ABSTRACT
The teachers in the case studies throughout this book were constantly evaluating and recording the progress of their pupils. This chapter provides a more focused consideration of assessment as an integral part of daily practice. Teachers are required to carry out both summative assessments (testing what pupils know at a particular time, for example, the National Curriculum SATs) and formative assessment (evaluating a pupil’s strengths and weaknesses to inform their planning). While summative assessments are useful when we need to inform parents or a new teacher of a child’s progress, they are less helpful in guiding future planning. They can be one useful way of detailing progress as long as we realise that children’s language and literacy development, including their increasing control over informational kinds of reading and writing, is not linear and therefore not easily tested, and that summative tests tend to concentrate on easily measurable skills (Karavais and Davies, 1995).
