Ipsative Assessment

What it might look like in Key Stage 3 Drama

In this post I’ll be describing a potential model for tracking student progress over a year using an ipsative assessment model.

So far this year, I think I’ve spent more time listening to Dylan Wiliam than any single other person. I had the pleasure of participating in his Assessment Literacy course throughout January, and also attended the online Learning and the Brain conference in February for which he was one of the presenters.

Early in the Assessment Literacy course, Dylan outlined the major forms of assessment. The one that perhaps caught the attention most was “Ipsative Assessment”. It’s one of those phrases that trips off the tongue, is unfamiliar to most people you’re going to talk to in the immediate future, but is likely to impress them when you use it, and make them want to use it too – a strong contender to be an up-and-coming education buzzword.

You may not be familiar with the phrase, but you’re certainly familiar with the idea. Put simply, it’s about measuring progress by comparing the students’ attainment now to their own attainment at an earlier time (rather than against their peer group, a system of levels or ladder of attainment, or some standard set in stone at some time in the past).

At the same time that I was introduced to this, I was thinking about online teaching, and becoming increasingly aware that some students were producing a much higher quality of work when they were working alone at home than they ever did in the classroom. We were switching back and forth between individual tasks (easier to organise and assess), and group tasks (important for the social aspects of learning, drama, and general social development and staying connected during lockdown).

The individual tasks, where students filmed themselves performing, were producing some stunning work. And most surprising was that a lot of this was from students who had never stood out in class – the introverts, the empaths, the creatives, and generally those who give way to others in the decision making and negotiation process of creating group work, and get lost in the crowd. This really gave them a chance to shine and show what they are really capable of when they are given the freedom to work THEIR way (even though within the bounds of the assigned task).

It seemed to me that in Drama, and probably other subjects, we are so focused on the idea that learning is, and should be, a social activity, that we forget that performance (and here I mean academic performance, rather than dramatic performance) is an individual one. And of course, in the confines of the Drama studio, once a week in an 80 minute lesson, it is hard to make it anything else.

One of the Assessment Literacy sessions focused in large part on the idea of “error” and its impact on the reliability of assessment. Here, by “error” we don’t mean “getting things wrong”, but the statistical concept of error, meaning “all the things that affect the results of assessment that are not the things we want to be assessing”.

In Drama, particularly in an International School, much of that error, I increasingly feel, comes out of assessment based almost entirely on group work done in class. Some of the things that might affect a student’s grade that are out of their control include:

• The language ability of others in their group.
• Students missing a lesson for assessed tasks that are developed over more than one week.
• Lessons being cancelled (public holidays, off-curriculum days, etc) for assessed tasks that are developed over more than one week.
• The amount of drama that other students in their group have experienced.
• The level of confidence in dramatic performance of the others in their group.
• The level of confidence, and forcefulness, in putting forward their ideas, of others in the group.
• The level of creativity of others in the group.
• The role they are given within the performance.
• How well they know others in their group.
• The level of maturity in relation to working with members of the opposite sex of members of the group.

Many of these mean that the concept of “standardised assessment” and particularly “standardised tasks” simply does not exist in our subject. The result of this is that we have to assess over multiple tasks, and make educated “averaged-out” guesses as to their abilities – if every group they work with produces outstanding work, we can assume (but not be certain) that they probably have outstanding drama skills, and positively influence the work of others. Conversely, if every group they work with produces low quality work, we can assume (but not be certain) that they probably have limited drama skills, and generally have a negative impact on others. If they produce excellent performances in some groups and poor ones in others, we can assume (but not be certain) that they have good drama skills, but need the support of others in shaping and developing their work. Or we might be completely wrong – they may give a weak performance because they have excellent drama skills but have been using them to support a student with less drama experience, or emerging English, or performance anxiety, rather than developing their own performance.

