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Session 1 – What makes assessment effective?

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Session overview

Effective assessment is critical to teaching because it provides teachers with information about pupils’ understanding and needs.

This session will focus on:

Understanding what makes effective assessment
Deciding on the purpose of your assessments
Ensuring that your assessment tasks are linked to the lesson objective

Approximate session length: 50 minutes

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Why is good assessment critical and what makes it effective?

Watch Professor Rob Coe as he explains why assessment is such a powerful teaching and learning tool, and what information it can give you about your pupils. You can make notes in your notebook if you wish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU9KawFgRNI&feature=emb_title

In some form or another, assessment is being carried out by the teacher almost every minute of the lesson. Assessment is an integral part of the teaching and learning process. Effective assessment is critical to teaching because it provides teachers with information about pupils’ understanding and learning needs.

The function of assessment sounds relatively simple: find out what the pupil knows, and doesn’t know, and plan subsequent opportunities to impart the relevant knowledge or skills based on the identified need. And yet, it can be a challenge to reliably assess a pupil’s level of understanding. For example, an ‘on-task’ child may appear to understand their learning, yet the work they are so busily producing may be full of errors based on an unidentified misconception. In the same way, only by removing the learning scaffold from a seemingly confident pupil might you discover that they cannot replicate the learning in a standardised test – implying that the knowledge was not firmly encoded into the long-term memory in the first place. It is therefore critical that you have a clear understanding of what makes assessment effective in order to best support impactful teaching and learning decisions.

Good assessment provides teachers with reliable information about pupils’ understanding. However, for this information to be of real value, the teacher must use it effectively to inform feedback and support pupils to move forward.

Watch the clip

As highlighted by Rob Coe, good assessment gives teachers a window into their pupils’ minds. The questions that are asked and the tasks that are set provide insight into the information that has been processed and subsequently stored in the long-term memory. Throughout the video he also emphasises the importance of the two-way nature of feedback. For the teacher, good assessment makes clear the knowledge that has been understood. It also gives the teacher information as to whether they need to reteach concepts or work further with a small group. For the pupil, feedback provides a way to move forward with their learning and helps them to develop secure mental models around a concept.

In order to ensure that the information you gather is accurate, Rob stresses that it is crucial to know the purpose of the assessment. The next section will explore how you might decide on the purpose of your assessments.

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�What makes assessment effective?�

Formative assessment

When teachers ‘use evidence of student learning to adapt teaching and learning, and instruction, to meet a student’s needs’ (Inside the Black Box, 1998).

Summative assessment

Is a term usually used to describe assessment carried out at the end of a period of learning, as a way of ‘summing-up’ what a pupil knows.

You will most likely have come across the terms ‘formative’ and ‘summative’ assessment during your initial teacher training.

The concept of formative assessment was made popular by Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black, who defined formative assessment as when teachers ‘use evidence of student learning to adapt teaching and learning, and instruction, to meet a student’s needs’ (Inside the Black Box, 1998). As such, it is generally used to inform future learning or teaching. In some instances, formative feedback can be immediate, and pupils are able to act on it instantly.

‘Summative’ assessment is a term usually used to describe assessment carried out at the end of a period of learning, as a way of ‘summing-up’ what a pupil knows. Results of a summative assessment may often be shared as a grade or level description (e.g. Emerging), and generally offer a shared meaning on pupil performance.

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Deciding on the purpose of the assessment

Watch the video of Mick Walker discussing the purpose of assessment and the shortcomings of trying to categorise them as formative or summative.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuaAD-QTt-0&feature=emb_title

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Deciding on the purpose of the assessment

When deciding on which assessment to use, consider the following questions to help you select which method is going to be most effective:

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Activity

A teacher has reflected on the purpose of an assessment opportunity they have planned for their next lesson.

They answered the four questions in the following way:

What are you trying to assess?

I want to assess whether my pupils have grasped the concept of a coordinating conjunction.

Why are you trying to assess this?

I am assessing their knowledge of this for two reasons:
To determine which, if any, of my pupils are ready for independent practice.
To help me decide where to direct my attention in the next part of the lesson.

What are you going to do with the information?

The assessment information will tell me whether I can move onto the next part of the lesson, which will focus on pupils’ independent practice of the knowledge.

How are you going to feed back the information to pupils?

The feedback to pupils is going to be almost immediate, as I will give them the answers to the multiple-choice questions. Based on their score, I will direct them towards the next task in the lesson. This may be independent practice, or a reteach by me.

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Activity

Select an upcoming assessment opportunity you have planned. This could be from a lesson or the assessment of a unit of work. Consider the purpose of the assessment and answer the questions below.

What are you trying to assess?
Why are you trying to assess this?
What are you going to do with the information?
How are you going to feedback the information to pupils?

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Assessment tasks linked to the lesson objective

Let’s return to the questions posed by Mike Walker when deciding on the purpose of assessment:

What are you trying to assess?
Why are you trying to assess this?
What are you going to do with the information?
How are you going to feed back the information to pupils?

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Assessment tasks linked to the lesson objective

The ‘how’ might take the form of;

Questioning
A matching activity
A low-stakes quiz
A performance
Through interacting with play

or various other methods that might lead to an indication of pupil understanding and highlight gaps in knowledge.