creativity in it, and I felt good.
So he was feeling happy while he worked.
He tried to stay on task, not getting, not getting distracted by, I guess, his friends that were talking to him.
And he said next time [INAUDIBLE] get his work done faster. But read it over the next time.
So recognising maybe got some feedback from somebody who said, you might think of reading it over as a revision strategy.
Then after writing, here's what they said.
And this was after they were able to engage with the critical friends or get fit, get feedback and give feedback to one another.
So this person really liked the idea of being able to read other people's story and tell them, let them know what they have, what they've done wrong.
But they did say that they wanted next or what they tried to do was be very specific
so that the person would know what it is that they needed to do to fix it.
And so the next time, they would certainly try to read the story well and to show them their corrections.
OK, I'm going to move from grade three now to a grade five example and the grade five teachers,
we've just finished with this group in June this year, the beginning of June.
And they decided that they wanted to focus on research with students.
And so with the research again, there was some set of common elements linking Israel to the research process.
So usually when we engage in recess, there's some kind of planning and acting review, revising, etc.
They wanted to use technology or have the students use technology in various ways during research, gathering information,
using computers as tools for writing, etc. And they also wanted students at the end of the day to present their work in some way.
The flexible elements included topics, so again, across classrooms, teachers could decide on the topics that their students would focus on.
They could decide what the technological tools would be,
and these varied across schools and classrooms, and they could also decide on the presentation format.
So in some classrooms, there were slideshows. Others did poster presentations.
There was a wide range of things, and they could also decide on the approach to implementation.
I also want to point out that the learning log is something that carried forward from grade three and each year, Teacher said, Well,
we like that learning log, but they would adapt it so that it became developmentally appropriate for the students in their classroom.
And so you can see that the Grade five learning log is actually quite a bit more sophisticated than the Grade three learning log.
Now they're asking students to beat to articulate what they perceive their
task to be and to identify whether they have a plan for working on that task.
They talk about getting they got them to rate. How difficult is it and what did you find difficult about it?
How interesting, how important and whether they followed their plan.
And then, of course, they get the affective information as well.
How did they feel? Why did they feel that way? What kinds of strategies now they're using the words strategies?
And did it work? Those strategies?
What are you going to try next time?
And then the second page is something that teachers added that reflects a process that is in place in the district where they're working,
where there are three questions that teachers often ask about the learning.
And that is, what are you learning? How's it going and where to next?
Very simple questions. But by asking those things, you're getting students to engage in metacognition, right?
They wanted to add the question How am I stretching myself?
So is this a challenge for me? And in what way?
So I'm going to talk about a teacher who referred to her research project as the Wonder Time project.
So what she wanted was for students to conduct a research about something that they were curious about, something that they wanted to know.
And before conducting their research, they constructed, as you can see on the right there, the purpose and format of the project.
And they were they reviewed their self-regulation strategies. During their projects,
the students conducted the research and they wrote a report and the teacher embedded the learning log assessments over the course of the project,
and she was very explicit with the students that she was going to pause to do the learning logs.
I like to do it halfway through an activity so that you can realise what you should be working on in the second half.
So clearly a prompt for learners. Well, this you may not be able to see very clearly from your end, but it's of a student who had a focus on soccer.
I picked that one for this group. I thought, maybe soccer is something we can relate to.
And so basically he has gone through here and I think what he said, that was difficult.
I have a hard time here as well, but might have been gathering the information.
But what was interesting about it was that he was very interested in soccer and he did it from a historical perspective,
and he picked a particular soccer player in history that was supposed to be the best soccer player of all time.
Can anybody guess who it might be? Started with an am. I just recall after the projects were complete, after the projects were complete,
the students shared their learning in diverse ways, including slideshows and dioramas and poster boards.
And so this is the poster board of the young fellow with the soccer player.
Yes, with the name of the soccer player very clear for you to see.
And after they finished the presentation and the whole project, they were able to engage in self-reflection again,
and the teacher was very clear that she really wanted them to focus on the Israel piece to be very reflective and deep about your learning.
And so again, this is this the student who has the interest in in soccer.
