Assessment to raise standards
The preceding activity ended with some discussion questions. These help us to think about fitness for purpose in terms of assessment strategies. Now consider the different purposes of assessment.
- Formative: recognising the positive achievement of the pupil, feeding back in terms that the pupil can understand and feeding forward in terms of next steps or targets.
- Summative: recording the overall achievement of the pupil, usually in the form of a useful summary that can be compared (i.e., ranked) with others, such as a grade.
- Diagnostic: designed to identify and measure particular learning difficulties which may be classified and scrutinised so that remedial action can be planned and implemented effectively.
- Evaluative: fulfilling the needs of the State or administration which legitimately needs some way of assessing the effectiveness (value for money) of the education service at various levels - individual teacher, school, LEA, sector, etc.
(Lambert and Balderstone, 2000, p. 336)
If the main purpose of assessment is evaluative, the occasional testing of pupils would be sufficient. If the purpose of assessment is formative, then assessments may take place that are diagnostic. These need to be planned for and research suggests that this can have a positive effect on learning:
... innovations which include strengthening the practice of formative assessment produce significant, and often substantial, learning gains.
(Lambert and Balderstone, 2000, p. 336)
Activity Resources:
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Activity
- Read the quotation below:
Individual teacher assessment can be notoriously unreliable. We are all easily mislead by the 'halo effect' of neatly presented written work or socially skilled children's conversation into thinking that a particular pupil's understanding is greater than it in fact is. Perhaps we also tend to focus too readily on what children cannot do rather than on what they can. Pupil performance needs to be gathered from as wide a range of sources as possible.
(Wiegand, 1997, p. 267) - Answer the critical comment above by considering how you would construct a departmental portfolio of evidence for the global dimension to illustrate the range of assessments that pupils could undertake over a key stage or an examination course.
- To help you do this, click on the Text icon and look at the 'Learning activities table' from Learning to Teach in the Secondary School: a companion to school experience (Capel et al., 1995, p. 275) and the 'Key concepts' from Developing the Global Dimension in the School Curriculum (DfES 2005, pp. 12-13).
