During Your PGCE Year, You Are Going To Become Experts In Assessment, Both As Assessors And As Trainees Being Assessed Yoursel

Assessment, by Harry Dodds and Lorna Smith

During your PGCE year, you are going to become experts in assessment, both as assessors and as trainees being assessed yourself. You will consolidate that understanding during your Induction Year. This article deals with the basic principles and with the important terminology, and will help you with your progress towards achieving Standards Q26a, Q26b, Q27, Q28 and Q29, and (for Induction) C31, C32, C33, C34, C35 and C36.

(‘Assessment for Learning’ (‘AfL’) is discussed in another article.).

Broad definition:

‘Assessment in education is the process of gathering, interpreting, recording and using information about pupils' responses to an educational task. At one end of the dimension of formality, the teacher reading a pupil's work or listening to what he or she has to say. At the other end of the dimension, the task may be a written, timed examination which is read and marked according to certain rules and regulations. Thus assessment encompasses responses to regular work as well as to specifically devised tasks.’

(BERA, 1992)

The importance of assessment

All teachers have a statutory duty to assess their pupils’ performance and must, amongst other things:

l keep up-to-date records of the learning and progress of individual pupils

l offer written reports to parents about their children's progress at least once a year

l be involved in the setting of targets for KS4 examinations.

That’s as may be, but assessment is much more important to the processes of learning than the above might suggest.

Assessment is a vital component of the learning environment. The information it gives should feed back into planning and into the way you teach. If assessment results tell you that learning is not being effective, then you need both to ask why, and to modify your approaches accordingly.

Careful management of the way you feed back the results of your assessments, whether they are formally or informally derived, can have a big impact on your pupils’ motivation, sense of achievement, and self esteem. Furthermore, the way in which you present and discuss the results of assessments with pupils can help them identify for themselves ways to improve their learning, and help them assume more responsibility as active and involved learners.

There’s no point in assessing anything unless you know that the results are going to be useful and accurate. That means that you have to have some insight into the ways in which pupils learn, and of the ways in which assessment is best tailored to the quirks of your own subject.

Useful assessments need to be:

l fit for purpose. You need to be clear about why you are assessing; what the results are for; who will use the results; and whether you have chosen the most appropriate style, technique or level of formality for your needs. For example, it is emphatically not helpful for you, at this stage of your training, to be assessed by OfSTED criteria for practising teachers, and to be told that you are ‘satisfactory’. You need to know how you are progressing towards specific Standards, and what you need to do and learn to help you achieve them.

l valid. Are you asking the right questions? Are you using language that is accessible to the pupils you are testing? (If you’re not, then you’re testing a specific linguistic ability, rather than understanding of the assessed task itself.) Have you made the assessed task completely clear? Have you made the criteria clear, and ensured that pupils understand them? Are you assessing in the most suitable context – is the assessment coming at the right place in the learning cycle, or even at the best time of day? All these variables have to be right or your assessment results won’t mean much.

l reliable. There is no such thing as completely objective assessment as there’s a human being at each end of the process. The reliability of an assessment can be completely skewed by any one of these variables:

a) The way you and, possibly, your pupils, interpret the success criteria, the way you actually conduct the test – are you serious about it, is it a big and important event, or is it a natural part of the learning process?

b) Is it held in your classroom or in a big hall with the whole year group?

c) Is it a surprise, or you have you given pupils time to prepare – or to become anxious?

l manageability. Do you have time to mark it properly? Do you have time to make sensible use of the information it provides?

Terminology

You will hear all these terms used in connection with assessment practice – better that you know what they mean.

Formative Assessment

This is a broad term, and is one of the starting points on which the larger structures of Assessment for Learning are built. Essentially it involves focusing on the feedback you give to pupils, as a result of their performance in the assessment, in such a way as to help them take their own learning forward. Naturally, your comments will define and celebrate their achievement, but the real point is to help them identify how they can move forward to the next stage in their learning

Summative Assessment

It sums things up. It’s typically an end of course or end of stage assessment, designed to see both what the pupils has retained and understood, and to assess what use she or he can make of the skills and content they have gathered. Typical examples – Finals for a degree; GCSE and A Level exams. Summative assessments may equally well be set and marked internally.

Ipsative Assessment

‘ipse’ – Latin for ‘self’. Ipsative assessments seek to measure the progress the individual has made relative to their own previous performance. They do not necessarily relate to any external criteria, neither do they make comparisons to the performance of other pupils.

Diagnostic Assessment

Typically used to assess reading ages and to identify specific learning difficulties. APP (Assessing Pupils’ Progress) materials may be used in the same way. Talk to your SENCO to find out what is used in your school, and why, and what happens to the results.

Finally, the two big distinctions between formal assessment systems. They may be either Criterion-referenced or Norm-referenced.

Normative Referencing (sometimes ‘Norm Referencing’)

This approach plots individual results on the familiar ‘bell curve’ graph (Standard Distribution; Normal Distribution; Gaussian Curve) and allows the individual pupil to see where his or her performance in a specific assessment lies in relation to all the others who have taken the same assessment. Exam results used to be graded with reference to this curve, so the top-scoring 10% (for example) might be awarded an ‘A’, the next 10% a ‘B’ and so on. This doesn’t happen any more, as most external examinations are now ‘Criterion Referenced. This is one of the root causes of the annual ‘A Levels are easier nowadays’ debate. Discuss.

Criterion Referencing

‘Can you do it, or not?’ is what this is all about. If, in the specification of an assessment exercise, you write a list of criteria to be satisfied, then the final grade will depend upon how many and how conclusively those criteria are met. National Curriculum Levels, and GCSE and A Level exams are now criterion referenced. Your own assessment against the Standards is criterion referenced – can you do what the Standard requires, or not? The most obvious example of criterion referencing is probably the driving test. If you can’t overtake safely, or reverse into a junction, you fail. If you can do it, you pass.

This resource was downloaded from www.teachit.co.uk – The Training Ground Page 3 of 3