(This post mainly refers to Assessing KS3 (Years 7,8 & 9) in the UK)
As an ex economist and consultant I’ve dealt with assessment/selection procedures many times during my career. Consultants are always writing proposals in response to a client’s selection criteria and on the other side of the fence I’ve designed selection criteria/process for publicly tendered procurement.
If I have anything to offer it is that doing assessment/selection isn’t easy. And it’s even more difficult in schools because we aren’t just trying to select the best, we are trying to assess everyone, so the method must be even more robust in order to be fair. Plus we need to make it transparent so children know what they need to do to improve. That’s the Assessment for Learning (AfL) buzzword that is sweeping UK schools.
In most of the schools I have seen (a handful) and in the examples of assessment material that I have seen from colleagues and off the Internet (which must cover most schools in the country) the assessment process is not being done very well. In the end it boils down to a gut reaction of an experienced teacher. The process is not transparent to the child, and in many cases neither to the classroom teacher who uses assessment sheets/criteria given to them by the department. This must be impacting learning.
Indeed my experience on my training placements was that assessment was an add-on to the unit of work not an integral part of it. Most of the time I was not aware of the assessment sheet until I was reaching the end of the module I was teaching. The children had to fill it in, because we had to tick a box saying we were doing self assessment and therefore assessment for learning. But when the teacher can’t understand the assessment sheet (me) there is absolutely no chance that the child is gaining anything from it.
Assessment Sheets 2: Design Principles
Assessment Sheets 3: Examples (coming next week)
[...] Assessment Sheets 1: Observations [...]