4 questions to make your assessments more effective
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4 questions to make your assessments more effective
Assessment is perhaps one of the trickiest things we do in schools, and one of the most significant.
As American psychologist David Ausubel said, the “most important single factor influencing learning is what the student already knows”. Being able to ascertain what students already know so we can decide where to go next is essential.
So what can we do to get the best out of the assessments that we use? Here are four questions to ask:
Making the most of your assessments
1. What do you need to know?
Think carefully about what it is you want to find out from the assessment. What is it that students need to know and do at this point? Do you want them to demonstrate how they can analyse a text? Or do you want to see how well they can write a narrative? Do you want to see if they have understood the principles of structure? Or that they can structure an argument?
It is important to return to your curriculum for this. Assessments won’t assess everything taught, and they shouldn’t be aimed at doing so. Identifying the components that were essential will help to focus the assessment.
2. What design of assessment will work best?
There are many different approaches to assessment, including over the long term. While we have a long tradition in English of extended pieces of writing, this may not always be the best way, even at the end of a unit. There is, of course, a time and a place for this, including outside of assessment (we don’t have to assess everything that a student writes, although we may want to read and discuss it with them), but we may want more granular information than these “noisy” assessments provide.
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If you’re checking that students understand what metaphors are, for example, you can see if they can identity them via a multiple-choice quiz. If you want them to go further, you can give them an example to analyse. Make sure they have the right scaffolds in place to help them pinpoint the information that you need.
3. What does the standard look like?
Even with relatively low-stakes assessments, it’s worth taking the time to look at the standard of what students have produced. Collate the assessment pieces and identify where the strongest responses are and the weakest. What are the gaps? Look at them together as a team if you can, and take some time to think about the patterns. Feed this into your next steps or think about how this may relate to your curriculum or teaching of that particular area next time.
4. What are the limits?
Take time to look at the big picture. Draw together different assessments and explore what they are telling you in unison. Don’t think that one, two or even 10 assessments will provide all of the answers; instead keep being curious. Keep going back to what you need students to know and do, and how you are gathering information about that.
No assessment process will tell you everything, and we should be pleased when there are surprises. If there was never anything to learn from assessments, we probably wouldn’t worry too much about doing them at all.
Whatever approach you use and whatever your curriculum looks like, it is important to remember that while we may use assessment for different purposes, the fundamentally important aspect is as Ausubel said: let’s make sure that whatever we choose to do, it gives us the best chance of finding out “what the student already knows”.
Zoe Enser is the school improvement lead for a trust in the North West of England