Setting specific and challenging goals: begin at the beginning

There is consistent evidence to show strong connections between clear goals, motivation, and improvement. Clear expectations focused on educationally significant learning and high but attainable goals raise achievement. The commitment generated through setting goals is the glue that holds teaching and learning teams together. Goals promote conversations focused on learning, they provide the basis for decision making, and they enable students and teachers to gauge their own success.

Before thinking about assessment, it is important to ask:

• What matters most?
  
• What do we want our students to achieve?
  
• What environment will we provide for learning?

Without clear common goals, teachers are not able to communicate meaningfully and precisely about how to improve – and about how to determine if [students] are improving. (Rosenholtz, 1991)

Teachers and students need to develop shared understandings about what is meant by achievement, what progress means, and what constitutes quality work.

Sharing goals with students is critical. Students need to understand what they are supposed to be doing and why. However, the teacher needs to do more than simply share their objectives or criteria. Often, students don't understand what the words mean in action or what work that demonstrates the criteria looks like.

Building students' understanding

Two approaches that may help students understand what goals or criteria mean are:

• encouraging students to evaluate one another's work so that they get a "nose for quality"
  
• providing opportunities for one-on-one conversations with the teacher where students talk about their own best pieces of work.

These approaches allow students to see and discuss desirable qualities in real examples of work and enable them to realise that there are many ways to achieve their goals.

Teacher, Ceridwen Goodwin developed a peer-assessment form to help her students evaluate each other's listening skills.

Achievement objective link :

• Converse and talk about personal experiences.
  
• Listen and respond to others.

It was exciting to see how the children improved. [They] learned that they had to look at the person listening when they were speaking, and they learned how to make their comments specific or related to what the speaker was saying. They also learned that facial expression has a role to play when you respond to others. Ceridwen Goodwin, Sacred Heart School, Christchurch

Student's comment : "It lets me see other people's work."

Science class peer assessment, Oxford Area School

The students and their teacher have previously identified the features that should be present in their science notes. They are using these features to discuss each other's work and to identify a particular feature to improve on for next time.

Students learn to make increasingly accurate assessments by judging their own work and that of others in relation to particular criteria, and also by discussing their judgments with their peers and their teacher. The ability to appraise one's own learning and achievement is a skill that needs to be taught. We need to give students opportunities to assess their own and others' work in a supportive environment.

Student's comment: I find peer assessment useful because it lets me see what parts of my work need improvement.

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