Supporting Assessment Design at Key Stage 3

Supporting Assessment Design at Key Stage 3

What is assessment?

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This section enables you to:

  • explore educational assessment;
  • examine the different types of educational assessment; and
  • consider the educational assessments you use in your school.

Assessment plays a key role in helping schools to improve outcomes for their pupils. Areas of strength and areas for improvement can be identified, allowing teachers to develop strategies that will help address their pupils’ learning needs. This in turn promotes improvement at class level, then at school level, allowing the school to set meaningful and challenging targets in its School Development Plan.

See CCEA’s Guide to Assessment (2011) for more details.

Assessment involves gathering information about a pupil’s performance to make educational decisions. It serves many purposes and can be used to:

  • evaluate pupils’ learning and progress towards outcomes;
  • identify pupils’ strengths and gaps in learning;
  • provide feedback to pupils to advance learning;
  • improve teacher instruction and facilitate differentiated instruction;
  • predict future performance; and
  • evaluate programmes, resources and curriculum.

Types of assessment

These are some types of assessment you may be familiar with:

  • Diagnostic assessment assesses prior knowledge and preparedness at the start of a programme or unit.
  • Formative assessment can involve frequent, low-stakes assessments to gauge ongoing learning and provide feedback during instruction.
  • Summative assessment evaluates learning at the end of a programme or unit against expected outcomes.
  • Evaluative assessment can provide data for school development and action planning, as well as setting class targets.

Norm-referenced assessments compare pupils’ performance to that of their peers, and criterion-referenced assessments measure pupils’ performance against fixed standards or learning objectives.

Examples of assessments include pre-tests, exit tickets, quizzes, tests, projects, observations and portfolios.

Understanding pupils’ strengths and weaknesses must be at the centre of assessment. Resisting temptation to ‘teach to the test’ fosters a better understanding and development of skills and capabilities and helps pupils take greater ownership of their learning.

Using assessment data effectively helps teaching and learning to work in tandem to support pupil growth and achievement. With increasing use of and reliance on data, it is better to be data informed so that teaching maintains focus on the development of skills, knowledge and capabilities.

Reflection

  • Why do you assess pupils?
  • Who uses the results of those assessments?
  • Do your assessments link well to your teaching/learning intentions?

Purposes of assessment

CCEA’s ‘Big Picture’ of Assessment and Reporting states that the aim of assessment is:

‘To facilitate the monitoring of standards over time in order to inform the development of policy and practice leading to better pupil outcomes’.

It also sets out five key principles of assessment. Assessment should be:

  1. complementary to, and supportive of, the key aims of the Northern Ireland Curriculum;
  2. fit for purpose;
  3. manageable;
  4. supported by teacher professional judgements that are consistent and reliable; and
  5. appropriate at all levels for system-wide accountability.

Teachers can use different assessment types to gather information. They can then use this information for a range of purposes, including:

Diagnostic To identify strengths and areas for improvement and to inform next steps
Formative (also known as Assessment for Learning) To use assessment information to make specific improvements in future learning (see Assessment for Learning for Key Stage 3)
Summative (also known as Assessment of Learning) To acknowledge, record and report pupils’ overall performance and achievement at a point in time or at the end of a period of learning
Evaluative To inform curriculum planning and to provide information for monitoring and accountability

One way to think of the difference between formative and summative assessment is: ‘When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment; when the customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment’ (Paul Black, Working inside the black box: Assessment for learning in the classroom, 2004).

Educationalist Dylan Wiliam would say that a single assessment can be both summative and formative. In this video (see 4:30 to 5:45) Wiliam explains how the results of a tables test can be used in a formative and summative way:

What every teacher needs to know about assessment
This link will open a page at www.youtube.com (see 4:30 to 5:45)

Reflection

  • What types of assessment do you use?
  • What is their purpose? How do you use them?
  • Have you used the results of these assessments in a formative and/or summative way?
  • Do your assessments reflect the depth and complexity of the content and skills you want pupils to acquire?
  • Do your assessments provide opportunities for pupils to reflect on their learning, self-assess their progress and set targets for future learning?