ABSTRACT
Why assess? If pupils’ attainments were not assessed in some way, teachers would not be able to ‘move children on’ by addressing their needs and planning appropriate learning experiences to enhance their existing skills. It would be impossible to tell whether children had made any progress and whether adjustments needed to be made to either the content or the presentation of their learning experiences. It is now
also increasingly clear that learning effectiveness is increased by appropriate and informative feedback to pupils and to teachers, and that, as shown in Figure 3.1, some form of assessment must be part of an effective learning-teaching cycle. Assessment is endemic in education, and for the most part is ongoing, informal, hourly and daily and involves a dialogue between pupil and teacher (Boyle and Charles, 2009). Whilst this type of assessment is still relatively informal, teachers still turn to a range of formalised, published test materials in order to find out more information about individual ability (be it skills or knowledge) so that they can make judgements about children’s achievements, both as individuals and as compared with their peers. With the introduction of the National Curriculum in parts of the UK, the call for assessment has become more explicit with regular, government-directed assessment. Results of these assessments at ‘Key Stages’ in children’s education are used for assessing not only individual pupil performance but also for evaluating teacher effectiveness and the overall standards of schools and education authorities. The Key Stages of assessment and how they fit into children’s overall school experience are shown in Table 3.1. Clearly, without any assessment, teaching would become a rather unfocused activity as teachers would be unable to determine what their pupils had learned and what they needed to learn. However, as discussed later in this chapter, there has been growing concern that in some classrooms, lesson content may all too often be determined by the requirements of externally imposed tests such as the National Curriculum SATs (Standard Assessment Tests and Tasks) – and, if this is so, then the tail may be wagging the dog. Thus, it is important to know about what we can assess, how to choose the most appropriate means of assessment and the ways in which results should be interpreted and used to greatest effect.
