As we should all now be aware, there are no external audiences interested in schools’ internal data. If we’re going to go to the trouble of getting students to sit formal assessments on which we will collect data, we should be very clear about the purpose both of the assessments and the data they produce.
On the whole, the purpose of assessment data appears to be discriminating between students. The purpose of GCSEs, SATs, A levels and other national exams is to discriminate between students – to determine each individual’s performance into a normally distributed rank order and then assign grades at different cut off points – so that we know who is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ at different subjects. Whatever you think of this as a system of summative assessment, and there are some reasonable arguments in support of it, there’s absolutely no necessity for schools to replicate the process internally.
Previously, I’ve argued that the purpose of formal internal assessments should be to twofold. First, they should seek to provide periodic statements of competence, that students have mastered curriculum content sufficiently well to progress onwards, and second, as a mechanism for assuring the quality of the curriculum and how well it’s taught.
If we are using the curriculum as our progression model all we need to know is, how well students have learned this aspect of the curriculum. Whilst the purpose of a GCSE exam is to say how well students have performed relative to one another, the purpose of a test attempting to assess how much of the curriculum has been learned should not be interested in discriminating between students. Ideally, if the curriculum is perfectly specified and taught, all students would get close to 100%. Clearly, we’ll never come near this state of perfection so if we achieve average scores of 90% and above, we should be well satisfied that we are specifying and teaching incredibly well.
This approach to assessment – let’s call it ‘mastery assessment’ – would be expected to provide a very different ‘shape’ to traditional, discriminatory assessment.
When assessment is designed to discriminate between students it will, given a normal distribution of students’ aptitude, produce a normally distributed bell curve, but an assessment designed to allow students to demonstrate mastery of the curriculum should produce something that looks a bit more like a slope.
A discriminatory assessment is designed to produce winners and losers; to celebrate some students as ‘able’ and some as ‘less able’. While we might tell ourselves that the purpose of such an assessment is to find our who needs additional support, in most cases this should be clear to teachers well in advance of formal assessments. We might also believe that discriminatory assessments may be motivating. It’s certainly true that those who find themselves near the top of the distribution may well enjoy competing against each other – and it’s equally true that there might be fierce competition to avoid being at the bottom, but for most students will, by necessity, learn that they are distinctly average. Doing poorly in this style of assessments is likely to create a self-fulfilling prophesy in which students learn early on that they’re ‘rubbish’ at certain (perhaps all) subjects. What’s motivating about that?
With mastery style assessment, if students fail to meet a minimum threshold, our default assumption should be that there is a fault either with the design of the curriculum or in its teaching. The fault should be acknowledged as ours, rather than something to be blamed on students. If our guiding assumption was that any test score below, say, 80% highlighted some fault in the curriculum or instruction, this could transform the educational experiences of our most disadvantaged students. Instead of seeing tests as demoralising pass/fail cliff-edges, they might come to see that they provide useful benchmarks of progress to strive towards.
To move towards mastery style assessment, I think we need to be clear on the following principles:
- Never assess students on something that hasn’t been explicitly taught.
- Any areas of the curriculum that can be described as ‘skills’ must be broken down into teachable components of knowledge which can be learned and practised.
- Until the curriculum has fully sequenced the teaching of these skills, test items should be as granular as possible to allow all students to be successful.
- If students struggle to answer test items, we should assume the fault is with the curriculum (students across multiple classes struggle) or with instruction (students in a particular class struggle),
- Not only do we need teaching to be responsive to students’ needs, we also need to think in terms of responsive curriculum.
thanks David, you’ve explained this distinction well. The Discriminatory Assessment graph is also useful to use to explain that when Educational jurisdictions focus on improving achievement in their jurisdiction all they are doing is increasing the median of the Discriminatory Assessment graph, i.e. moving the whole graph to the right. So there will still be around 50% of student below this median score. So the question is, is that really improving the education in that jurisdiction? For example, here in my state, Victoria, Australia, the priority of the Govt, for many years, has been to improve the Year 12 median scores for all (around 2,000 schools & 1 Million students). But given they measure this by way of discriminating students and schools scores, around 50% will always fall below the median. So in some sense the system will always fail.
