Summary of research by Shirley Clarke

Additional information about Learning objectives and success criteria

· Formative assessment (AfL) consists of 4 basic elements, underpinned by confidence that every child can improve and an awareness of the importance of children’s high self-esteem:

- Sharing learning goals

- Effective questioning

- Self and peer evaluation

- Effective feedback

· The aim is for children to ask “What are we going to learn?” rather than “What are we going to do?”.

· The impact of sharing learning objectives:

o Children are more focused on the task

o Children will persevere for longer

o The quality of children’s work improves

o Behaviour, especially time-wasting tactics at the beginning of lessons, improves

o The dialogue between children while they are working is more likely to focus on the learning objective than on their own interests

o Children become automatically self-evaluative, subconsciously or consciously weighing up how well they are doing against the learning objective

o Marking is easier

· The learning objective is the heart of formative assessment and needs to be made clear at the planning stage if teachers are to find formative assessment manageable.

· To increase understanding and motivation, children need to be involved in initial unit coverage planning and to be continually aware of how short-term learning objectives fit the big picture of whole-unit coverage

· Once given responsibility for and a stake in their own learning, children will often want to know in advance what they will be learning - display a list of learning objectives for the week, can add each weeks to make a term/half term of learning, is accessible to parent too.

· Need to be explicit about the focus and overall purpose of the lesson when sharing learning objectives: What do, How do and Why doing.

· To know…(knowledge: factual information e.g. names, dates, labels, events)

· To be able to… (skills: using knowledge, using resources covered in the Programmes of Study)

· To understand…(concepts: understanding reasons, causes and effects, how things work etc)

· To be aware of…(attitude: empathy, awareness of the environment etc)

· Closed skills – right or wrong; success criteria are usually steps for a method; easy for children to evaluate against

· Open skills – neither right or wrong; continuum of achievement with variety of quality; menu style success criteria

· Concept and knowledge learning objectives – success criteria are focused on the process by which to achieve understanding or knowledge e.g. learning objective = to understand the importance of protein in diet, success criteria are about use of retrieval skills to find information.

· The teacher needs secure subject knowledge to be able to know the success criteria

· Quality comes from teaching and feedback not success criteria.

Bexley Primary Mathematics Team