Good assessment in school

Good assessment in school

It is a truism to say that there is good assessment, and there is bad assessment.  Assessment is an essential part of teaching, of course. But it has to be used properly if it is to have the impact we want as teachers and leaders.

What is assessment and why is it important?

In schools, assessment involves any activity designed to find out how students are doing. A quiz and a formal test are obvious examples, but a paired speaking activity, a student presentation, an essay, a sentence hastily written by students on a mini whiteboard, and a multitude of other activities can also be used just as well – the point is that one key purpose of assessment is to elicit information about students’ progress in their learning, and/or their attainment. But there is another key purpose of assessment that is at least as important, and arguably more so: assessment should be about promoting learning. In part, this is because students tend to work harder when they are being assessed, so it’s motivational; in part it’s because assessment forces us to think, and learning comes from thinking; and finally, assessment reveals gaps that we can fill, in order to learn.

Some of the limitations of assessment

Any assessment can only sample from the subject domain; the sample is almost certainly a tiny one considering how big subject domains are – most of the domain cannot be assessed at any one time. So it could be that as a student I am assessed on my knowledge of coastal erosion in geography, and I score 40% – but coastal erosion just happens to be my weakest thing in geography, and had I been assessed on the whole term’s geography work to date, or any other specific topic I have studied this term, I would have gotten 80% or more – in other words, the teacher and I need to bear in mind that the coastal erosion assessment was just that, and no more – we absolutely should not be inferring too much about my performance in geography generally from this one assessment.

Another limitation of assessment is the challenge of designing an assessment that provides reliable information – designing robust, high-quality assessments is time-consuming and hard. This isn’t an issue with low-stakes quizzing and other low-stakes assessment activities, but it matters a lot with things like formal tests and end-of-year school examinations. To provide useful information, you have to use a high-quality assessment; especially where the assessment is high-stakes.

A third issue with assessment is that we have to be very careful with any conclusions that we draw from assessment activities. Can I reasonably say that a Year 9 student is on track to get a Grade 6 at GCSE, based on their recent assessment? What can I reasonably say based on their performance in their recent assessment? Presumably that they did well or satisfactorily or not so well in that one assessment. Individual assessment activities are, clearly, just one part of the bigger picture of how we are doing; teachers know that but sometimes students don’t and need to be reminded.

Good assessment in school

Good assessment uses the assessment activity formatively. We know from research that people benefit hugely from being assessed through quizzes, test questions, past papers, etc and from assessing themselves – through self-quizzing and using online tools such as Quizlet. This is surely the real power of assessment: using it to promote learning. There is extraordinary power in testing ourselves and in being tested, especially if we use the information we have gained to fill the gaps in our learning uncovered by the test. This is why testing is the best form of retrieval practice (revision): if we just reread information, we can delude ourselves into believing that we know a thing because it feels familiar when we reread it. For example, if I read this sentence: An exothermic reaction is one that releases energy from the system to its surroundings. I can easily believe that I knew that – it feels familiar to me as I read it. Whereas, if I address this question: What is an exothermic reaction? I have to engage my brain and think. If I try to answer it and I know it, my answer will show this; if I don’t know it, I will have uncovered a gap that I now know I need to fill.

A key problem with assessment, then, is just seeing it, or mostly seeing it, as a tool for measuring performance. All school-based assessment should be seen mostly as a tool for promoting learning.