Inside the Black Box

Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, King’s College London School of Education, about Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment:

In terms of systems engineering, present policy seems to treat the classroom as a black box. Certain inputs from the outside are fed in or make demands—pupils, teachers, other resources, management rules and requirements, parental anxieties, tests with pressures to score highly, and so on. Some outputs follow, hopefully pupils who are more knowledgeable and competent, better test results, teachers who are more or less satisfied, and more or less exhausted. But what is happening inside? How can anyone be sure that a particular set of new inputs will produce better outputs if we don’t at least study what happens inside?

This paper is about the inside of the black box. It is focused on one aspect of teaching—formative assessment, but the argument that we develop is that this feature is at the heart of
effective teaching.