And I think that at the end of the day,
he talks about enjoying the project because he are and also presenting the project because he loved presenting.
And what did he learn from?
The experience of presenting was to look at keep focussed on my paper, my presentation and also my making eye contact with the audience.
And next time he would try to make better eye contact with with the audience.
I think this fellow also talked about the fact that he really enjoyed the project because it was on a topic that was of great interest to him.
And when he was asked where to next, it was that he wants to learn more about soccer and I believe another soccer player.
And so he has a future direction.
I guess I want to maybe pull all of this together to think about the purpose for assessing self-regulation in these ways and what
it is that we might accomplish when we focus on assessment that is embedded in what it is that we're doing in classroom tasks,
in regularly occurring tasks. Hopefully, our assessments are assessing thinking and I would add learning rather than the possession of information.
So we're not we're talking about processes as well.
And hopefully our assessments enable teachers to develop sophisticated judgements about students understanding of significant ideas and processes.
Ideally, students and teachers learn from these assessment experiences.
What are the standards of good work? And they could construct those, and they come to shared understandings about what those might be,
and assessment becomes an occasion of learning rather than just a performance at the end of the day.
So here are some comments from the teacher, the grade five teacher who whose class we just looked at in terms of their wonder project,
she said in reference to the learning logs that completing those was an important opportunity for
students to reflect on progress at different stages as they went through the research process.
She said it read it reiterated for me the importance of Israel being embedded in all the learning strands,
and I might argue that it should also emphasise how important embedding the assessment is in all of the the learning strands.
And what she noted was that students awareness of what works and doesn't work for them increased steadily throughout the project.
So now I'm going to summarise some of the key findings I've talked about kind of two specific classrooms and the work that they've been doing.
We also have analysed data across classrooms and so for about 10 of 10 classrooms of grade three learners,
I'm just going to summarise what it is that we're finding generally that the work that we're doing,
what what is the difference that we're making to students, maybe on a larger scale?
So we're finding that children's in children, in classrooms that we characterise as emphasising self-regulated learning,
we've looked at classrooms and we have a way of kind of characterising those that have what we would
refer to as kind of a high emphasis on Israel and those that where Israel is not so much the focus.
And so here are some of the things that we're observing in the high emphasis classrooms
that children demonstrate higher task understanding even when tasks are complex.
There's evidence of more productive engagement in the Sahel process processes,
so they have more opportunities, they understand them better and they're engaging in them.
They obtain higher ratings of achievement on tasks involving self-regulated learning.
They give higher ratings of interest and importance to their classroom tasks.
They report using more task relevant strategies to accomplish tasks.
And they report more nuanced emotional responses to tasks and give more elaborate and task relevant explanations for those responses.
So I think those are the kinds of outcomes that we're looking for in terms of learning for students, their engagement in complex,
meaningful activity, their ability to articulate what it is that they are feeling and thinking and learning and so on.
We're quite pleased with those outcomes. But there are always some lessons learnt.
So I'll just quickly go through those and then turn it over to Theresa.
I think what I have learnt in all the work that I have done is that if we want to make a difference for learners,
which is my primary objective, we need to work with teachers and I'm talking about researchers and I'm talking about working with teachers.
We need to create for them learning contexts that are much like the ones we want them to create for their learners so that they can experience that.
Collaborations between researchers and teachers in my experience result in the following what I perceive to be positive outcomes.
First of all, more usable sustainable interventions.
If teachers are involved in the construction of the intervention,
if the intervention fits with what they are doing in their classroom and what they perceive is meaningful for them,
then they're much more likely to take them up even after the researcher leaves the scene.
We're building capacity in school systems for engaging in research, informed improvement efforts.
And we get deeper levels of commitment and engagement amongst teacher participants.
Right. It's interesting. When I started the longitudinal study, my plan, after many years of participatory research,
was to do a very standard longitudinal design right out of the developmental literature, and I couldn't get anybody to participate.
And that was because teachers didn't want to wait for six years to find out the results,
and they didn't want researchers coming in and collecting data and doing what they wanted a professional learning experience.
And so hence we changed the design of the study and introduced the idea of learning teams.