In his Learning and the Brain presentation, Dylan gave an example of a kindergarten teacher, who every few weeks asked her students to draw a self portrait, and then to talk to her about the improvements they had made since the last time they did the task (“My arms don’t come out of my head any more”). At any other time, I might have skipped over this as “a cute story, but nothing to do with me”. Coming as it did in tandem with my growing awareness of the strength of the online performances, and the nature of some of those performance tasks, it got me wondering whether we could do this in Drama.

What if we have a single performance task that the students return to, unrelated to the topics that we work on in class, every four or five weeks? What might that look like, and what data might it give us about the students? Or to look at it more effectively, in terms of designing learning activities, what do we want to learn about our students from our assessment tasks.

I have five basic “general” performance targets permanently on the studio wall:

• Clarity of speech
• Clarity of movement
• Awareness of the audience (blocking)
• Focus on your own performance (not disrupting the flow of the performance)
• Focus on your own performance (staying in role, especially not laughing at yourself)

Different targets have been on and off this list, but over time it’s settled down to these five, which must be present in any piece of work, no matter how simple or complex it is, for it to be effective. We don’t bother with levels for any of these – they’re either there, or they’re not.

The ipsative assessment task, then, must allow students to demonstrate all of these. Students must be able to perform it on their own at home, or in their boarding house at school. It must be simple enough that students of any level of drama experience can carry it out, but with room to become as complex as the students want to make it. It must be accessible to students with emerging English, as well as those with fluent English. It must provide a structure for those that need it, but allow freedom, for those that can, to develop it beyond what it seems to be. It must be an individual task, but imitate the demands of a group task.

I feel that this last one is really important – I don’t want to give the students a traditional monologue, which can lead to a static performance, with a perceived goal of fluency in a talking-head style, and a simple actor-audience relationship (or student-camera relationship).

A further requirement is that it should be open enough to allow them to apply skills and techniques that they have worked on in class to it each time they rework it, either by developing and improving on their previous interpretation (if we’ve been focusing on acting techniques, for example), or by completely reinterpreting it (if we’ve been focusing on a new performance genre or style, maybe).

One of the earliest tasks that we developed when lockdown first began, feels like it might have promise in all these respects.

We gave students a simple ten-line script, and asked them to rehearse and film it, with the goal of convincing their audience that they were speaking to someone else, either on their device, or in their house, or both. They were also asked to make the performance last about a minute (a little shorter or longer depending on the year group), so that they had to include pauses and build up the story through action. They were not allowed to add any other dialogue, but could include non-verbal vocalisations.

This is the script we gave them:

Hi!

Hello?

No, I’m not.

Hello?

I said, I’m not.

Hello?

Hello?

Are you still there?

Can you hear me?

Who’s there?

I modelled this for them, to give them an idea of how it might work. Some of them simply copied what I’d done, perhaps with minor adaptions. But a lot of them took it in very different directions.

I think that something like this could fulfil all the criteria I set out above. Those who are just starting out in Drama can turn it into a very simple scene, while those with more experience can develop and extend it, both through their acting, but also through technology (adding sound effects – live or recorded, or experimenting with lighting, for example. Maybe even using green-screen?). They can work on it alone, but it requires them to use focus, voice and movement in the same way they would if they were performing with others.

I imagine that, as in Dylan Wiliam’s kindergarten example, this will be used in conjunction with self-assessment to encourage them to a) take charge of monitoring their own learning journey, and b) transfer the skills they have developed in class into a new context. Recording their performance will be homework one week, and the self-assessment will be the following week’s.

By focusing on just one repeated task, progress should be much more apparent, and reportable, than in the way we currently try to monitor it across continually changing tasks and contexts.

Of course, we won’t be using this as our sole means of assessment. We will continue to monitor and assess group work done in class (but with greater awareness of their limitations), and written tasks, but this solo performance will carry a good deal of the assessment weighting, and I think it will enable us to give a much more accurate, well-rounded assessment of students’ ability, attainment and progress in Drama, and reduce the “error effect” considerably.

I plan to start trialing this in September 2021, and would love to receive feedback or ideas from others.