If you have looked into assessment for learning then you will almost inevitably know about the seminal work, “Inside the Black Box”, by Black and Wiliam back in 1998.
This book, ICT: Inside the Black Box, takes the techniques discussed in that book, and apply them to ICT.Now before getting down to the review proper, I must declare an interest. Actually, two interests. But because they may prejudice me in opposite directions, hopefully they will cancel each other out!
Firstly, I have been planning a book along the same lines for quite a while, so was obviously somewhat put out to find myself pipped to the post when Margaret Cox, one of the authors, informed me that the book was soon coming out.
Secondly, as already implied, I have known Margaret, and to a lesser extent her co-writer Mary Web, for a long time. More to the point, I know the quality of her work and attention to detail – she is, after all, an academic – so I knew the book would be carefully written.
The book is, at 24 pages long, deceptively thin. What the authors have done is to take AfL techniques and say how they might be applied in the ICT lesson, thereby saving the poor teacher a great deal of work.
I also think that having an academic viewpoint can often help to put things into perspective. Let’s take comments, for example. How many times have you heard a speaker say how wonderful it is that her students received 8 million comments about their video? I read things like that all the time in blogs, and my two word answer is, “So what?”.
I wrote about that here, and in the October 2007 issue of Computers in Classrooms, in which I said:
“Does having 5,000 comments on a piece of work have an impact on learning? Well, only if (a) the student reads them and (b) if they are useful in themselves. Comments like “Mega” are not known for their capacity to help students improve on their work.
… Let’s suppose all the comments are useful. Is reading 5,000 comments likely to have a greater impact on learning than reading 4,000? Or 1,000? Or 10? Put another way, how many variations of a particular comment can there be?”
At that Becta seminar I mentioned earlier, Angela McFarlane said that comments on work are only useful if they are critical, and that 3 million comments of “cool” do not help anyone to improve.
In this book, the authors have arrived at a similar conclusion, albeit expressed differently. They say:
“Writing effective comments takes practice…. Enabling students to assess their own and others’ work… requires much work by the teacher in consistently modelling good written and oral feedback….”
The book discusses the well-known traffic light system of self-assessment, but goes further in describing how one teacher used it in the context of employing summative tests for formative assessment. As you may know, that is a topic of particular relevance to teachers of ICT at Key Stage 3 in England and Wales now that the on-screen test is being promoted as a formative, rather than a summative, assessment tool.
So, should you buy it? The answer is “yes”, but I’d go further. At a cost of £5 each, if I were still a Head of ICT in a school I’d buy a copy for each of my staff, and a few spare copies to give to newcomers to my team. Then I would ask each of them to take a section of the book and running an in-service training session on it for the rest of us.
If you have a huge team you will benefit from bulk purchasing discounts of 25% off orders of 50 or more copies, and 40% off orders of 100 or more. Local Authorities and school federations should think seriously about pooling resources and buying a crateful of this book through central purchasing.
You will find ordering details here. It does not appear to be available through Amazon.
This review first appeared in the April 2008 issue of Computers in Classrooms. Please see here for details.
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