This is a fascinating post and I think that your division of assessment into two distinct types according to purpose is very helpful. However, as an English teacher, I think English in particular presents a number of difficulties with the model you suggest. Mainly these are related to the difficulty of separating knowledge and understanding into discrete blocks. For instance, would your model allow the use of ‘unseen’ texts in a reading comprehension assessment? If so, then the influence of what you call ‘aptitude’ and which includes knowledge that wasn’t explicitly taught would become much stronger – possibly to the point that mastery assessment would be compromised. On the other hand, if students were only to be tested on texts previously studied, then the test would be assessing knowledge of that text rather than comprehension. Does this mean that under your model, comprehension couldn’t be assessed?
To be clear, the model I propose is for use at KS3. Obviously, as long as exam specifications include unseen responses, students need both frequent exposure to a wide variety of unfamiliar texts as well as to practise writing about them, including in formal assessments. However, our obsession with analysing the ‘unseen’ is, I think, I particularly pernicious aspect of our subject which makes GCSE English Language the most iniquitous of all GCSE examinations.
David what are your thoughts on pre assessments designed to find out what students know prior to formally beginning a new unit of work!
These are generally a Good Thing
So they’re ultimately aiming for everyone to be above average? 🙂
Lol. Obviously not. This is a trap of the way we typically grade assessments. What I’m arguing for is that ‘average’ should be a high bar.
This is a really interesting blog – I agree with almost all of it. As a school Head, I absolutely agree with the notion of using the curriculum as the model of progression, but the idea that students failing to meet a minimum threshold in assessments must be the ‘fault’ of either the curriculum or its delivery feels a bit black and white to me. It is a reasonable assumption to make on average (which I guess is what you mean by the ‘default’), but for individual students there may be many variables at play when it comes to how well they attain on an assessment that it’s also reasonable to acknowledge the part played by the individual learner in their learning. If I teach a topic really well but three of my class have very recently fallen out and as a result they fail to concentrate quite as well over a number of lessons and they then do less well in the assessment, this is a factor. It feels right to acknowledge that what the learners bring to the experience of learning will be a factor in how they well they attain in assessments.
Hi Mark – it *is* a bit black or white to assume students performing poorly must be the fault of the curriculum or its delivery. I think I say in the blog that this won’t always be the case but is still a useful fiction. Of course we must be aware of all those variable you discuss but still – it’s an assumption which focuses us on the main point of assessment: to asses how we rather than students are doing. Also, alongside these formal assessment points there should be regular and frequent formative assessment so that teachers will (should) be aware well in advance of which students are struggling with difficult concepts.
Thanks David, very insightful! There’s just one issue we’re struggling with within our department (university of applied sciences). A major part of our curriculum consists of homework assignments and many students simply fail to do them. We’re then readily inclined to blame the students for not putting in the effort when failing a test. How would you deal with homework as part of the curriculum?
Am I right in thinking you work in a University? The expectations of homework in schools and universities should, I think, be very different. I learned a hard lesson at university when I was 2 hours late handing in an assigned essay. It should have been in at at 12pm – I delivered it some time after 2pm. The tutor refused to mark it and the essay received a failing grade. This was a mistake I never repeated.
School though is different – many children have home lives so chaotic that assigning important work as homework automatically means that the most disadvantaged students will be even further disadvantaged. Schools need a mechanism where those most a rink are given a safe, non-punitive space where they can complete homework.
Thanks David. My comment wasn’t specific to KS4. I think it would apply to any reading assessment in any year. I agree that ‘unseen’ texts can be pernicious but I’m at a loss as to how you would assess reading (as opposed to knowledge of a specific text) without it.
I guess then I have a couple of questions.
1. What does it mean to ‘assess reading’? Are we simply assessing a ‘skill’ that we’re not actually teaching?
2. Why do we want to assess reading? Would we be better off assessing what we’re actually taught in our curriculum?
3. If we do want to assess reading, are we better off just using a standardised reading test?
4. If we want to genuinely prepare students for analysing unfamiliar texts, would we be better off identifying the components of such a skill and teach (and assessing) these individually?
That makes perfect sense but my question applies to assessment rather than teaching so even if we taught separate skills, presumably we would want to assess them in combination rather than individually by asking students to analyze a text that they hadn’t previously studied (in other words ‘unseen’).
[…] to learn and how best we can ascertain whether they have been mastered. This is why, as I argued here, we need to use a mastery assessment model. The main point of such assessment is to find out how […]
[…] David Didau discusses the purpose of assessment and differentiates between ‘discriminatory assessm….’ […]