Important ideas on pupil assessment and learning

Measuring progress in the classroom

Starting out as a teacher? One of the most powerful tools in your toolkit is assessment — and it’s not just about marking work. Good assessment helps you understand how your pupils are doing, and just as importantly, helps them understand it too.

Knowing where your pupils are at means you can support their progress, adapt your teaching, and help them grow. These resources are a great starting point for getting to grips with how assessment works in the classroom — and how it can make a real difference to learning.

What is progress in the context of primary education?

This chapter from Promoting Good Progress in Primary Schools introduces you to the concept of progress in primary education and how it relates to assessments.

READ: UNDERSTANDING PROGRESS IN PRIMARY EDUCATION

Formative and sumative assessment: what is the difference?

Effective formative assessment enables teachers to identify children’s current stages of development so that they can identify their next steps in learning. Formative assessment is usually informal, used during or between lessons and support teachers to:

identify what learners know and can do.
identify and address misconceptions or gaps in pupils’ understanding.
plan for/identify pupils’ next steps in learning.
adapt their teaching during lessons to support pupils’ understanding.
evaluate the effectiveness of their own teaching.
identify pupils who need specific interventions.

Formative assessment supports children to:

understand what they know and can do.
know what they need to do next.
know how to get there.

In contrast, a summative assessment is a summary of a child’s achievement over time. It is usually formal and takes the form of tests and examinations. However, judgements of pupils’ learning can be based on teacher assessments of pupils’ performance over time – for example, by considering their performance across a series of tasks. Unlike formative assessment, summative assessment is primarily used to help schools to evaluate their effectiveness.

*This is an edited extract from The ITT Core Content Framework: What trainee primary school teachers need to know by Glazzard & Stones.

To test or not to test?

While examinations and standardised tests are generally regarded as a fair and efficient way of assessing a student’s knowledge and understanding, a number of criticisms have been levelled against high-stakes assessments that are used for accountability purposes. These relate to both primary and post-primary levels and include the following:

An over-reliance on examination grades or test scores can limit what is on the curriculum and encourage teaching to the test (Jennings and Bearak, 2014), even if this consequence is not intended. Parents, and even students, may put pressure on the teacher to cover exam content.
Examinations (and tests) can be over-predictable, leading to rote learning, which may be quickly forgotten after the examination has been completed (Baird et al., 2015). Other approaches to learning, such as those based on constructivist and sociocultural theories, align better with more continuous and student-centred approaches to assessment.
Grade or score inflation, where examination grades and standardised test scores creep up over time, undermines confidence in the examination process (Coe, 2010).
Examinations and tests that are used to classify students (for example, those with learning difficulties) can lead to labelling and may influence teacher expectations in negative ways.
Many standardised tests do not provide information on what the student has learnt, only how he/she stands relative to other students.
Externally regulated examinations and tests take the responsibility for summative assessment away from teachers. · League tables of schools based on examination grades or standardised test scores often fail to take students’ initial levels of achievement or their socioeconomic status into account. The use of alternative approaches to assessments would strengthen processes such as school evaluation.
There is potential social and economic inequity associated with examinations and standardised achievement tests, with some social and ethnic groups consistently achieving higher average grades or scores than others.

In the literature on assessment, concerns about the negative effects of examinations and standardised tests abound. Literature supporting these assessments is available but can be harder to locate. Use the internet to access at least two articles, such as those in the additional resources section at the end of this chapter, to make a case for summative assessment. Document four or five points that support the use of summative assessment to improve students’ learning. The further reading section at the end of chapter 3 of Understanding and Applying Assessment in Education is a useful starting point.

*The above is an edited extract from Understanding and Applying Assessment in Education by Murchan & Shiel.