And we have had the participation since then and opportunities for researchers to develop and test theory in naturalistic contexts,
which I think is something that's sorely needed, at least in the self-regulated learning literature.
I'm not sure if that's as much an issue in the assessment for learning literature.
Ultimately, I think all of these things and the ways in which we're conducting the research will lead to more robust,
ecologically valid and practical models of learning and self-regulated learning.
So with that, I will thank you for your attention.
I'll turn it over to. OK.
Well, sincere thank you to Professor Nancy Carey. For those of you who don't know me, I'm just McGrane.
I'm the director here at the deputy director. Director, can you see what happened?
And first of all, I just wanted to sincerely thank Nancy for giving us just a snapshot of what it's been years there,
I say decades of work working in this coal face.
It's very complex and somewhat chaotic space of trying to connect the academic educational theory to real life classroom practise.
And and the work you've shown us today is laudable in that respect.
I know that this really is just a snapshot that everything you've accomplished and in terms of the same lessons learnt,
I think the one thing I really. Or two things that I really learnt from you, Nancy,
is firstly the humility that you bring to your work despite the fact that you have such an illustrious and laudable career yourself.
And secondly, your celebration of the community of researchers that you work with,
whether that be your direct collaborators, but also the teachers themselves and two of those things,
the reason why you've been so successful in this, as I say, complex space of connecting theory to actual classroom practise.
So on that note, I'm sure all of you in the room probably have lots of questions and reflections and comments for Nancy.
But first cab off the rank in this respect will be to raise up from back, who is the director of the area.
Say the real director there.
Yes. Now this is someone who in this room doesn't need any introduction, but I'm going to give her an introduction anyway,
because as the boss, you often spend a lot of time celebrating others and not having anyone celebrating you.
So many of you in this room probably don't know that in a past life, probably more moons ago,
that you would care to admit that Teresa is actually an award winning teacher in Norway.
Yeah. And off the back of that, she decided to leave the heady heights of teaching and actually go into research
to try to really delve into and understand what is it that makes a good teacher?
What is it that makes best teaching practise?
And as part of that, she actually has two books published in Norwegian that are bestsellers in her in her home country.
And maybe one day you'll probably say is in English tourists who share those positive knowledge with us.
But there's a side of the back of that. She's actually known as being the slayer of learning styles in Norway.
Now, slaying Norwegians don't have a very good reputation on this island, so I'll just leave that alone for the time being.
But of particular relevance to today's talk is Raise finished in 2009 from the University of Oslo,
and in that was a core focus on self-regulating learning theory.
She's continued to develop these ideas and particularly their connexion to formative assessment and assessment for learning.
And so I turn it over to you, Teresa, today to give us the initial discussion and reflection on Nancy's talks.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Nancy.
And I think that one of the things I appreciate the coming talks for is the dialogue and walking into a room and being able to have all this fantastic
dialogues with people around you asking the tough questions like some of my colleagues and the brilliant team here in front of us to talk about,
thank you just for your kind words. And you asked me very often challenged me with challenging questions as well.
And since I first met you, Nancy, I've been thinking a lot about everything behind what you said and what is really a self-regulated learning.
Where does the theories come from? What does it mean if we know anything about learning strategies?
What is it? Is it something really called learning strategies?
And then I was really inspired coming to Oxford and discussing a lot with, amongst others, I'm sober.
What is the assessment for learning? And I thought it was fascinating to hear your speech on your talk.
Explain how you worked in classrooms for teachers as a researchers, and you use these words like, What am I learning?
How is it going to go next?
And I'm immediately thinking about the books I read about from one stalwart, and it brings it back to the assessment for learning.
One of the things which I find fascinating is that researchers like yourself and Pinterest
Zimmerman was in a research tradition with social cognitive theory in self-regulated learning.
And I studied and looked into theories, and I found this attrition.
The same time you had groups like Martin and Celia or you went to Australia and some other researchers.
They were all looking into self-regulation using the same language as researchers here in
the UK when they were talking about formative assessment and assessment for learning.
And sometimes, I wonder wondered where by then more dialogues between these research groups.
