ABSTRACT
Increasingly, assessment of children's abilities and progress is essential in every area of the curriculum to ensure that progress is consistent, planning is informed and teaching is as effective as it can be. Since IT is often taught as a cross-curricular subject, it can end up being left out of assessment procedures, and when it is included it is often in a very diluted form. This chapter provides some tried and tested ideas for implementing effective assessment of IT, and on how assessment can be used to enhance teaching and learning. Higgin's Educational Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely teachers know about a pupil's performance, the less useful this information is about their momentum of learning. Teachers may get more helpful information for their teaching from observing them work, and in an open-ended task. Involving pupils in self-assessment is teaching them to be responsible for their own learning, in essence to become their own teacher.
