Assessment...

On Thursday, ukedchat (twitter discussion about education issues in the uk) focussed on Assessment.  It was a very interesting discussion, with all views expressed from we are doing far to much assessment, to we need to do more.  What came out more though was that the term assessment has a lot of negative connotations - what teachers do all hte time is assessment - we are always seeing what students have learnt, taken in etc.  But the word assessment seems to have taken on the meaning 'test or Summative assessment'

This has had me thinking over the past few days about what we need to do.  We all know that AfL / AsL are the big themes at the moment in education, but a lot of me thinks that a lot of it is re-inventing the wheel.  One of my bug bears at the moment is the continuous marking of coursework / assessed work for BTEC qalifications.  We do to much spoon feeding at the moment and do need to teach students how to assess themselves as well as the teacher doing the assessment for them.

Assessment should be what we do all the time.  Ask any teacher about their students and we should be able to tell you what they have learnt, their strengths and their weaknesses. Assessment though should not be forced upon you - or at least the summative / test types of assessment.  The real question I think is do students need to know what level they are at?  Or what grade they are working at? Yes, students need to know how they can improve - but does it matter to the student that they are a 5c or a 4b?  Or that in Y10 they are working at a grade B?  It might be helpful to the teacher to track this but is it for the student?  How many of us have had students not read any of the comments / targets we have suggested to them but had just looked at teh level they achieved?

Assessment needs to be about moving forward.  Whenever I do tests / mock exams etc (mainly with KS5) I always explain that they are for me to see what students do not know first - so that I can see what still needs work on - basically assessing my teaching.  Assessment needs to be done so that students know what they have achieved - not necessarily what level they are - and what they need to do to improve or move on.  And that is what we should be doing every day.  How we do this?  There are many ways.  I'm a bug fan of peer assessment if done well - students are often the hardest critics and can give some really good ideas / targets on improving. 

I'll probably come back to this topic as it is one of the main topics of conversation in teaching at the moment.  My musings probably make no sense at all, but it has made me think about what I see assessment is.  It has made me realise how important it is that we get assessment right - both for the students but also for us teachers - workload is an important issue.  I am planning on using different forms of assessment, from peer, self and teacher over the next few months, especially using new ideas (for me) such as blogs.

Tom