And I'm very pleased to say that the past five years, it has been increasing more dialogue between these fields,
and that is a little bit of what you have demonstrated for us now. And I would like to also say that the journal,
which is called Assessment in Education Principal Bullies Practise where I'm currently that leader, editorial leader.
Stobart, you were one before me, Josh.
You are on the editorial board here. We had a special issue on assessment for learning a few years ago,
and soon we will have a special issue with Jason Brown hair as one of the guest editors where we tried to link a system of learning and
self-regulated learning and why we mean one of the reasons why I wanted you to come here and talk to us is because after reading and this field,
I felt as a researcher, there's so much of this research field which we need to know more about,
but also linked to the research here and formative assessment. But we do have some really big questions.
And one of them are how do we assess anything with self-regulation?
How do we assess formative assessment properly? Because these days we are always asked to give evidence?
Have students really learn something? And how do we know whether to have learnt something?
And as you said,
also when they do self-report and a concern which happen in our field around assessment for learning and formative assessment was in 2011,
when Ben but I had this major critique of formative assessment coming out,
and this was also picked up in something which colleagues Baird and Stoddart and myself and used in our times summarised.
And one of the critiques we found was that a lot of the definitions used informative assessment are kind of blurring.
And if you are a researcher and you're trying to make a design research projects and you're supposed to figure out something,
but the constructs you're building this research on are not really helpful and good.
What is it that the critique he had has been discussed since 2011 in the research community, and a lot of us have been really shaken up?
It's a critique of lack of clear definition. It's a critique that there are some claims which are too strong about the effectiveness of something.
And it's also this critique that there's limited attention given to domain concerns in its conceptualisation.
And then also this thing about the measurement principles and the impact it possibly have on the larger society.
And this might be strange to flag this up now, but at the same time as I'm coming from a teacher background,
that's Josh carefully reminded me of and I really, really.
Think that we should be careful about not only working with research and theory,
I always struggle to think about what kind of advice to would give teachers and how can
we make sure that the advice we give are evidence based and that they're really solid?
And the reason why I'm saying it is also because there are so much lower quality around
what you have demonstrated for us is excellent ways of working with researchers.
How do we make sure that the research we are doing is based upon high quality so we can give really good advice when working with teachers?
And how can we support teachers also to understand the difference between high and low quality and could lower that advice?
I would say. And of course, the reason why I'm saying that is because in our field on self-regulation,
I would suggest now that the field is a bit confused as well.
People these days talking about learning styles as it most mentioned conflicting learning styles and strategies.
Still, after all these years where we have had demonstrated in several articles that it's flawed literature,
but there are still developing instruments using words themselves.
And then we have this debate about what do we call the different things we're measuring,
and we use different words depending on whether we are from Australia or Scandinavia or England or us.
But it makes people confused. And then sometimes, of course, it could be.
Potentially that rift is a new thing, but is it really a new thing?
If you looked at the items closely, I see that very many of the items in the great scale was actually developed by Pinterest.
If you look at it and and it's similar to the old classics.
So I'm wondering, is it possible for, you know, in this field,
so much to say something about how you're thinking we should work in this area for trying to work together from the field of assessment,
for learning formative assessment and the field of self-regulated learning?
Is it possible to discuss and have a dialogue? What can we actually do to make sure that we have clear definitions and do not and
make it even more blurry because it clearly would use a lot of the science and items,
but the language is sometimes not clear enough. The other thing is how do we develop now in the future?
Better measurements because there are clearly some things which are better than others.
But not all of us have the font now these days to go out and do some of the work, which has been suggested is better than other things.
Like, for instance, classroom observations are clearly more expensive than doing questionnaires and a final point.
I also would like to address since you have been our advisor in Africa,
one of the final big questions we are discussing is that almost all the research we're currently
doing also in self-regulation and assessment learning formative assessment tradition.
It's based upon the material from studies in English speaking countries based upon white pupils, isn't it?
And when we try to work the series from these studies in Tanzania, in South Africa,
we are now questioning three years after we have had this study whether we actually need to go back and discuss the theory behind what we're doing,
because sometimes the idea of what it means to be a self-regulated girl is not the same in a white,
English speaking country as it is to be an Darrisaw school, for instance.