Differentiation: Is it all the teacher's responsibility?

Integrating Differentiation into Science Curricula via Categorised Assessment.

It really comes down to what we want from our assessment: to discover what students can and cannot do, or to rank them?

If there’s one topic that’s guaranteed to have science teachers gazing at their shoes even more than normal, it’s differentiation. Difficulties arise, often from ‘teaching to the middle’, when assessing performance criteria whose success definition is presented on a graduated scale but, in reality, is assessed in a binary fashion. So much of examinable science is asked in a manner where the question is either ‘right or wrong’, leading to the inevitable outcome of the double-peaked bimodal distribution curve of performance.

Teachers then evaluate this evidence and provide more scaffolding and support for those struggling students to the left of the curve, yet this support often arrives late to the party because, by then, those who “can’t do” know that they can’t do and don’t have the mental state or impetus to care about or know “what they can’t do”. Anyone who has taught a support class to a small group of struggling students, especially in sciences where the right answer seems so unattainable to some, will have picked up on the deflated body language, the despondent stares and general sense of defeatism in opposition to this unsurmountable barrier.

But what if their examination and assessment were designed in a different way? If each topic had outcomes that were presented across several categories, difficulties and challenging areas would be smaller and easily identifiable. These categories could be, for example:

· qualitative and conceptual understanding,

· technical and quantitative competence,

· situational application (conceptual and quantitative) and

· practical application (experimental manipulation).

Most examinable content in a subject like chemistry weighs heavily on the second and third of those aforementioned categories. As exams demand, teachers follow. Crafting better exams would go a long way to making teachers integrate these structural changes, promoting easier differentiation. Exams presenting one grade, derived from a reductive synthesis of all competences, perform an extremely crude ranking role when a student's knowledge and competences could be far more clearly expressed, independent of the attainment of other students.

Given that schools and, by extension, teachers are often measured by exam success of students, teachers who fail to coach students towards exams and tests are guilty of ethical negligence towards the future needs of the student and professional negligence towards their career and the attractiveness of the school. Even if I were to preach deep-rooted and multi-faceted pedagogy with an ethos of inspiring inquiring learning, those are not examinable metrics and so can be viewed as ideological as opposed to pragmatic. So, a way of making it easier for teachers to differentiate instruction and for teachers and students to better identify weaknesses must be found.

The answer is surely to be found in assessment that is representative of the student's capacities. If the student has excellent knowledge but poor problem solving and higher-order abilities, why not show that? If another student has poor knowledge but an excellent ability to answer higher-order questions, representing both with the same grade is like comparing a central defender and a winger in football: both have clear strengths and weaknesses and are not defined as the average of their qualities. Actually, representing the different abilities of a student in a subject in the same way as visualisations are created for football analytics makes a lot of sense.

Why couldn't we represent a child's progress in this way, learning lessons from a game like Football Manager, rather than one crude grade or number? This would allow for far more targeted and useful differentiation and individualisation of learning, with students feeling unique instead of categorised. It really comes down to what we want from our assessment: to discover what students can and cannot do, or to rank them?

A specific example of this could be the highly abstract notion of teaching redox chemistry to fifteen-year-olds. Students are typically asked to write half-equations for a reaction, identify oxidizing and reducing agents, find the anodes and cathodes, write net-ionic equations and apply these concepts to the cell. To the non-scientist, or even someone who finds sciences tricky, the vocabulary already seems impenetrable.

In order to perform any one of those tasks outlined above, the student really needs to be able to know, understand and apply several different skills and competences. Instead of these being implicit, how about making them explicit? For example, for a student to write the half-equations and net-ionic equation for the reaction of zinc metal in silver nitrate, they need to be able to:

· Describe the structure of atoms.

· Explain and understand the formation of ions in terms of electron transfer.

· Determine the formula of a compound using complex ions.

· Not be completely discouraged by the notion of complex ions, whose structure is hitherto tactically avoided.

· State that oxidation is loss of electrons, despite the fact the equation contains a plus sign in front of é, for electron.

· Determine the most stable ion of the oxidising zinc, either from prior learning or a reactivity series.

· Ascertain which reactants are present in the reaction mixture at the start.

· Determine which reactant is most likely to oxidise based on its position in a reactivity series.

· Solve simultaneous equations by elimination to determine the net-equation.

· Identify the spectator ion.

· Explain the notion of a spectator ion is being present in the reaction mixture but not changing (without really considering why).

For being able to do all of the above, the student may be awarded around three marks. If they cannot do any one of those interconnected things, they will most likely receive zero marks, thus giving rise to the previously described double-peaked attainment profile. Parsing and defragmentation of this information into coherent and assessable yet discrete categories would give teachers and students more targeted help on identifying strengths and weaknesses. However, if all that is ever asked is writing redox equations and finding oxidising agents and anodes, all of the contextual theoretical and practical knowledge that accompanies this is deemed redundant.

Teachers always work from the exam back. If you want to change the methodology of instruction, then the assessment needs to reflect these desired changes. Casting my mind back to my early days as a practitioner and the rolling out of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, I cannot remember one Head Teacher or Departmental Leader in Secondary Education greeting it with any enthusiasm as, for all its noble intentions, aspirational ideology and theory-based assumptions, it was full of foggy outcomes, vague assessment criteria and marketing-speak.

Numerous LTS secondees had clearly endeavored to produce what could only be described as the fruits of committee. It would be years before any changes in tangible outcomes would be formulated, leading to years of administrative box-ticking and weak buy-in and teacher confidence in the changes. Little of the much vaunted “four capacities” were evident in Higher Exams, the very metric by which secondary schools are ranked.

Morale was different, however, among Primary School teachers, who largely embraced the new development. They welcomed the fluidity, fogginess and vague descriptors as this gave them more freedom to implement assessment that suited them and their students. What teachers called “Level-E literacy” varied quite significantly from classroom to classroom, but as students’ literacy levels aged 11 do not act as a gateway to tertiary education, this banding is less problematic. Had students’ promotion to Secondary School been dependent on passing some kind of exam, you can be sure that Primary School teachers would have taught towards that too. Even SATS, for all their meaninglessness, have no bearing on a student’s future in the way that A-Level, Higher or Baccalaureate results do.

Until such time as differentiated and individualised practice and assessment is given due consideration at curriculum and examination planning level, it will remain an uncomfortable intangible add-on, especially in science education. A more differentiated and fragmented assessment regime, via a series of structured but different exams, would give students more power to identify their strengths and weaknesses and the agency to address them. When every outcome is a higher-order synthesis or application and curriculum volume determines pace, those who fall behind remain in danger of being left behind.