good-practice-in-science-teaching-what-research-has-to-say

184 PAUL BLACK AND CHRISTINE HARRISON
Teacher
Controller
Or
Conductor
Learners
Passive
Or
Involved
Figure 9.1 A model of formative interaction
The key point here is that the information is used to modify the activities.
Thus, where a test is used only to record a mark or grade, and so to serve as a
summary of a learner’s achievement, it is summative, not formative: the test
as such might be either formative or summative, it is the purpose for which
the evidence is used, however, that matters.
A basic model is represented in Figure 9.1 (from Black and Wiliam, 2009).
This is a model of a typical classroom episode, which starts when the teacher
begins by presenting a task or question to the class (the arrows from left to
right): pupils may then respond (the arrows from right to left), and in the light
of that response the teacher has to decide what to do next. The responses of
learners are frequently unpredictable, so it follows that genuinely formative
interaction is contingent, that is, what happens will depend on how learners
respond. The teacher’s response may be to judge the response as a right or
wrong answer, or the teacher may avoid this and try instead to draw other
pupils into the discussion. If others join in, then there will be many such
interactions in which the classroom (the shaded area) becomes a forum for
general discussion. The process represented might either be an oral one, in
which a two-way step might only last a few seconds, or a written interaction
for which the time-scale might be much longer.
In terms of Figure 9.1, the teacher’s task can be seen as involving:
1. deciding about the selection and presentation of the task, then,
2. interpreting the learner response, and then,
3. deciding what best to do next.
These three stages will be discussed in detail in the next section. However,
there are some general principles about learning which should guide all of this
activity. The first of these is that new ideas cannot simply be taken on board by
a learner exactly as they are presented. Learners will always try to relate new
ideas to those with which they are already familiar: hence the break between
the arrows from left to right in Figure 9.1, which represents the fact that what
is received will be an interpretation of what was intended, not a literal copy.
For example, a teacher says to a 6-year-old drawing a picture of a daffodil:
‘What is this flower called’ The child answers: ‘I think it’s called Betty’ (Fisher,