ABSTRACT
Assessment is not the same as tests, and there is a lot more to assessment than just giving children tests, be they at the end of the week, the end of the year or the end of the key stage. Indeed viewed purely internally, with no reference to how children are ‘performing’ in similar schools elsewhere, tests tell us very little. Some teachers argue that tests simply confirm what they already knew e.g. their most able readers do better than their least able readers. The real test, however, is whether the most able readers are achieving as much as children in other schools. We are not arguing here for league tables but on the place of standardised tests within the wider assessment process. They contribute to an assessment jigsaw for each child made up of three large pieces: summative, formative and diagnostic.
