Copenhagen III: Repertory Grid
I have been investigating the use of Repertory Grid Technique (RGT) for formative assessment. The technique is based on Kelly’s (1955) Personal Construct Psychology. The general idea is to interview someone to elicit elements (things) and then pull out the relationships between elements by eliciting constructs. There are many ways to do this, and we’ve been experimenting with some of the better established means that are part of WebGrid. Once you have a bunch of elements, you present triads of those elements (randomly chosen – or not) and ask the participant to choose one element from the triad that’s different from the other two. You use that grouping (two similar elements plus one different element) to create the poles of an axis, which you then ask the participant to label.
I’m new to this technique and so I’m just ramping up on it. I got the chance to work with a group of teachers to create a Repertory Grid of their understanding of formative assessment. (Note that this is not what I meant by using it for formative assessment in the previous paragraph. It’s just that the technique is very flexible and it was illustrative to use the topic of “formative assessment” to elicit elements and constructs from the teachers.)
We used the WebGrid software developed by Brian Gaines and Mildred Shaw, professors emeriti of the University of Calgary.
We asked them for examples of formative assessment that they currently used. They enumerated nine: questioning, classroom monitoring, observations, in-class assignments, games, little tests, homework, workbooks, and reviewing written work. We then used triad to elicit constructs and we got four of them: “involves students - teacher’s job”, “closed questions - open questions”,”skills - competencies”, “outside learning situation - takes place in learning situation”. We were pressed for time and part of the exercise was to expose them to WebGrid so we stopped eliciting constructs at that point.
Here’s what we learned: (1) RGT is a promising approach, (2) the existing WebGrid software needs to be customized and localized to make it usable, (3) the representations of the output needs to be improved. That’s good news. We can customize the WebGrid software quite easily (or so the manual tells us). That means we can focus our attention on the representation layer.
We need to figure out the best way to use RGT as a formative assessment tool with students. THe gist of what we’re going to try is an elicitation of the key concepts for a particular curricular unit (for example, rocks and minerals) from each student in a class. Each student will then go through a construct elicitation step, and we’ll present the results. Perhaps the students will share their RepGrids with the teacher and perhaps with each other. The students will then work their way through the unit and repeat the RGT exercise after the unit. Again, sharing would be great. We can then compare the before and after RepGrids.
Kelly, G. (1955). Principles of Personal Construct Psychology. New York: Norton.