Article Review

For my article review I chose Holistic assessment through speaking and listening: an experiment
with causal reasoning and evidential thinking in Year 8 by Giles Fullard and Kate Dacey.(1) The article looks at current assessment methods in the social studies/history courses for children in Year 8 in Great Britain. It is current practice both in Great Britain and North America to use the essay as the primary form of assessment in the social studies/history idiom. Fullard and Dacey believe that this is a very inadequate form of assessment and set out with the help of other secondary school educators to develop a model of assessment based on other means. It would be a holistic approach including both speaking and listening along with the already functional essay. “We... tried to think of ways to access students’ extended thinking on a different basis but with the same academic rigour... Speaking and Listening... provide part of the answer.”(2) The thought behind including all of these factor is that by speaking and listening students will develop the skills necessary to organize and write a academic paper.(3) The debate became the necessary model for Fullard and Decey to help implement their plan of holistic assessment. The process of the debate from the preliminary research to the development of the main arguments to the organization of questions and other factual evidence for rebuttal is meant to help encourage students to do the same process for paper writing.(4)

For the purposes of assessment this was a three fold idea: to encourage verbal skills necessary
for social interaction, to encourage critical thinking skill through listening and reasoning, and to
encourage better writing and research habits in student essay writing.(5) Fullard and Dacey were at first overwhelmed with the new scheme for assessment. There became too much for one teacher to try and assess about every student in too short of a period of time. They came to the
conclusion that these debates must be filmed in their entirety to help teachers have more time to
gauge and assess student learning and comprehension.(6 )Through trials in different Year 8 classes in Great Britain, Fullard and Dacey came to two major conclusions about their new model of assessment: the first being that where students who previously struggled in the written essay
continued to show the same struggles in the speaking and listening portions of the debates, and the second being that although speaking and listening are important they are not the answer; speaking and listening must be a part of the overall assessment method in order to be effective.(7)

For my purposes I agree with the findings of Fullard and Dacey. I would find it hard to believe
that speaking and listening provide the sole answer to problems with assessment. I also find it
irresponsible to believe that the struggling student would excel at something that is essentially the same thing done a different way. I do believe that the debate is an important part of learning and can also play an important role in assessment. I must remind myself however that because of the large class sizes that I will surely encounter, not every student will have a fair chance to participate. Agreeably, it is part of the answer but certainly doesn’t constitute the whole answer.

(1) K. Dacey & G. Fullard, Holistic assessment through speaking and listening: an experiment with causal reasoning and evident thinking in year 8, in “Teaching History,” The Historical Association, June, 2008, 25 - 29.
(2) Ibid., 25.
(3) Ibid., 25.
(4) Ibid., 28.
(5) Ibid., 29.
(6) Ibid., 28.
(7) Ibid., 29