Assessment Reform in Science: Fairness and Fear (Science & by Benny H.W Yung

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S: 15 minutes. T: How about in the other setup? 2 cm. In this situation, it was most likely that the teacher was just ‘doing something’, with no specific purpose in mind, or was engaged in general monitoring, with no assessment-oriented motive. 7 A summary on the foci of T-S interaction related to teaching of practical work Figure 3-4 shows the different foci that each teacher emphasized [in terms of % DTUs (PW)] in their teaching of practical work per se. Four general trends were observed. First, teachers who saw the TAS as both an assessment reform and a pedagogical reform tended to emphasize discussion of concepts underlying scientific research during the TAS practicals more than those teachers who saw the TAS primarily as an assessment reform.

S: What should I do then? T: I have told you already that a needle cannot be sharp at both ends. You just comment on your method. There is no perfect method. This is just a mind-training exercise to find out what minute details you would consider in solving a problem. Right? 2 Developing scientific attitudes Alan also emphasized the developing of appropriate scientific attitudes in students, in particular, an objective attitude in assessing experimental results. In order to ease students’ worries if marks would be deducted from them for not getting the “expected results”, Alan took the trouble to refer students to the relevant part of the TAS annual report.

Thus, the low percentage of Hugo’s T-S interaction in this area, relative to that of other assessment-oriented teachers, might just be an indication of the low frequency of occurrence of student discussion generally in his class (which was in fact true). Nevertheless, this episode does illustrate how quantitative figures may sometimes fail to reveal important information. More detailed and qualitative descriptions of the teachers’ classroom actions can be found in their individual case stories in Chapters 4 to 11.