SMEC 2014 | Wynne Harlen

Assessment in support of inquiry-based education

The intention in this presentation is to consider how assessment, whether its overt purpose is formative or summative, should ultimately improve students’ learning. The starting point is the meaning of assessment and how it can have a direct or indirect impact on learning and the circumstances that are associated with a positive or negative impact. An outline of the nature of inquiry-based education draws attention to the challenge of establishing valid and reliable summative assessment of the intended learning outcomes. It requires situations to be chosen or set up such that students are using the understanding, skills and other competences that inquiry-based learning and teaching aim to develop. Discussion of different ways of doing this suggests the need for more openness and involvement of students, enabling the process to have a formative role as well as reporting reliably on achievement.  slides

Biography

Wynne Harlen, OBE, PhD, has been involved in teaching and research in science education, evaluation and student assessment throughout her long career, during which she has been Sidney Jones Professor of Scientific education at the University of Liverpool and Director of the Scottish Council for Research in Education. Among other roles, she was the first Chair of the OECD/PISA expert group for science (1998–2003) and led a Working Group of the Royal Society which produced the State of the Nation Report on Science and Mathematics Education 5-14 (2010). She was President of the UK Association for Science Education in 2009 and was editor of its Primary Science journal from 1999 to 2004.

She now acts as a consultant to various UK and overseas school science and assessment projects. Her publications on science education and on assessment include 25 research reports, over 150 journal articles, contributions to 37 books and 28 books of which she is author or co-author.